Consideration of Incoming Quota Arrangements 

Use

You can define that the system considers incoming, time-dependent quota arrangements that you have defined in the master data for optimization-based planning in Supply Network Planning (SNP).

The consideration of quota arrangements is valid for the following receipt types:

●      In-house production

●      External procurement

●      Stock transfers from other locations

You can define penalty costs for cases where the SNP optimizer exceeds or falls short of the quota arrangements. The SNP optimizer takes these costs into account in addition to the other costs that are relevant to source determination. For more information, see Source Determination.

Prerequisites

In the SNP optimizer profile on the General Constraints tab page, you have set the Consider Quota Arrangements indicator. By default, the indicator is not set.

Features

Time-Dependent Quota Arrangements

●      The SNP optimizer takes into account incoming quota arrangements that you have defined in the quota arrangement master data. You create the quota arrangements in a time-dependent way, in other words, for a particular validity period that you have also specified in the quota arrangement master data.

●      The validity period does not have to agree with the periods in the planning buckets profile. In the SNP optimizer profile, you can define how the SNP optimizer proceeds if multiple quota arrangements exist for a certain period. You can use the Multiple Quota Arrangements in Bucket indicator on the General Constraints tab page to define that the optimizer considers the first or the last quota arrangement in a period. The optimizer ignores the remaining quota arrangements within the period.

Quota Arrangements for Products and Product Groups

●      You can specify in the quota arrangement master data whether the quota arrangements are to be valid for a product or a product group. In this case, the quota arrangement refers to the total receipts of the corresponding product group.

●      If you want to define the quota arrangements for product groups, you must specify product groups and product group types, which you have already defined in Customizing for the master data under Product → Product Groups, in the product master data on the Properties 2 tab page. All the products in the product group must have the same base unit of measure.

Incomplete Quota Arrangements

You do not have to define quota arrangements for all sources of supply. In the SNP optimizer profile on the General Constraints tab page, you can define how the SNP optimizer proceeds if a quota arrangement has not been defined for a possible source of supply. You have the following options:

●      Treat as Zero: The optimizer does not plan any procurement from sources of supply for which no quota arrangements have been defined.

●      Ignore: The optimizer plans procurement from all sources of supply that come into question. Quota arrangements are taken into account for the sources of supply for which they were defined.

Penalty Costs for Quota Arrangement Violations

Quota arrangement values are soft constraints for the SNP optimizer that the system can violate in return for incurring penalty costs. You can define these penalty costs for exceeding or falling short of the quota arrangement value in the quota arrangement master data.

If you set the penalty costs suitably high, the system will try to adhere to the quota arrangements (since the optimizer always tries to find the solution with the lowest costs).

Creating and Changing Quota Arrangements

The SNP optimizer can also create quota arrangements for subsequent optimization-based or heuristic-based planning runs. For example, after a longer term optimization-based planning (monthly, for instance), you can perform shorter term heuristic planning runs using the quota arrangements created in the optimization planning run as the basis for the heuristic planning runs. To do this, set the Modify quota arrangements indicator when you run the optimizer in the background (see also the F1 help).

If you set the Modify quota arrangements indicator, the optimizer might overwrite quota arrangements that you created previously. Moreover, you still have to define penalty costs for the quota arrangements created by the optimizer so that the system can take them into account in the next optimization run.

Activities

You run the SNP optimizer interactively or in the background. For more information, see Running the Optimizer from the Interactive Planning Desktop and Running the Optimizer in the Background. During source determination, the system considers the penalty costs that you have assigned to potential quota arrangement violations.