Calculating the Forecast 

 

Purpose

Sourcing of forecast allows customer-specific forecasts from SAP APO DP and sales orders from the SAP R/3 system to be sourced from different plants, while taking into account resource and material constraints. This function extends the classic SNP supply chain and adds the customer, since this is where the initial demand originates.

This example is to help you understand how sourcing of forecast works.

 

Prerequisites

For a complete list of prerequisites, see Forecast Determination.

 

Sourcing a Customer-Specific Forecast

Initial situation

The DP forecast in this example is 100 pieces for customer 1 and 50 pieces for customer 2. There are also existing sales orders of 45 pieces for customer 1 and 20 pieces for customer 2.

Calculating the open forecast

To calculate the open forecast, use the following equation:

DP forecast­ – cumulative sales orders = the open forecast

In our example, the open forecast totals are:

·        55  [100 – (30 + 15)] for customer 1

·        30  [50 – 20] for customer 2

The optimizer run

The next step is to perform an optimizer run, which calculates the optimum sourcing situation. For our example, here are the results:

To calculate allocation, use the following equation:

sourced forecast + sales orders = new allocation situation

New sales orders from the SAP R/3 system are allocated to plants, based on the sourcing decision for the customer-specific forecast.

The sourcing results depend on the cost associated with each of the production locations and the transportation lanes. If there are capacity constraints at both plants (for example, each plant can only produce 55 pieces/bucket), the production costs are the same at both plants; the transportation costs from plant 1 to customer 1 and from plant 2 to customer 2 are 1 APO-$/PC.  But, the transportation costs from plant 1 to customer 2 and from plant 2 to customer 1 are 10 APO-$/PC.

 

The result of the sourcing process varies depending on the SNP optimizer parameters (cost profile).

 

Sourcing Sales Orders

When sales orders are sourced, new sales orders from the SAP R/3 system are allocated to plants based on the sourcing decision for the customer-specific forecast.

To continue with this example, in the SAP R/3 system, a sales order has been created for 70 pieces for customer 1 for the product in the sourcing process.

When you check the availability of the quantity with GATP, using the allocation method, at plant 1 there an open allocation of 55 pieces and at plant 2 there is an open allocation of 0 pieces. When this ATP check result is accepted, two new subitems are created for the main item in the sales order. This step leads to two sales orders at each supplying plant in SAP APO. The confirmed quantity for the sales order is 30 + 15 = 45.