Forecast Determination 

Purpose

The purpose of the sourcing of forecast process is to source customer forecasts created by demand planning (DP) to possible production locations using an SNP planning tool, thereby considering material and resource constraints that exist through the supply network. This sourcing decision then impacts the assignment of subsequent incoming sales orders to the appropriate production locations.

Prerequisites

Master Data

·        The customer locations are maintained as SAP APO master data.

·        Transportation lanes between the source and the customer locations are maintained as SAP APO master data.

·        All location products that take part in the sourcing have the:

¡        Same consumption group for the same product

¡        Necessary GATP product allocation settings maintained

¡        Sourcing flag set in the transportation lane master with respect to the source and target locations

·        The usage for descriptive characteristics are appropriately set for all the location products that participate in the sourcing process.

·        Standard SNP optimizer settings are maintained.

Customizing

·        The object structure in the planning area of the consumption group contains all characteristics, such as the source location and the participating customer, for the product.

·        The date to be checked with ATP is the material availability date. (This date will be used to update the allocation.)

·        BAdI /SAPAPO/DM_SEL_MOD is activated and implemented.

·        The global rules-based ATP check has confirmed the desired quantity.

Now, the allocation check decides about the sourcing of the sales order to the appropriate production location. The global rules-based part is necessary, because all sources for a customer have to be searched.

·        The results of sourcing from the previous planning cycle in liveCache are deleted.

Process Flow

The sourcing of forecast process results in the following:

·        A customer-specific forecast at the production locations

·        Sourcing of sales orders, based on the forecast sourcing decision

 

Sourcing a customer-specific forecast

       1.      Customer forecast in DP

The basis for the sourcing decision is the final customer-specific forecast that is planned in SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (SAP APO) DP. The characteristic combination for this step is customer, location, and product. (The customer location has to be the same as the location in the master data.)

To set up customer-specific allocations that are consumed by sales orders from various plants and to derive the consumed allocations for these plants (or any possible source locations attached to the customer), there must be a characteristic for the plants inside the DP object structure. 

The customer-specific forecast is accessed per bucket from its key figure inside DP for the time horizon specified for the sourcing process. Forecasts outside this horizon are not considered.

       2.      Determine the forecast organization

Forecast organization is when the sourced forecast orders are protected from being consumed by existing sales orders at the plants.

Since the open forecast is sourced with the SNP optimizer, existing sales orders at the plants need to be attached to local consumption partners. If these consumption partners are not attached, the sales orders at the plants consume the sourced forecast.

The forecast from the forecast organization must be customer-specific, so that the automatic consumption process can take place at the plants for each customer’s forecast and the sales orders. To allow customer-specific forecasts at the plant, the following descriptive characteristics are used:

¡        Plant=WERKS

¡        Product=MATNR

¡        Customer=KUNNR

       3.      Calculate the open forecast by using location-overlapping forecast consumption

The open forecast is determined by subtracting the cumulated sales order quantities from the customer-specific forecast per bucket. This forecast is converted to the format of the SNP optimizer input and is calculated for the time horizon that is specified for the sourcing process. (If the cumulated sales orders are greater than or equal to the customer-specific open forecast, this forecast is set to zero.)

The dates and the buckets from which to subtract the sales orders are determined by the delivery dates of the sales orders at the customer location.

       4.      Source the open forecasts with the SNP optimizer

The SNP optimizer is used to determine the process of distributing the open forecasts to the plants.

The following factors are considered by the SNP optimizer to source the open forecast:

¡        Supply chain, including the customer and transportation lanes between the customer and other locations.

For the sourcing process, transportation lot sizes or rounding values at the lanes between sources and customer are not allowed. Transport lot sizes could lead to an over-delivery in transport orders, but the sourcing process depends on the real, transported quantities.

¡        Existing sales orders at the plants.

The optimizer run results in:

¡        Receipts for the sales orders at the plants

¡        New customer-specific forecast orders at the plants that represent the sourcing decision

¡        Receipts for the dependent requirements at the plants

The forecast is now distributed to the plants.

 

Sourcing sales orders

Sales orders can be checked against allocations in the different plants and can be distributed to the plants using rules-based ATP (RBA). New sales orders from the SAP R/3 system are allocated to plants based on the sourcing decision for the customer-specific forecast. Incoming sales orders can be checked with rules-based GATP against the allocation.

Unconfirmed schedule lines are additional requirements that can be handled with backorder processing.