SAP IBP Order Based Planning – Split Production for Improved Deployment Planning

Background – Lot of times during scheduling process individual planned orders are merged to minimize/save setup time, this perfectly make sense from scheduling perspective as your objective is to create a schedule where you minimize changeovers however this can be challenging when these orders are running over multiple days as the output from planning perspective is always realized on the last date i.e when the order is finished. This situation is very typical in some of the industries like pharma or consumer goods.

Now if you are to create a deployment plan using above planned/process/production order information then deployment engine in SAP IBP will always suggest one order and that will be inline with the availability/finish date of the planned/process/production order, this can result into unrealistic deployment plan as in reality you would often be receiving output from the production on daily basis and would be moving the stock around your network on same day or other. This means that the output from system has to be reviewed and adjusted if this situation happens.

Was this possible in SAP APO – one may ask how this situation was handled in SAP APO, the answer is SAP APO used to support distribution key (a standard ECC concept) for PP/DS planned orders, Production/Process orders – in this way the output from these orders could be realized in SNP Planning book on daily basis which then used to be accounted by Deployment heuristic/optimizer engine in APO.

However, similar functionality is not available in SAP IBP OBP nether with SDI nor with RTI.

So is there a solution to this problem – well to every problem there is a solution, SAP IBP does offers possibility to enhance the interface by which you can achieve similar behavior. Ex – with SDI based setup you can utilize ABAP_OUT BADI to split the orders while they are being interfaced to IBP OBP from corresponding execution system.

Planned order in ECC vs OBP (Projected Stock) – standard behavior

System behavior without distribution key being used

Planned order in ECC vs OBP (Projected Stock) – enhanced behavior

System behavior after distribution key being used

Please note that above screenshots are only illustrative and does not represent real planning views from system.

Summary/Conclusion –

1. Its possible to realize split production and use it in IBP OBP for further planning activities like Deployment etc
2. This enhancement could enable you to visualize right Production/Storage capacity usage
3. The above enhancement does create misalignment between ECC and IBP OBP as you do end up creating artificial orders in OBP
4. Another simple enhancement would have to be made in ABAP_IN BADI to filter out these orders if you are deleting planned orders from OBP using Delete Planned Receipts application job
5. Proper design considerations should be made from performance perspective
6. Similar approach should be possible with RTI
7. The approach described above is simple and splits the quantity equally over number of days, this can be made even more sophisticated by reading the Distribution key assigned to Production version master data in ECC or S/4

If you are looking for more such topics and explore more in SAP IBP please do contact us on info@smartcons.nl