Introducing Predictive MRP (pMRP)

1. Demand Forecasting

   pMRP uses advanced predictive algorithms and historical data to forecast future demand accurately. It helps organizations anticipate and prepare for demand changes effectively.

2. Simulation and Scenario Planning

   pMRP enables users to create and simulate various planning scenarios to evaluate the impact of different variables such as changes in demand, supply chain disruptions, or production capacity adjustments. This ability to simulate scenarios aids in strategic decision-making and risk management.

3. Capacity and Resource Planning

   The solution facilitates detailed capacity planning by predicting the necessary resources required to meet the forecasted demand. It ensures that production capacities are aligned with anticipated needs, thus preventing bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the production process.

4. Integration with Real-Time Data

   pMRP integrates with real-time data from the supply chain and shop floor. This real-time integration allows for more accurate and up-to-date planning, reflecting the actual conditions and dynamics of the production environment.

5. User-Friendly Interface with Collaboration Tools

   SAP S/4HANA pMRP features an intuitive interface that makes it easy for users to navigate and perform planning tasks. Also, it includes tools for collaborative planning, allowing multiple stakeholders to engage in the planning process, share insights, and make informed decisions together.

These aspects work together to make pMRP a comprehensive and powerful tool for enhancing material and resource planning in manufacturing environments, leading to improved efficiency, reduced costs, and better alignment with market demands.

pMRP can also, from a business point of view, be regarded as a successor to long-term planning from SAP ERP (ECC). This unit provides some insights to how this planning philosophy works.

The goal of predictive material and resource planning is to identify potential capacity issues and to evaluate possible solutions as early as possible based on a simplified requirement plan using a simplified material requirements algorithm. It can also be used as an input for strategic and operational purchasing. As a result of the simulation, production planners are prepared to take decisions on changed conditions, for example, regarding requirement planning, resource plans, pre-production, or make-or-buy decisions.

The starting point of a pMRP process is the definition of a simulation scenario:

To define a simulation scenario, to determine the reference plan, and to create a simulation, you start a scheduling job. You define a simulation scenario by determining which data based on material resource planning (MRP) is considered as reference data by the simulation in pMRP.

From a process point of view, only two steps are necessary:

• Create simulation
• Process planning results

You can schedule the creation of the pMRP simulations with the Schedule pMRP Simulation Creation app. To process simulations, the system creates simplified data based on your operative data for material resource planning. This data is used as reference data in pMRP. A set of defined reference data can be used to create multiple simulations.

In the Schedule pMRP Simulation Creation app, you define which reference data is considered as reference data for a simulation. Then, you start to create a simulation. If you want to use the same reference data in an additional simulation, you must copy the simulation based on the reference data. Then, you make the changes you want to simulate and compare the two simulations.

All relevant demands are distributed over the specified bucket data and displayed in the simulation plan as defined in this app.

As a prerequisite, before working on pMRP simulations, you must make sure that you have basic MRP data in active versions.

Make sure that you have the following data available:

• Materials
• Bills of material for your materials
• Work centers
• Routings
• Production versions
• Planned Independent Requirements (PIRs)

After initial creation, you can copy a simulation to create multiple simulations that you can compare.

Within a simulation, you can display capacity issues. Then, you can change the capacity of work centers or to the quantity of top-level demands. You can also display the multilevel bill of material, start a pre-production on component level, or change the source of supply to solve the capacity issues. These changes are only simulations that you can compare to analyze the impact of the changes on your delivery performance or your capacity situation.

With the Process pMRP Simulations app, you can create multiple simulations, check the impact of simulated changes to capacity or demands on the KPIs, and make informed decisions for your production planning.

You can reduce inventory costs by making the right adjustments in your simulation.

This app provides the following features:

• Demand plan simulation
• Capacity plan simulation
• Multilevel material simulation
• Simulation summary

In this step, you can do the following:

• Process multiple simulations
• View capacity issues
• Change demand quantities
• Adjust simulations
• Release simulations before implementing the changes to the operative material requirements planning (MRP)

The capacity plan simulation helps you to do the following:

• Get an overview of the capacity situation of a work center for the defined time period (bucket)
• View all top-level demands of the work center and their share in consumption
• Change the available capacity
• Disregard capacity issues of a work center

Multilevel material simulation helps you to do the following:

• Check if pre-production is possible for a material component in case of a capacity overload.
• Change the source of supply to solve capacity issues.

The simulation summary gives an overview of all the changes that you made to the simulation plan as compared to the reference plan.

A download functionality is provided. You can also download and analyze your simulation results in Microsoft Excel.

When you decide to implement the simulation results in your operative MRP, you release the simulation. Then, you can check and adjust the buffer levels for your products before starting a new operative MRP run.

After releasing a simulation, Planned Independent Requirements (PIRs) are created in an inactive version for top-level materials and in an active version for demand-driven materials. You can check the PIRs in the Maintain PIRs app.