Outlining Material Requirements Planning with MRP Live

An MRP planning run is a resource-intensive (often: batch) process, which can involve thousands of materials in hundreds of physical locations. It performs hundreds of thousands of database reads from across multiple database tables in the system. With "classical" planning modes, the process typically took or takes hours to execute, so these are typically run once a week, once every couple of days, or overnight.

On completion, planning with a "classical" planning mode creates a snapshot of the existing material situation across all the locations in an enterprise. The snapshot is immediately outdated after new supply and demand activity occurs.

In SAP S/4HANA , besides the "classical" planning modes, one of the available planning modes is called "MRP Live". Using this functionality, you can plan one or several plants, online and interactively. The "classical" MRP planning modes, such as total planning or single item planning, that you might know from SAP ERP system are also available in SAP S/4HANA. MRP Live is the focus for this unit.

With classical MRP planning modes, material planners could be making material decisions based on outdated information, because there was no real-time, single view of material issues, and no view of supply and demand across multiple sites based on current information. Material planners only saw material shortages from a site-specific and material point of view. Identification of critical material shortages based on outdated information makes real issues harder to detect and increases the opportunity for poor decision-making. MRP Live tries to eliminate planning with obsolete data, by planning more frequently.

Another challenge is that material planners are challenged with potentially dozens of material shortage issues each day, and must identify, prioritize, and focus on the most important issues first.

They must know which sales orders are affected, for which customers, and how much time is needed to solve the issue before the shortage affects fulfillment.

MRP Live can immediately calculate and highlight the material issues that must be addressed across thousands of material stock situations.

This process is faster, more streamlined, and less manually intensive when compared to classical planning modes, which allows the material planner to identify issues more quickly and find better solutions to material shortage issues.

Some first characteristics of MRP Live, especially when compared to classical planning modes:

• It can run on any device
• Possibility to run MRP more frequently
• It supports procurement, in-house production, delivery schedules, and configurable materials
• It has a much better performance than the classical planning modes (by up to a factor of 10); HANA capabilities for parallelization are leveraged
• The memory footprint of MRP Live when compared to classical planning modes (reduction by a factor of 5 as an estimate)
• It utilizes a code pushdown of ABAP code lines into the HANA database (SQL Script: 15.000 lines of code)

Traditionally, to identify solutions to materials shortages, a material planner had to investigate options across multiple system transactions, which were time-consuming.

In SAP S/4HANA, for example by using the app Monitor Material Coverage, the ability to identify and make decisions to solve material shortage issues is greatly improved:

• More frequent MRP runs provide more timely and accurate material stock information.

• It provides a single, real-time view of material shortage information across plants without having to navigate across multiple transactions.

• There are new views of material shortages from a sales order, inventory, and procurement point of view, instead of just a material view.

• It is possible to simulate recommended solution viability and effectiveness in real time across plants and thousands of material situations.

These improvements allow a material planner to work much more effectively.

The material requirements planning cockpit of SAP Smart Business is a new capability being developed to replace existing MRP UI and transactions in ERP.

For each material, it provides real-time visibility to the stock situation and indicates when a stock level will become insufficient or critical.

It provides a personalization capability to allow the Material Planner to filter on certain types of materials and have different and customized views of shortages.

It performs the recalculation of thousands of material situations in real time.

It not only suggests potential solutions but, using SAP HANA, also provides the ability to evaluate the potential viability and results of a solution, before it is applied.

In SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, there is also improved UI and processes for traditional Production Planning, Quality Management, and Enterprise Asset Maintenance.

In Production Planning, planned orders and purchase requisitions inside the replenishment lead time have to be "released" to the shop floor and the purchasing department respectively. On completion of production, the amount of product produced and raw materials and resources consumed must be "confirmed".

In SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, there is a new User interface to convert planned orders into production orders, to convert purchase requisitions into purchase orders, to release production orders, and to confirm production on completion.

Technically, there are two database deployment options: an integrated one with full deployment as part of Suite on SAP HANA (which is a prerequisite for MRP on SAP HANA), and a side-by side scenario of the SAP HANA database with a traditional database. The latter cannot be used for MRP on SAP HANA.

The planning scope preselects the materials that have to be planned in a certain MRP Live run. You can indicate the BOM components and stock transfer materials (according to a special procurement type) so that they are also planned during the planning run.

Using the MRP Live control parameters, you define how the preselected materials should be planned. For example, by selecting the Regenerative Planning parameter, you force the system to plan all preselected materials, even if there were no changes since the last planning run.