Exploring SAP Applications for Predictive Material and Resource Planning (4B5)

• Maintain PIRs (F3445)
• Define Flexible Constraints (F4449)
• Schedule pMRP Simulation Creation (F3968)
• Process pMRP Simulations (F3934)

You can use this app to create and monitor planned independent requirements (PIRs) of materials in months or weeks. The information can be used to negotiate rates with your suppliers and, as a result, reduce costs. PIRs are used to procure or produce materials or components prior to receiving sales orders for materials. This information is particularly important if the lead times demanded by your customers are shorter than those to which your suppliers can commit.

The Maintain PIRs app helps you detect forecasting errors early in the process so you can produce or purchase sufficient quantities of material to cover future sales demands on-time. The forecast period indicator is defined in the material master.

Note

The Maintain PIRs app only shows results for the selected period indicator. The default view is set to monthly periods.

• Sort and filter the list of materials based on various filters such as reach, accuracy, plant, active version, or period indicator.
• Determine the reach of your PIRs and find materials with an insufficient reach.
• See how accurate your PIRs are for each period.
• Create additional PIR versions for each material.
• Change a PIR version to active or inactive
• Mass maintain your PIRs - you can process materials either in months or weeks for up to 12 months or 52 weeks. You can also adjust the period within which you want to process the PIRs.
• Use Microsoft Excel files using the comma-separated value file format (.csv) to maintain PIRs.

With this app you can add, copy and delete constraints for materials that will be considered in the simulations.

• You can define constraints for in-house materials, materials procured from suppliers and materials that come from other plants (stock transfer) to restrict demand quantities per time period (month or week). The defined constraints are considered in the simulations.
• Issues are displayed in the Process pMRP Simulations app, if a constraint is violated. For example, if a material quantity exceeds the defined constraint quantity in a particular time period, the system will display an issue. It is displayed as Violated Constraint in the header of a simulation and as issue category Constraint Violation in the inspector panel.

You can define constraints for in-house materials, materials procured from suppliers and materials that come from other plants (stock transfer) to restrict demand quantities per time period (month or week).

1. Choose Add.
2. Enter all required data:
   1. Use the input help to select a plant.
   2. Use the input help to select a material.
   3. Use the selection list to select the period type Month or Week.
   4. Use the selection list to select a constraint category:
      • Material - restricts the production quantity of a material for specific weeks or months
      • Supplier - restricts the procured quantity of a supplier material for specific weeks or months
      • Stock Transfer - restricts the transferred quantity of a material from another plant for specific weeks or months
   5. If desired, use the input help to select an MRP area.
   6. Choose OK.
3. Select the added constraint from the list.
4. Choose Edit.
5. Choose Add to add periods.
6. Select the number of periods you want to add.
7. Specify a quantity for each period.
8. Choose Save.

Note

If the defined quantity is exceeded in a given time period when processing the simulation in the Process pMRP Simulations app, the system will show an issue in the inspection panel, or show a violated constraint in the header of the simulation.

If you don't define a constraint for a period here, even though the period exists in the simulation, the system will treat it as if there wasn't any restriction on material quantities in the given period of the simulation.

In this app, you define the reference data that will be considered for a pMRP simulation, then schedule the creation of the simulation. In order 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 or you can use the same reference data in additional simulations by copying the original. You can also create multiple scheduling jobs to create simulations with different reference data.

• Create pMRP simulations based on work center data
• Create pMRP simulations based on top-level material data
• Create pMRP simulations based on material component data

1. In the Schedule pMRP Simulation app, choose Create to create a new simulation.
2. Follow the steps that guide you through the creation process.

   You can select one of the following available job templates:

   • Creation of pMRP Data via Work Center

     Use this template to generate reference data based on work center data.

   • Creation of pMRP Data via Top-Level Materials

     Use this template to generate reference data based on material data.

   • Creation of pMRP Data via Components

     Use this template to generate reference data based on material component data.

     Note

     Bills of material (BOMs) are always exploded from top down in the pMRP simulations. If you make simulations on the BOM of a material component, you will not see the impact it has to components on a higher level, or to the top-level material.

3. Enter all required and additional desired data.
   Note

   In the Start Date of Reference and the End Date of Reference fields, use the dates wisely to have a realistic planning. For example, if your planning horizon is too narrow, the pMRP simulation might not consider data before and after the defined planning horizon of the reference data.
4. Choose Schedule.
   Note

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

Note

Learn about special scenarios for creating a simulation in the SAP Help Portal.

The Process pMRP Simulations app enables you to create multiple simulations, check the impact of simulated changes to capacity or demands on the KPIs, and make informed decisions in your production planning. This app facilitates customers reducing inventory costs by making the right adjustments to the pMRP simulation.

• View a simulation list with status
• View and change material demand quantities
• View the capacity situation of a work center
• Display aggregated work center groups
• Change capacity demands
• Shift top-level material demands
• View material components and supplier information
• View the multi-level material simulation
• Start a preproduction of a material component
• Change the source of supply
• View simulation summary and revert changes
• Access the global change history for a simulation and undo or redo changes

After defining the reference plan in the Schedule pMRP Simulation Creation app, the first simulation is available in the Process pMRP Simulation.

• Copy Simulation

  All active simulations that you scheduled are listed in the Process pMRP Simulations app as simulations. In this app, you select a simulation that has the status Created to start processing it, or you can copy the simulation to have two that can be compared at a future point in time.

  Note

  You can copy a simulation multiple times. But you can edit only one simulation at a time.
• Demand Plan Simulation
  • This view provides different views of top-level demands and their quantities displayed as planned independent requirements (PIR) per bucket. To increase or decrease quantities, you choose a cell and begin typing. The red-colored cells indicate a capacity issue. Find more information about the issue by selecting the relevant cell.
  • You can choose between the following views showing the demand quantities as follows:
    • Simulation:

      This view shows only the simulated quantities, that is the quantities that can be edited by you.

    • Reference/Simulation:

      This view helps you to compare quantities based on the reference data with quantities that you can change manually.

    • Delta of Reference and Simulation:

      This view shows the difference between the quantities based on the reference data in comparison with the simulated quantities that you can change.

    • Simulation/Available Delta:

      Available delta is the difference between feasible and required quantities. It can be negative in case the required quantity exceeds the feasible quantity. In this view, you can compare the simulated quantity with the available delta quantity, and you can change the simulated quantity.

Capacity Plan Simulation

This view displays the work center and for each period all related top-level demands. You can see a work center's capacity situation over the defined time period. You have the following options:

• Change Available Capacity:

  You can simulate changes to the capacity of a work center by changing the available capacity, and analyze the result of it. You can also display a graphic with an overview of the capacity situation of the work center.

  Note

  The capacity view displays distributed capacity demands for the resources because pMRP considers in-house production time for materials in a multilevel supply chain.
• Disregard Capacity Issues:

  Use this option if you are sure you want to ignore capacity issues, for example, because a particular resource of the work center is not considered crucial. As a result, all issues of the selected work center will disappear. If you want to restore them, you navigate to the Simulation Summary and restore the issues on the Disregarded Capacity Issues tab.

• Shift Demand:

  From the Top-Level Materials panel below the Inspector panel, you can choose a top-level demand and shift the capacity demand to another week or month (week or month earlier)

• You can change the table display to view aggregated work center groups

This view shows you a list of all material components of the simulation and their demand quantities per time period. You have the following display options:

• You can switch the Materials and the Supply perspectives:

  The Materials perspective lists all components and their demand quantities per time period (week or month). You can extend the table row of a component to view the corresponding production version or supplier (sources of supply).

  The Supply perspective groups the list of components according to their source of supply:

  Anonymous Supplier is displayed when no source or no supplier exists for externally procured materials. The name of the supplier is displayed for each component with a clearly identified supplier.

  In-House Production is displayed when a production version exists without a specified production line. The name of the production line is displayed for each component with a production version and a specified production line.

• Open the Inspector Panel or choose a demand quantity in the table to show additional information about the demand quantity of the component in the displayed week or month. It also shows the associated top-level materials.
• You can change the display of the components by using filters or settings:

  Filter - for example by Type of Procurement, then choose to show only material components that are procured externally.

  Settings - select an additional column, for example, Demand-Driven Material to see if a component is a demand-driven material or Type of Procurement to distinguish between in-house materials, externally procured materials, or both types.

• Multi-Level Material Simulation

  This view shows you the multi-level bill of material with all its components. You can open the inspector to display capacity issues. You have the following options to solve capacity issues:

  • Preproduce - You can decide to plan a preproduction on component level to mitigate capacity overloads.
  • Change Source of Supply - If an alternative source of supply exists, you can choose to change it if you encounter capacity issues.
• Simulation Summary
  • Lists all the changes made to the simulation plan. You can switch between the following tabs:
    • Change in Demand
    • Change in Capacity
    • Preproduction
    • Change of Source of Supply
    • Unresolved Issues
    • Disregarded Capacity Issues
  • If you have various simulations, you can view the changes you made in each simulation. You see the changes you made to the demand quantities or to the capacity of a work center in addition to the information of whether you decided to preproduce a particular material component or if you changed the source of supply. The simulation summary also gives an overview of all "still unresolved" issues and the issues you explicitly discarded. This overview enables you to analyze how these measures help solve capacity issues and how close you are to meeting your delivery target.
• Release Simulation

  After analyzing your simulation, you release it with the changes you want to implement. A released simulation cannot be edited. The released simulation changes the quantities of demand-driven materials and the planned independent requirements (PIRs) are created for the demand-driven components and/or top-level materials.

  • For buffered demand-driven MRP components, PIRs are created in active version 00.
  • For top-level materials, you can select a PIR version and decide to activate it right away or not.
    Note

    If a top-level material is a demand-driven MRP component, it will be considered a demand-driven MRP component. In this situation, PIRs are created in active version 00.

  • For subassembly components, you can select a PIR version and decide to activate it right away or not.
    Note

    If a subassembly component is a demand-driven MRP component, it will be considered a demand-driven MRP component. In this situation, PIRs are created in active version 00.

To prepare the production line for the planned demand based on the pMRP simulation, you can implement changes to work center capacities, to the planned demand, and to the sources of supply and planning preproduction.

• To check the PIRs, use the Maintain PIRs app.
• To check and adjust buffer levels for your products, use the Manage Buffer Levels app before starting a new MRP run.
• To start an MRP run, use the Schedule MRP Runs app.

Learn about issue handling in the SAP Help Portal.

• SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer

• SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

• SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library

Note

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