Exploring Planning

The figure illustrates the position of planning in the complete training scenario.

Your company is selling fashion goods across various sales channels. The goods are either bought externally from vendors or manufactured in their own manufacturing plants.

Since the lead time for procurement is long, you require planning figures in order to trigger the buying and/or manufacturing before actually having the detailed demand from all sales channels.

Your Wholesale business is entering explicit sales orders quite early whereas your Retail business executes an overall plan, but creates the individual store orders right before actual delivery. Your e-commerce business also performs planning, however customer orders only come in once your fashion goods are in stock and offered in your e-commerce channel.

Therefore the demand needs to be captured in different ways in the system, depending on the point in time and on sales procedures.

The main goal of overall planning is to guarantee stock on time. Within the fashion industry this means, that the stock has to be provided in the required size, color or even a certain segment which might be stock relevant, such as special labeling or qualities.

The Material Requirement Planning summarizes the total demand entered as planning data, actual sales orders or stock transport orders, performs a net calculation of the demand and stock situation and generates proposals on how to fulfill the excess demand if any. Based on the required delivery date and quantities the MRP creates:

• Purchase Requisitions: if the material is procured externally
• Stock Transport Requisitions: if the material is supplied by a DC or another plant
• Planned Orders: if the material is internally manufactured

The store replenishment is not part of the MRP process.

Planned Independent Requirements (PIRs) are used to hold the demand quantity for a material / material variant(s) for a specific time and plant.

PIRs can be generated in different versions, e.g. to hold data of various planning cycles. However version 00 is the operative version used in follow-on processes.

The planning quantities may be entered in the system manually or transferred via interface from external planning solutions, such as SAP APO Demand Planning. The planning data needs to be activated to be considered as demand quantities during the MRP execution.

Relevant transaction: FSH_PIR - Manage PIRs for Generic Materials

Manual creation of Planned Independent Requirements (PIRs) can be done via transaction FSH_PIR. By entering the generic material, the system determines all variants and planning quantities can be entered for the defined time periods within the time horizon at the variant level.

If segmentation is setup for the material, the planning data can be maintained on requirement segment level for each material variant.

Activated Planned Independent Requirements are visible on the Stock/Requirements list as demand objects accordingly. Make sure the activation flag is set.

Maintaining Planned Independent Requirements manually is a high effort and only makes sense in certain situations. Typically planning systems are used for generating the planning figures and these can be transferred to create the Planned Independent Requirements.

Maintaining Planned Independent Requirements via BAPI:

• BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_CREATE
• BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_CHANGE
• BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_GETDETAIL
• BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_SIMULATE

Maintaining Planned Independent Requirements via APO Demand Planning. Planned Independent Requirements can be maintained via CIF Interface by APO Demand Planning. The Planned Independent Requirements can only be created for one single default segment. The default segment can be setup in the Field Defaults area in segmentation structure customizing.

Active Planned Independent Requirements are displayed as RP elements on the stock requirements list. The transaction code to view this is MD04P.

If Planned Independent Requirements are maintained on segmentation level, the respective Requirement Segment is displayed too. If stock segments are active, make sure you enter the stock segment you want to analyze in the header of the Stock Requirements list.

Depending on the selected planning period, the Planned Independent Requirements are created for the corresponding date, e.g. 1st workday of a month.

Strategy 40 (Planning with final assembly) defines, that Planned Independent Requirement quantities will be consumed by incoming sales orders correspondingly. Means the planning figures should be replaced by actual sales orders ideally.

In the material master data it can be defined, how sales orders consume the Planned Independent Requirements.

Incoming sales orders consume PIRs - in past or future, depending on master data settings. As a result, the PIR quantity is reduced by the sales order quantity when the planned demand is partially or wholly covered by actual sales orders.

In the example above, it is defined, that sales orders will consume Planned Independent requirements up to 20 days backwards of the sales order delivery date and 20 days forwards of the sales order delivery date.

In the material master data you can define, how sales orders consume the Planned Independent Requirements.

The sales order 1 for delivery date 15.04. will consume the Planned Independent Requirements created for 1st of April accordingly. The sales order 2 for delivery date 24.04. is exceeding the 20 days of backwards consumption and therefore is using forward consumption and consumes the Planned Independent Requirements created for 4th of May.