MRP Processing

• If a material is transferred from one plant to another, the stock-transfer requirement is not known in the supplying plant until after the material has been planned in the receiving plant. MRP Live determines the sequence in which materials have to be planned across several plants.

• MRP Live is a prerequisite for the future production planning and detailed scheduling PP/DS solution in SAP S/4HANA.

• Classic MRP is still available as an interim solution, which at the moment has to be used in the following case: To create capacity requirements with MRP (in a future release, MRP Live will also be able to create capacity requirements).

The main function of material requirements planning is to guarantee material availability, that is, it is used to procure or produce the requirement quantities on time both for internal purposes and for sales and distribution. This process involves the monitoring of stocks and, in particular, the automatic creation of procurement proposals for purchasing and production.

Procurement or production dates for the finished product, the assemblies, and components are determined based on the requirements dates for the finished product (a sales order, for example). If possible, backward scheduling is used to derive the requirements dates for the dependent requirements of lower level materials.

If MRP discovers shortage quantities, procurement proposals are generated in planning. For execution, they are converted. Planned orders can be converted into production orders or process orders. Only in Repetitive Manufacturing (REM), you produce based on the planned orders directly. Purchase requisitions, planned orders, and scheduling agreement scheduling lines are internal planning elements that can be changed, rescheduled, or deleted at any time. After conversion of planned orders or purchase requisitions, production orders, process orders, and purchase orders are fixed for planning.

Material requirements planning takes current and future sales as its reference point. The planned requirement quantities trigger the MRP calculation. In MRP, the requirements elements include sales orders, planned independent requirements, material reservations, the dependent requirements created by exploding the BOM, and so on.

If the MRP run determines shortage quantities, the system creates procurement proposals: Purchase requisitions and planned orders are internal planning elements that can be changed, rescheduled, or deleted at almost any time. With in-house production, the system creates planned orders for planning the production quantities.

When planning is complete, planned orders can be converted into production orders.

With external procurement, the system either uses a planned order or uses a purchase requisition directly to plan the external procurement quantity. When planning is complete, the planned order is converted into a purchase requisition, which is subsequently converted to a purchase order. Using the creation indicator for purchase requisitions on the initial screen of the planning run, you control whether the system immediately creates purchase requisitions directly, or first creates planned orders.

If a scheduling agreement exists for a material and is relevant for MRP in the source list, you can also create schedule lines directly using MRP. You control this using the creation indicator for scheduling agreement delivery schedule lines on the initial screen of the planning run.

• MRP Live:

  Using a S/4HANA Enterprise Management system, you use the new function MRP Live to run MRP. The system performance enables you to plan one or several plants online interactively.

• Total planning for a plant:

  You can execute a total planning run for several plants and MRP areas. Total planning for a plant encompasses all MRP-relevant materials for this plant, and includes the BOM explosion for materials with BOMs.

• Planning for an individual material:

  You can execute a single-item planning run for a specific material (single-level) or for all BOM levels (multilevel). Interactive planning of a material is also possible.

From the MRP menu, you can execute total planning online or as a background job. To execute the total planning run as a background job, select a report variant to restrict it to the relevant plant and schedule the job.

You can use a user exit to restrict the total planning run to materials that fulfill certain freely definable criteria. For example, you can select all materials for which a particular MRP controller is responsible.

MRP Live refers to the migration of the traditional MRP Planning capability to run on SAP HANA.

MRP on SAP HANA provides the ability to run MRP faster and, therefore, more frequently.  This means more real-time visibility to a broader set of supply and demand data from across the enterprise, including the combination of sales order, inventory, and procurement information into a single view.

The solution immediately calculates and highlights the material issues that need to be addressed across thousands of material stock situations.

The new process is faster, is streamlined, and is less manually intensive.

All of these factors allow the Material Planner to identify issues more quickly and find better solutions to material shortage issues.

With regenerative planning, the system plans all materials in a plant. This is useful for the first planning run and during day-to-day plant operations when data consistency cannot be guaranteed due to technical errors.

Due to certain circumstances, such as goods issues, new sales orders, and changes to the BOM structure, it is recommended (particularly with a large number of materials) to execute MRP for only those materials to which MRP-relevant changes have been made. Because of its short runtime, net change planning, which is used to plan only these materials, allows you to execute the planning run at short intervals, yielding the most current planning result.

With net change planning in the planning horizon, the system only takes into account changes that are within the planning horizon, and only plans materials to which MRP-relevant changes have been made within the planning horizon. In addition, the materials are only planned within this horizon.

You can set the planning horizon as a plant or MRP group parameter in MRP Customizing. The planning horizon must at least include the time period in which sales orders are received, the delivery times, and total lead times for the material.

You specify the type of planning to be used in the Processing Key field on the initial screen. With single-item planning, you can decide between net change planning (NETCH) and net change planning in the planning horizon (NETPL). With total planning, in addition to NETCH and NETPL, you can select the NEUPL key to determine that all materials in the planning file are to be planned.

Additional similarities between the current stock/requirements and MRP list are as follows:

• The worklist of the MRP controller is in the form of a tree, on the left (optional).

• The header with the material number is above the list. More information displays above the header details.

• The list contains the individual MRP elements and the corresponding available quantities.