Exploring Business Process Scheduling (BPS)

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business world, efficient and effective management of business processes has become more important than ever. The modern supply chain is a complex network of interconnected business processes, from sales to procurement and production to warehousing. As companies try to meet customer demand while keeping costs low, there is an increasing need for advanced technologies that can optimize these processes and improve overall efficiency. BPS provides you with a flexible and configurable scheduling framework that you can use to schedule logistical activities of different business processes. You can use BPS to schedule several freely definable business processes according to your requirements. BPS enables greater planning accuracy and can optimize your resource utilization.

The solution decouples business documents (for example: Sales Orders) from a concrete scheduling application and allows a fully flexible configuration of duration, calendar, and time zone for each defined logistical activity. You can use BPS to determine the relevant date types (for example: Delivery Date) in your business process. This means that you can define times in your logistical business process (start or end of logistical activities, for example: Start of Loading) for which BPS returns a planned date and time zone as well as optional times. You can use BPS to determine the relevant date types (for example: Delivery Date) in your business process. The core configuration for scheduling is your scheduling schema, that is, a sequence of scheduling activities that you can define according to your logistically required process. It also contains information about your date types, which you can assign to all logically possible dates.

BPS covers the following functions:

• Business Process Definition
• Determination of Activity Attributes (Calendar, Duration, Time Zone)
• Scheduling on the level of time granularity in days or seconds

The upper half of the graphic shows a standard delivery process with backward scheduling. Starting from the requested delivery date, backward scheduling is performed to calculate when the material must be in stock and when transportation planning must start to ensure on-time delivery. Therefore, the transportation duration is subtracted from the requested delivery date based on the determined factory calendar and optionally from the working time to calculate the goods issue date (date on which the transport must start). The loading duration is then subtracted from the goods issue date to determine the loading date (the date on which the goods must therefore be ready for loading).

According to this procedure, the material availability date and the transportation planning date are calculated from the loading date. If date types along the scheduling schema are calculated to be before the earliest permissible date (in this example, in the past), BPS does not confirm the delivery date.

In the previous example, the transportation planning date is earlier than the earliest permissible date. Therefore, BPS adjusts the transportation planning date to the earliest permissible date (for example, current point in time). The forward calculation (rescheduling) of all date types along the scheduling schema is then performed to ensure that all date types are planned in the future or at least on the current day. This part of the scheduling process is shown in the lower half of the graphic. Forward scheduling can also be triggered if Available-to-Promise (ATP/aATP) is configured for a specific process. If ATP cannot confirm the material availability date due to the unavailability of a requested material, a forward calculation is started from the earliest permissible date to determine the earliest date for which the requirement can be confirmed. In this calculation, the latest material availability date and transportation planning date are calculated so that the material availability date is as close as possible to the confirmed delivery date.

However, in addition to the aforementioned functionality, which can also be mapped to the greatest extent with standard scheduling in SAP S/4HANA, it quickly reaches its limits when using calendars, durations, and time zones.

The configuration of the BPS attribute determination can use some configurations of delivery and transportation scheduling for the attribute determination categories calendar, duration, and time zone for some activities.

• Define Scheduling by Shipping Point
• Maintain Working Hours
• Maintain Duration

The values you maintain in these configurations are used by the BPS logic when you select the following as your attribute determinations:

• CALENDAR_FROM_SHIPPING_POINT (factory calendar from shipping point)
• CALENDAR_FROM_CUSTOMER (factory calendar from ship-to party)
• CALENDAR_FROM_ROUTE (factory calendar from route)
• DURATION_FROM_SHIPPING_POINT_LOAD (duration from shipping point for activity load)
• DURATION_FROM_SHIPPING_POINT_PICK (duration from shipping point for activity pick)
• DURATION_FROM_ROUTE_TRANSP_DAYS (duration from route for activity transport, only transportation time in days is considered)
• DURATION_FROM_ROUTE_PLAN (Duration from Route for Activity Plan)
• DURATION_FROM_ROUTE_TRANSP (duration from route for activity transport, duration in days or hours/minutes is considered) This determination is not configured in the standard schemas for activity TRANSPORT ("Transport"), but you can copy a standard schema and change the determination from DURATION_FROM_ROUTE_TRANSP_DAYS to DURATION_FROM_ROUTE_TRANSP if necessary.
• DURATION_FROM_STOCK_TRANSPORT (duration from goods receipt processing time of stock transfer)
• TIMEZONE_FROM_SHIPPING_POINT (time zone from shipping point)
• TIMEZONE_FROM_CUSTOMER (time zone from ship-to party)

You can use Business Process Scheduling in the area of Sales. You can schedule date types flexibly. BPS returns the default date types to the corresponding sales documents.

Perform the following steps to activate scheduling with Business Process Scheduling (BPS) for sales documents. The date types that you have configured in your scheduling schema are then returned with the calculated dates (and optionally, times) to the sales document you are using.

Currently, BPS supports documents for the following categories:

• Sales Inquiry
• Sales Quotation
• Sales Order
• Sales Scheduling Agreement
• Sales scheduling agreement with external service agent
• Sales Order Without Charge

• Sales Contract

Step 1: Activate Scheduling for Sales Documents

For each sales document type, specify whether scheduling is to be carried out in general. You can also control whether only backward scheduling or backward and forward scheduling is carried out for certain document types.

Step 2: Activate BPS for combinations of sales document types, item categories, and shipping points

You can activate BPS as a scheduling solution for specific combinations of sales document types, item categories, and shipping points by assigning them to a specific scheduling schema. If you do not make the corresponding configuration for a specific sales document type, item category, or shipping point, BPS does not perform scheduling. Instead, scheduling is performed as a fallback from shipment and transportation scheduling for sales.

The main goal of BPS is to increase the precision of scheduling and provide flexibility. It helps in decoupling business documents and scheduling them concretely. First, you need to configure the scheduling schema according to your business needs. You can use the BPS standard schemas for sales or create your own schemas.

This schema contains a set of activities that are part of your business scheduling process. Depending on the business requirement, you can create custom activities and add them to the schema. You now have the option to maintain the activity duration in three ways: calendar, duration, and time zone.

The following overview should once again reflect the overall process of configuring Business Process Scheduling.