Evaluating Planning Results

SAP S/4HANA features MRP Live, an MRP run optimized for SAP HANA.

Production planners have to make sure that material is available when needed. MRP assists production planners with this task.

MRP Live reads material receipts and requirements, calculates shortages, and creates planned orders and purchase requisitions all in one database procedure.

The MRP run determines expected material shortages and creates planned orders, purchase requisitions, or delivery schedule lines to cover the expected material shortages. A shortage exists for a material if the material is subject to demand-driven planning and if the total quantity of material requirements (sales orders, stock transfer requirements, production requirements, and forecast requirements) up to a certain point in time exceeds the total quantity of material receipts (inventory, production orders, purchase orders, delivery schedule lines, firmed planned orders, and firmed purchase requisitions).

This minimizes the volume of data that has to be copied from the database server to the application server and back, which considerably improves performance.

• Higher flexibility in the definition of the planning scope:

  MRP Live allows you to plan a set of materials with all components and materials for which a certain production planner is responsible, or one material across all plants.

• Stock transfer requirement:

  If a material is transferred from one plant to another, then 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.

• For the production planning and detailed scheduling functionality:

  MRP Live is a prerequisite for the production planning and detailed scheduling PP/DS solution in SAP S/4HANA, available since SAP S/4HANA 1610.

• Classic MRP is still available:

  Classic MRP is still available as an interim solution, which, at the moment, has to be used in the following cases:

  • For creating MRP lists.

  • For special scenarios with limited planning data volume – therefore, the customer can still execute the production planning using MD02. (harvester-effect).

Personalized KPIs and alerts allow material planners to see sales orders at risk due to missing materials.

It's easy to identify customers with the highest order value to address issues immediately.

SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA provides the material planner with insights to decision-making criteria and alternative methods to resolve missing material issues quickly.

This figure, MRP Cockpit Screen Flow, shows the screen flow of the MRP Cockpit.

From the Monitor Material Coverage, there exists a direct access to the Monitor Manage Material Coverage where the issue could be analyzed in detail. In addition, the system provides possible alternatives to solve this challenge.

Therefore, the Material Shortage provides compressed real-time information about material supply and demand match, as follows:

• Overview with KPIs and alerts

• Variable display of availability, demand or supply, color-coded

There's another use case, which is to reduce the bullwhip effect in the supply chain by an instant material flow control.

The result of the MRP is stored in MRP lists. Additionally, the current material receipts and requirements for selected materials can be checked in the stock-/requirement list. Production planners can select MRP lists with problems and stock-/requirement lists with short range of coverage (where the latter is performance critical). Today, decisions in production planning departments and purchasing departments are made based on outdated information due to batch runs.

The major challenges are the following:

• Analyzing MRP lists is comfortable, but based on outdated information and on paper.

• Analyzing stock-/requirement lists is less comfortable and performance critical, and also includes paper work.

• Problems in the material flow remain undetected or are detected late.

With SAP HANA, the Material Requirements Planning function can overcome these issues.

A new Dashboard for the Material Planner supports the following:

• Monitoring of KPIs and alerts with corresponding actions to solve issues.

• Identification and valuation of sales orders affected by shortages or delays to guide the user to the most important issues.

• Simulation of different 'what if' scenarios in real time.

• Calculation of alternative solutions. User is guided to the best solutions via colors.

This results in various benefits and new capabilities for you as the user:

• Get a business insight that has not been possible before and thus identify issues faster than ever before.

• Match demand and supply more efficiently than ever before.

• Give better service to the customers than ever before.

The key capabilities are as follows:

• 50% reduction in MRP runtime with high-speed reads.

• Increased usage of stored procedures to accelerate calculations, such as Stock Requirements List and where-used lists.

• Instant update on Supply network collaboration with latest demand information.

• High-speed read access slashes the runtime of read-intensive reports.

• Real-time access to large volumes of data.

• Proposals of different alternatives for taking action.