The economic use of available resources is an essential objective for many areas of a company. For this purpose, SAP S/4HANA Capacity Planning is available.
As a planner in manufacturing, you are responsible for the optimal utilization of your work centers. The capacity load of the work centers should not be too high or too low in certain periods. In addition, the planned orders and production orders should be assigned to the work centers in an optimal sequence. To achieve these goals, you can use various tools in SAP S/4HANA for capacity evaluation and capacity leveling.
First, you must get an overview of the integration and the basics of SAP S/4HANA capacity planning.

SAP S/4HANA Capacity Planning is available for the areas listed in the figure. In this course, we focus exclusively on the application in discrete manufacturing, that is, for planned and production orders. The tools and functions described herein are very similar and partially identical in the other areas.
Capacity Planning in Manufacturing

The functions of Manufacturing form a complex process chain starting with the creation of requirements (planned independent requirements or sales orders) and ending with the goods receipts of the finished products.
Manufacturing is integrated into the functions of capacity planning, costing, inventory management, quality management and many other SAP S/4HANA applications. There are also various interfaces to external systems.
When you define sales quantities or create planned or production orders, capacity requirements are generated. These can be evaluated and leveled in capacity planning. By confirming the orders, the capacity requirements are reduced.
Capacity Planning in Manufacturing: Master Data and Orders

The master data of the work centers play a central role in capacity planning. In the work centers, their available capacities and formulas for calculating the capacity requirements of operations are defined. Work centers are assigned to the operations of routings.
Planned orders or production orders are created on the basis of routings. Based on the work center formulas, lead time scheduling takes place for the orders and capacity requirements are created for their operations.
The operations are scheduled infinitely. The non-working times of the work centers are taken into account, but not the capacity requirements of other orders. This can lead to capacity overloads.
In such situations, various tools are available for capacity evaluation and capacity leveling. In capacity evaluation, the available capacities of work centers are compared with the capacity requirements of operations. In capacity leveling, operations are scheduled finitely. They are dispatched to periods with free capacity. In this way, the available capacity is guaranteed.
Material Requirements Planning and Capacity Planning

The figure, Material Requirements Planning and Capacity Planning, again describes the fact that lead time scheduling is carried out in material requirements planning. An infinite available capacity is assumed. In a subsequent step, capacity evaluation and capacity leveling must take place if you want to avoid capacity overloads.
Capacity Planning Tools

For capacity evaluations, several apps and evaluation reports are available. This enables you to analyze a capacity situation flexibly and effectively, depending on your current requirements.
For capacity leveling, you can use several apps and planning tables.
The Capacity Scheduling Table is a straightforward tool for the capacity leveling of planned, production and process orders. It is accessed via the SAP Fiori launchpad and provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to dispatch and deallocate bottleneck operations of orders transparently and easily.
The Capacity Scheduling Board is a tool to analyze the schedule of operations and to dispatch, reschedule, or deallocate individual bottleneck operations on pacemaker work centers in a graphical chart. It is accessed via the SAP Fiori launchpad.
The tabular planning tables give you a period-oriented, aggregate information on available capacities, capacity requirements, and capacity loads. In the tabular planning table, the capacity requirements of operations are dispatched to periods with free capacity. However, you cannot create a specific sequence for the dispatched operations within a period.
The graphical planning table enables you to carry out detailed planning of capacity requirements continuously over time. The requirements of operations are dispatched to individual capacities at exact times and in the sequence in which they are processed.
Note
The use right for the Graphical Planning Table expires on Dec 31, 2025. For this reason, the Graphical Planning Table is not covered in this course.
See note 2268050 for the following information:
Transactions CM21, CM22, etc with the Graphical Planning Table are still available in SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition, but not considered as the target architecture. The Graphical Planning Table is part of the SAP S/4HANA compatibility scope, which comes with limited usage rights. For more details on the compatibility scope and it’s expiry date and links to further information please refer to SAP note 2269324. In the compatibility matrix attached to SAP note 2269324, Graphical Planning Table can be found under the ID 451.
Transactions CM* will be replaced by apps like "Manage Work Center Capacity", "Capacity Scheduling Table", and "Capacity Scheduling Board".
Alternatively consider SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud DMC component Resource Orchestration REO. REO works on more granular data defined in Digital Manufacturing Cloud. In a job-shop environment for example work-centers could be defined in SAP S/4HANA and the individual machines only in DMC. Dispatching from the work-center level to the individual machine level is the domain of REO. Further information can be found on http://help.sap.com/dmc.
Use embedded PP/DS for complex scheduling problems, if for example planned and production orders of different BOM levels need to be synchronized, or if material availability needs to be considered in scheduling, or if multiple bottleneck resources must be aligned. PP/DS is embedded into S/4HANA. It is available on-premise. For details refer to note 2666947.
Recommended Actions:
- Consider to migrate to the new apps "Manage Work Center Capacity", "Capacity Scheduling Table", and "Capacity Scheduling Board"
- or evaluate REO
- or evaluate (embedded) PP/DS.
In this context, please also refer to course S4224 and the workshopS42245.
Example: Capacity Evaluation in the Stock/Requirements List

The figure, Example: Capacity Evaluation in the Stock/Requirements List, shows an example of a capacity evaluation that was called up directly from the stock/requirements list. The MRP controller displays the capacity loads of the affected work centers. Overload situations are recognized immediately.
Updating the Data in Planned Orders and Production Orders as a Result of Dispatching

The figure, Updating the Data in Planned Orders and Production Orders as a Result of Dispatching, shows which data is updated in a planned order and a production order when an operation is dispatched.
In a planned order, the Capacity dispatched indicator is set. The planned order is also firmed. It cannot be rescheduled using MRP or any other type of lead time scheduling.
In a production order, the status DSPT Dispatched is set for a dispatched operation. It also cannot be rescheduled using lead time scheduling.
Rescheduling of dispatched operations is only possible using finite scheduling in a planning board.