Checking and Releasing Production Orders

When a production order is created, the system determines requirement quantities and requirement dates for the material components in the order: The requirement quantities are determined based on the selected bill of material and the planned production quantity of the order. The requirement dates result from the start dates of the operations to which the material components are assigned. Let's consider the following scenario as an example: We create a production order for the production of 100 bicycles. According to the bill of material, 200 wheels are required. The bicycles are to be assembled in the operation Wheel Assembly. Scheduling has determined that this operation should start on April 12 at 2:30 pm. The 200 wheels are therefore to be picked on this date.

You can use the material availability check to ensure that the required component quantities are available at the scheduled time. A material availability check is usually automatically triggered at order creation and/or at order release. However, a production controller can also trigger an availability check manually at any time. A manual check can be triggered for an individual order (for example, in the Change Order application) or for several orders simultaneously using mass processing. The latter can be executed in the foreground (for example, in the Manage Production Orders app) or in the background.

When the material availability check is triggered, a scope of check is determined for each material component. It defines, for example, the stocks and the receipts and issues to be taken into account by the availability check. You can define different scopes of checks to be executed at order creation and order release. For example, when a production order is created, the planned goods receipts of purchase orders and the on-stock quantity of a material component are to be taken into account, but when an order is released, only the on-stock quantity is to be considered. Alternatively, when a production order is created, you could also take the material in quality inspection stock into account, but at order release, you require that the components must be available in unrestricted-use stock.

As a result of a material availability check, committed quantities are recorded for the checked components and the order status is updated. If all components are completely available at the required time, the Material committed order status is set. If one or more components cannot be confirmed as requested, the Material shortage status is set, and the material shortage is recorded in a missing parts list and in the missing parts information system. You can define whether orders cannot be opened and/or released in case of material shortage.

The material availability check is performed according to the available to promise method (ATP). The system checks for every requirement whether the required quantities are available at the requested time and commits them if they are available. Let us discuss the ATP approach using the following simple example:

In this video, you will see the following process steps:

1. Executing and analyzing an automatic material availability check.
2. Executing and analyzing a manual material availability check.
3. Executing and analyzing a material availability check with missing parts.
4. Analyzing a missing part situation in the order information system and in the availability overview.

The figure above describes the basic principles of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Capacity Planning:

• The master data of the work centers play a central role in capacity planning. In the work centers, the respective 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, meaning that, although the non-working times of the work centers are taken into account when the system calculates processing date and time, the system assumes that the required capacity is always available when needed. Due to the fact that the capacity requirements of other orders are ignored in this approach, the assumption of infinite availability of capacities 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 to the capacity requirements of operations. In capacity leveling, operations previously scheduled with infinite resource capacity are now scheduled finitely by allocating the respective operation to a time slot in which the required resource is not occupied. Following this approach, it is guaranteed that the operation can be executed on the requested resource at the planned time.

For capacity evaluation and leveling, the following apps are available:

• The Manage Work Center Capacity app provides a user-friendly interface in which the capacity load of work centers is displayed clearly and concisely, and which can be easily adjusted to individual questions and requirements.
• 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.
• The Capacity Scheduling Table is a straightforward tool for the capacity leveling of planned, production and process orders. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to dispatch and deallocate bottleneck operations of orders transparently and easily.

In this video, you will see the following process steps:

1. Releasing individual and multiple operations.
2. Releasing individual and multiple orders.
3. Scheduling an order release run.