Prepared for everything

A good production plan is a feasible production plan. It must take into account restrictions in the supply chain such as machines, personnel, tools, etc. during detailed planning, but at the same time be flexible enough to be able to react quickly to changes, e.g. in demand, in order to avoid bottlenecks.

SAP Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS), a module of SAP SCM Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO), is a production planning solution with many advantages for planners: Coordinated, smoothed and feasible production plans across plants and MRP levels; reduced lead time throughout the production chain; setup-optimized planning; and optimal capacity utilization.

The high costs, integration and IT support involved often prevented medium-sized companies from additionally operating an external APO or other APS system. However, due to limited possibilities for finite planning, production planning in ERP produces results that cannot be implemented in production. Excel and other tools are used and transparency is lost due to a lack of integration into the ERP.

With embedded PP/DS (ePP/DS), the full PP/DS functionality is now also available directly in S/4 Hana or already in an ECC on Hana. The integration with the ERP logistics modules means enormous simplification in the use of master and transaction data and makes the introduction of ePP/DS attractive for SMEs too.

The main goal for companies is to reliably and bindingly meet deadlines promised to customers. In order to achieve this and counteract the constant rescheduling of sequences and processes, stable, finite planning against limited capacities and materials is a great advantage. Orders are only scheduled out when required and then rescheduled accordingly. This stabilizes planning in production and purchasing and increases the reliability of delivery commitments to the customer.

Consilio has designed and configured a template solution for stable production planning based on the SAP standard ePP/DS. In contrast to the standard, the advantage here is that not all orders are always rescheduled in the event of short-term changes, but only the new sales orders are actually planned and integrated into the process. This means that planned and production orders do not have to be reprioritized. Order sequence and resource utilization are optimized for new orders, taking alternative machines and tools into account at the same time.

The Consilio template provides the planner with a large number of extensions for system-supported, interactive rescheduling, such as in the detailed or resource planning board, to ensure a high degree of flexibility in order to react to short-term changes and high-priority customer orders despite the calm, stable capacity planning.

The solution enables him to plan and reschedule entire order networks at once and to use the optimizer interactively not only for resources but also for orders. The planner can highlight order networks graphically and sort them automatically according to dispatch levels. This provides ideal support for rescheduling and allows it to be carried out efficiently.