Planning Supply Chain in SAP

[Former Member]

Dear all,

has anyone of you have any experience on modelling a supply chain in SAP (not in APO or any other tools).

I have 47 plants and a central storage location which i need to model their movements for. Plants only sell:

they can take stock (a) from the supplier directly, (b) from central warehouse and (c) from other plants through

internal transfers.

I have seen in SPRO that SAP has some functions of declaring if a plant is a distribution plant, a manufacturing plant etc,

but i am not sure if this is my case...

Any thoughts/comments are welcomed!!!

Best regards,

Nikos Giannopoulos

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Nikos,

Yes, I have such experience.  Before I worked in APO I worked in multiplant ECC Planning environments.  Many companies are completely satisfied with Supply Chain solutions that exist totally within ECC.

So, your question is a bit vague, so I will give high level answers.

It is not necessary to define a plant specifically as a warehouse.  In ECC, a plant can be a manufacturing site, it can be strictly a warehouse, or it can be a combination of both.

There are several ways to move materials from one plant to another plant, these are usually supported via Special Procurement Keys in the Material Master.

Procurement Type and Special Procurement Type - Planning Process - SAP Library

By using a Special Procurement type, you can cause MRP to plan that a certain material will always be procured via a special method.  Otherwise, it will be procured using either Standard Purchase Reqs/Purchase Orders, or by local manufacturing through Planned orders/Production orders.  You can always manually use a different procurement method, by creating the appropriate documents manually, and this action will override the normal planning behavior.

Probably the most common method is moving materials from plant to plant via use of a Stock Transport order.

Stock Transfer Using a Stock Transport Order - Managing Special Stocks (MM-IM) - SAP Library

Best Regards,

DB49

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Many thanx, once again.

You are right, i have not explained my self correctly.

The situation is as follows: my plants run their MRP and they produce their purchase requisitions. Let's assume plant A requires 10 items of material B, which MRP creates a Purchase requisition for towards the supplier. Now, let's assume this material is also in plant C.

How can i run availability check and under what rules so as i take this material (through internal stock transfer) from plant C and not purchased from the supplier?

Of course, i will have to implement rules so as (a) plant C does not run out of stock and (b) that it would be cheaper to take material B from plant C and not from the supplier.

Best regards,

Nikos

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Nikos,

You are talking about availability checking; I was talking about planning.  In SAP, those are two distinct and separate functionalities.

In General, SAP ECC does not really support availability checking in more than one plant at a time.  APO Global Available to Promise does have some functionality in this area.

Best Regards,

DB49

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello DB.

Sorry if i have confused you. I know they are different issues. Since i understood what you have told me about forecasting, i moved forward to the next issue, this of the availability check. I do understand your points, however i have to derive a "solution" since i need to find a way to "implement" the collective availability check...

Best regards,

Nikos

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Nikos,

There is a functionality within ECC called 'collective availability check'.  MDVP or COMAC. Using this functionality, one can perform availability checks for the component materials of masses of planned orders or production orders.  This to me does not seem to meet the business requirement you have stated so far.

There is a similar functionality in ECC called 'rescheduling' which can perform availability checks for the requirements generated by masses of Sales documents and Stock Transfer documents. V_V2..  To me, this does not seem to meet the business requirements you have stated so far.

My understanding of your business requirement is that you want to perform an availability check against one or more requirements in one plant, and have the solution check the availability of each  requirement across multiple plants, and then yield a composite answer for each requirement.  None of the standard availability checks that exist in ECC, including any of the collective availability checks mentioned above, has this capability.  If you need to have this business requirement fulfilled, it will probably require enhancements(s), written by your own ABAPers.

Best Regards,

DB49