Using Planning Products within APO-Demand Planning

[Former Member]

I am in the process of implementing APO-Demand Planning within a business that uses Planning with a Planning Material (Strategy 63). In order to execute forecasting at the Planning Material level, I would like to implement the use of Planning Products within Demand Planning. Thus, sales history would be aggregated at a Planning Product level based on the Products that use that Planning Product. I have been successful in creating an integration model that contains both materials (with locations) and planning materials, and I see the nodal structure under hierarchy PLANNING PRODUCT in transaction /SAPAPO/RELHSHOW, but I don't know how to proceed from here.

Can Planning Products be used in the way I describe within Demand Planning?

If so, what configuration needs to be done within Demand Planning and/or BW to enable this to work? It appears that I'll need to add hierarchy info to the characteristic representing Product in order to allow this to work, but I don't know the specifics.

It doesn't appear that much documentation exists to address the use of Planning with a Planning Material in Demand Planning, so any information that can be provided would be much appreciated.

Points awarded for helpful advice.

Best regards,

Mike Carey

Edited by: Michael Carey on Jul 19, 2010 10:27 PM

[Former Member]

Kumar,

Thank you very much for the clarification on the applicability of Planning Product to APO-Demand Planning.

Mike

[Former Member]

There is no easier approach or a standard approach in DP based on my past experience for a exact requirement.

If I understand your requirement below, the only reason you would like to use the functionality of "planning with plannning product" is to aggregate the sales history of all the products into planning products.

In SNP-Aggregate Planning- we can aggregate the data from lower level(product) into higher level( Planning product) using

"SNP Location Product Hierarchy Struct." in the Planning Area as " PLANNING PRODUCT"(Standard Hierarchy structure for planning product), however we cannot achieve the same result in DP.

The sales order will always be at the product level, only the forecast consumption will happen at the planning material level at which the forecast is released.

To address your requirement, ( please let us know if you come up with anything else) would be to use the BW route.

For a Planning Material, using a where used, list out all the products and Import from ECC the sales orders for all these products into a INFOSOURCE for the PLANNING MATERIAL.

2 ways:

(1) In DP, the Planning Material will be as a characteristic against which you will have the SALES HISTORY from BW INFOSOURCE (aggregation of all sales history from products)

(2) In DP, if the requirement is also to see the product along with the Planning material, then the CVC will contain Planning Material(9amatnr) as your main characteristic on which forecasting will be done and probably a navigation attribute for the product(zz**prod**).

Again using BW we will extract the mapping info from ECC and use this in APO

Thanks

Kumar