CM25 CM21 potential functionality

[Former Member]

Hi peers

I wish to get experience feedback around use of the scheduling workbench in SAP R3 ie CM25 / CM21 transactions.

For the moment for various reasons we don't have SAP APO in our tools landscape.

So we try to get the best from standard R3 functionality.

CM25 profile setup in background seems to be very rich and complex to implement.

We already have some profiles customized but none allows to fully satisfy in itself the users requirement.

Does anybody has a Point of view about feasability and how-to in the following areas :

- ability to save changes without having to get out the graph. Currently the save icon make the user get out the graph so have to rekey in criteria. Selection criterias are not kept in lilve memory...

- ability to move a planned order inside the order pool. Currently we have to dispatch the planned order to the desired date then undispatch it just to change the date.

- ability to convert planned orders into work orders from CM25. This is currently possible only from MD04 ?

- ability to view designation of products for planned orders as well. Currently it is displayed only for work orders.

- ability to add user defined characteristics. Eg display characteristics like color, pack size etc would help a lot scheduling task. and highlight orders with different color based on these characteristics.

- ability to view excreption messages against planned order & work order. Would help the planner to place the planned order at the most optimal time taking into account capacity constraint without having to query MD04 for each individual item.

- ability to highlight orders which are late ? (eg based on exception message and gap between planned date and re-schedule date)

- ability to some sort of automatic capacity levelling. Ie level load across 2 alternative machines. Currently planned orders are llinked to the machine on the first production version by default. Is there any way that SAP can use a priority feature and change the version by default if the first machine is fully loaded at the required date ?

Please share your experience with MPS and scheduling in SAP. It seems that if we want the MPS planner to control the planning function in SAP R3 we have to freeze the horizon over many weeks so that capacity of machine is respected but then a lot of planning calculation has to be done manually...

Thanks in advance for all your answers. Help will be much appreciated.

BR

Olivier

[Former Member]

You've posted way too many queries into one (just for your info - forum rules no more than one query to be posted in a single thread). It would be hard to expect someone to read thru' each one of those n provide meaningful inputs.

Anyways as a start point go thru' SAP help on capacity planning & leveling if you've not done that. It should give you a fair idea of what you can expect from CRP on SAP ECC side. Once you do that start mapping your needs against those.

Based on what I read of the queries you've posted, I see some major alignments needed in terms of the master data, the buffers, operation times you've maintained which should give you some leeway in terms of planning. As regards to checking the exception messages in MD04 & then planning based on that, it would require some custom development.

But if SAP-ECC (not APO) is the tool to be used, then I would suggest see how best you can modify the process, without loosing much in terms of process efficiency thereby you can still make do with the std. out-of-the-box solutions.