Dear friends of TM,
Purchase scheduling agreements are commonly used to capture the demands of a product for a longer period in time. In case the procured products are picked up at the supplier or at any handover location (e.g. a port), the receipient needs to plan a transport to the final destination location.
Therefore, we already integrated purchase scheduling agreements with Transportation Management to enable customers to do the respective transportation planning.
As purchase scheduling agreements can well run over several years, may be even with deliveries every day or multiple times a day (e.g. in automotive industry), their number of schedule lines grows significantly over time. In TM integration, this can lead to performance challenges e.g., when it comes to freight unit building respectively to the calculation of open quantities when all schedule lines are considered.
Therefore we introduced a start and end date for the consideration of schedule lines which is derived dynamically, based on delivered quantities and fixed time horizons. How this works is explained in the following.
Overview integration of Purchase Scheduling Agreements with TM
The integration of purchase scheduling agreements with TM is explained in the following:
- Material Requirements Planning (MRP) identifies the requirements (quantity & delivery date) for a certain product.
- The purchase scheduling agreement creates and updates schedule lines for those requirements.
- Freight unit building in TM creates and updates freight units based on the calculated open quantity and delivery dates from the schedule lines.
- Delivery dates and quantities of the freight units can be updated by transport planning of the customer. Therefore, a report synchronizes the schedule lines accordingly with the delivery dates and quantities from TM.
Customizing
The calculation of start and end dates is based on customizable rules and respective settings.
The rule group is a new setting in customizing:
This rule group is then maintained in the logistics integration profile:
Means, the rule group is defined on the level of document type / purchasing org. / purchasing group.
The detailed settings and how those rules have an effect is explained in the following where the calculation of start and end dates is described.
Calculation of Start Dates
The start date from when on schedule lines are considered is calculated by determining the oldest schedule line with an open quantity. Thereby, a schedule line has open quantity when the order quantity is higher than the goods receipt quantity.
Now, it might well happen, that this 'oldest schedule line with open quantity' is only a couple of days in the past. Then, it could be an issue to take this as a start date as still those schedule lines and their quantities might change, e.g. due to a cancellation of a goods receipt. Therefore a 'safety margin' is introduced, how much in the past the start date must be at a minimum. This safety margin is maintained at the so-called rule group which will be introduced in detail in the following chapter talking about the calculation of end dates.
The start date for the consideration of schedule lines is then the oldest date, comparing the oldest schedule line with open quantity and the safety margin subtracted from today.
This start date is calculated automatically during logistics integration with TM. But to gain best possible performance, the calculation happens only when the purchase schedule agreement is integrated with TM for the first time. And for the dynamic movement of the start date, a report is in place, which a customer would usually plan for running e.g. every week. It's surely not necessary to calculate new start dates on every change of the purchase schedule agreement, so this is the most efficient way in terms of performance.
Let's show this in the following examples. For both of the examples, we assume a safety margin of 7 days:
Today is the 11.1. and those are the schedule lines:
Here, the start date for the consideration of schedule lines is 3.1., as this is the oldest schedule line with open quantity and the safety margin is at 4.1.
Now, the oldest schedule line with open quantity is on 7.1. but the safety margin is again at 4.1. Therefore, the start date is at 4.1.
Calculation of End Dates
The end date for the consideration of schedule lines is calculated based on customizable rules which determine the horizon, how far in the future schedule lines should be considered. And this horizon is based on a rule set, which calculates the number of schedule lines in a particular time frame. Means basically, the more schedule lines are present, the smaller is the horizon, with the goal, to keep the number of considered schedule lines at a lowest possible level.
Let's again make an example of a so-called rule group with its rules. The rule group has a timeframe for counting future schedule lines of 30 days:
Now, we count the number of schedule lines in the given time frame of 30 days and check which of the maintained rules fits:
Assuming we count e.g. 8 schedule lines, rule 2 fits, the horizon is 35 days and the end date for the consideration is therefore 35 days from now.
So, this is surely a big step forward for our integration scenario with purchase scheduling agreements, improving performance significantly.
Appreciate your questions and comments!
Best regards,
Michael
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