DP - delivery date or/and material availability date?

[Former Member]

Dear DP experts,

let's say, we have only one plant as 9ALOCNO (delivering location). Transportation time is very long and can be several months. While loading sales orders for that plant it seems natural to choose the material availability date on the sales orders as basis for planning. Later on, transferring planning results to SNP, there will be the consistent picture for requirements with regard to date. But imagine, the sales manager wants to have a look at the demand plan to discuss it with the client and possibly to make a correction in the plan. They should probably operate on the basis of delivery date at the customer location that is shifted from the material availability date by transportation time and loading time. Note that in the demand history both dates are present. Is there any possibilty in demand planning to have a double view of the plan (based on the material availability date and on the delivery date at the customer location)? I would appreciate any advice on that topic,

Best regards

Vladimir

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Marc,

thank you for this useful information!

1) Technically, do you suggest to create 2 infocubes in BW, right?

2) The second part of my question concerns the following: suppose we now have 2 key figures for historical data.

How should I handle them in synchronous way. No problem to generate two forecasts. If an user works with the forecast based on the delivery date (let say he will make corrections in the KF "final forecast on delivery date"), how should this information be transferred into the key figure "final forecast on loading date) that will be used for SNP? I would suppose - with a macro, but may there be some kind of standard solution/best practice?

Best regards

Vladimir

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Vladimir.

1. If I understand the context (i.e. all collection and dissemination of history is done in APO-BI and there is no separate BI history supplying the APO prepared history) then yes. One cube is collecting the sales history from the ECC system and there is then a transformation from that cube to another cube that is supplying the history to the APO Planning Area.

2. The key question will be 'what are you trying to forecast?'. This will depend very heavily on what is modelled in SNP. If you are modelling demand out of DC's, then the material available date is the key data. I can imagine a scenario where you are running SNP against the forecast deliveries out of DC's but when you are talking to customers you do it in terms of delivery date at customer. This then means you potentially have to maintain the relationship between the two forecasts. In other words manual adjustments to the forecast on delivery date because of agreements with the customer should be reflected in the forecast against availability date. This would be possible if the lead times involved were stored allowing adjustments to be made across the 2 plans accordingly using macros.

Regards, M.

[Former Member]

Hi Vladimir.

Yes this would be entirely possible. Most of the would be done in BI before loadining into the planning area though.

Simply you would have 2 key figures for history, 1 based on mat. availability, 1 based on delivery date. There will probably be a single source for the history in BI (could be deliveries, billing etc., depends on your business scenario) but the volume is used twice to generate the history against the 2 date values of the document data. All pretty standard BI stuff. These two data sets are used to populate the 2 key figures.

Hope this helps.

Mark.