How to evaluate adherence to plan in APO / ECC ?

[Former Member]

Dear gurus,

After the implementation of DP, SNP and PPDS, we want to measure the adherence to plan ( either in APO, ECC or BW, wherever it is more straightforward ).

I expected that such a standard KPI would be covered somehow by the standard, but I cannot find anything to work with and the only alternative I find is to build it from scratch (store today's orders in a custom table and, when production is notified build some logic to compare the original dates from the table with the actual dates etc...).

Is there any standard way to do this, ie. through APO business content or a standard ECC report? Can anyone share some thoughts about this?

Any help will be most appreciated.

regards,

Pablo

[Former Member]

Pablo

The definition of 'adherence to plan' varies widely by organization/ business function and sometimes also by whom you ask/ time of day! Even a relatively simple KPI such as Forecast Accuracy in DP can get mired in questions like "Which forecast ? Last month's or the month before that ?" "At what level of aggregation?"

Once you go down to SNP or PPDS, this becomes even more difficult as plans change frequently. Should Planned Orders be considered as 'the plan' for comparison ? Or should you wait till they are converted into Production Orders?

So even if SAP had standard KPI's, I doubt if they could be used as is.

In my opinion, the most important aspect is to get cross functional agreement on

1. Which KPI's are important (More is not better).

2. How do we define these KPI's

3. How do we measure these KPI's.

4. Finally, how do we act/ react to KPI's once we measure them.

From an SAP perspective, this kind of reporting is best done in BI. There are standard/ extractors/ datasources for pretty much everything in ECC/ APO. First check if delivered content (Infoproviders/ Datasources/ etc) is sufficient and meets your definitions. if not, you will have to build your own.

In general, for any Plan v/s Actual, its good to have some kind of 'versioned' plan. This enables you to get lagged reporting - How did we do with last months/ last quarters plan ?.

You could dump all the custom data into custom tables and write ABAP reports of them, but why would you do that when SAP provides a highly sophisticated Business Intelligence platform for precisely this reason?

Rishi Menon