Production at the alternative plant

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

I have 2 manufacturing plants, and 1 distribution center. Stock transfer should be done only in the primary plant and also the SNP manufacturing orders; but during PPDS run, if the capacity of the primary plant is full, the PPDS orders should be carried out in the alternative plant for the orders that primary plant can accomodate. How can this be possible? Is there a particular setting that I need to apply this scenario?

Thanks

Regards,

Lhon

[rajkj]

Hi Lon,

It sounds like a complicated requirement. Please validate my understanding of the issue.

You have 2 plants (one is primary and the other is alternative) to manufacture a particular product and a DC in your supply chain network. The DC is replenished by primary plant alone.  You use SNP to plan the entire network and use PP/DS for detailed production planning and scheduling at a given plant. It is required to load the primary plant and use the alternative plant only if the primary does not have required capacity to handle the demand.

If the above statement is true, it is required to have a proper model in SNP rather than PP/DS. Probably, you can use the storage resource assigned to location (t.code /SAPAPO/LOC3 tab Resources) to apply plant capacity constraint. For details, please check the following link

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_em70/helpdata/en/e2/551740180d48a8a67d27c55910ff16/frameset.htm

However, SNP heuristics may not consider the storage resources and may not be useful for the planning.

Please let me know your feedback.

Thanks,
Rajesh

[Former Member]

Hi Rajesh,

Thanks for the response. Yes your understanding is correct, planning should be done only on the primary model and the alternative plant should be trigger production orders if the capacity of the primary plant cant handle it and requistion should only be generated between DC and primary plant.

Regarding the storage resource, I think the scenario will work at the same of setting production constraints on the main resource used in the plants. Unlike SNP this can be achieve and controlled in using quota arangement, and procurment priorities; but that will create requisitions on both production plant which is the scenario we are avoiding.

Is it possible to customize this scenario in heuristics?

What other options can be used to attain this requirements?

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi,

YOu can use CTM to achive above requirement where system will try to fulfill demand first with plant 1 and then if it cannon be met on time it will go for plant 2.

Regards,

Santosh

[rajkj]

Hi Lon,

Thanks for the clarification. You are correct, even with usage of storage resource, there is a risk for requisitions being created at alternative plant, if there is a t.lane between DC and alternative plant. Otherwise, without t.lane, the planning engine (any of the SNP engines) may not recognize the alternative plant.

After pondering over it for a day, I came up with the following solution based on aggregated planning that can even be supported by SNP heuristics. Let me get into the details.

It is required to maintain the hierarchies as shown in the following screenshot.

Product Hierarchy: We will have a fictitious header product A with actual product B attached to it at next level.

Location Hierarchy: There is a dummy header location 1 with actual locations representing your primary and alternative plants (2 and 3 respectively)

Location Product Hierarchy: Dummy product A is extended to dummy location (A/1) and existing location products B/primary and B/alternative (B/2 and B/3) are attached to this header location product.

PPM/PDS Hierarchy: A dummy header PPM/PDS (P/1) is associated to the dummy location product. The actual PPM/PDS (R/2 and S/3) are attached to this header PPM/PDS. Primary Plant's PPM/PDS has higher priority over that of alternative plant's.

Let's assume your DC placed a demand of X quantity for product B on primary plant (location 2). We will not place any demand for product B at alternative plant (B/3). Due to aggregation, this demand will be rolled up to the top level i.e. location product A/1.

The header PPM/PDS's resource have the same capacity and basic rates as that of primary plant's. When you run the heuristics at aggregated level, it will create the planned orders for product A/1 using source of supply as P/1. Now, execute the resource based disaggregation so that SNP standard functionality load R/2 up to it's limit due to it's higher priority and the exceeded demand will be placed on S/3. Please find the details at http://help.sap.com/saphelp_SCM700_ehp02/helpdata/en/43/03b0b3dccd22f3e10000000a1553f7/content.htm

Please let me know your feedback.

Thanks,
Rajesh

[Former Member]

Excellent response, but I think it'd be more practical implement, understand, and tweak the solution if CTM is used in the targeted manner as suggested by Santosh.

Lon, what did you finally decide to do?