Changing Characteristics in Demand Planning

[Former Member]

Is there a way to eliminate or create characteristics in a Planning Area once it is initialized?  We have been on APO DP for 6years and feel we could eliminate 4-5 characteristics (making some Navigational Attributes) and adding 1 or 2 that we feel would now be beneficial.

[rajkj · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

If you want to change your POS, it is required to be deactivated. Then, it allows you to manage the characteristics i.e. you can drop the old ones and add new characteristics with nav attributes.

However, this change will impact everything i.e. planning area, data sources, etc. Probably, it would be a better idea to create a new POS, a new PA based on the existing one, new planning books and data views based on the existing objects.

Then, you copy the data from the old PA to new PA using t.code /SAPAPO/TSCOPY (depending on your characteristics mapping). If this is viable, you can still extract the old PA data into an InfoCube and then load into the new PA using t.code /SAPAPO/TSCUBE.

Thanks,

Rajesh

[former_member209769]

Hi Christopher,

Let me add more to what Rajesh mentioned.

This exercise would be a big exercise.

Not only within APO, you also need to think of the changes that would need to be done to get data to DP planning area, and also to extract data from DP planning area. Think about end-to-end impact. I am talking about the changes required in the cubes that would send history data to DP planning area, and also the reporting extraction/backup extraction that you might be doing from the DP planning area.

Apart from this, you would need to change the design for the way in which your attributes are filled in the flow.

The above design changes that you make might be only in APO, or you might also decide to make design changes from BW system itself till APO. Discuss about this with your BW team. 

In our case, we kept the old flow (cube, planning area, etc), and a new flow was created in-line with the changed DP planning area (from BW through APO). We took out the old flow completely only when the new flow was working perfectly.

Hope this helps.

PS: As Rajesh clearly said, you can't change the MPOS when the planning area is active. Only after deactivating the planning area (meaning removing all the data), you can change the MPOS.

If you just want to change the characterictics, that would have been comparatively simpler exercie, but again your whole design would need to be looked at end-to-end similar to above.

Thanks - Pawan