Order priority vs Product priority

[Former Member]

Hi

Can someone explain me the difference b/w Order priority and Product priority in simple words with examples and if possible through a business scenario??

I am really confused with the way SAP help has explained everything. Reference module is PPDS.

Regards

Chuck11

[rajkj · Accepted solution]

Hi Chuck11,

Pl assume the following very simple business scenario.

There are 3 products and are given priorities based on their contribution margin to profitability.

Product  -  Priority

P1         -   05

P2         -   10

P3        -    15

Consider the high priority product P1 is being sold to 3 customers and the SD module is customized to define sales order priority based on sales volume of customer and product combination (customer material info record).

Product P1

Customer -  Priority

C1          -   2

C2          -   3

C3          -   4

all others -   5

Since P1 sales to C1 is more, the orders from this customer have high priority and given preferential treatment. Here, we are overriding the product priority (i.e. 5) and assigning higher priority to the order based on specific business criteria.

Thus, when a sales order to fulfill C1's demand entered, we'll have a requirement order with priority 2 and production plan run with appropriate heuristics generate receipt order with priority i.e. 2 instead of product priority i.e. 5 so as to give preference in resources allocation to fulfill the demand in time.

Thanks,
Rajesh

[Former Member]

Hi Rajesh

Everything is crystal clear now  except one comment from you :

In APO, we don't deal with customer priorities but consider the sales order priority instead.

I think , if we define any priority in the customer master, then any sales order created for that customer will have the priority specified in the customer master. So Customer priority as a matter of fact will become Sales order priority.

Any difference of opinion?

Regards

Chuck11

[rajkj]

Hi Chuck11,

• As you aware, APO treats the customer as a location. In location master, we can maintain location priority (general tab; predominantly used by CTM, TM, and EWM) and delivery priority (ATP tab). Location priority is manually maintained whereas the delivery priority CIF'ed from ECC.

• We do maintain product specific customer priority in ECC that helps to auto generate the sales order priority in ECC. Thus, the sales order comes with a priority in to APO.

Due to these reasons, I mentioned we don't deal with customer priorities in APO. Apart from this, I certainly agree with you.

Thanks,

Rajesh

[Former Member]

Wonderful !!!

Sounds like a much better proposition Rajesh.Thanks for the guidance.

But I was speaking in reference to ppds and scheduling the ppds orders with high priority. Correct me if I am wrong but I thought Product/customer priority is done in snp. Will defining hierarchy and priority help me in ppds also ; or were you talking w.r.t  snp optimizer ?

Thanks

Chuck11

[Former Member]

It follows the same logic, but PPDS gives you heuristics to control how to propagate priorities from demand to your planned/production orders: as the demand situation evolves, you can both reschedule according to existing priorities on your entries or reassign priorities with your own logic instead of rescheduling.

[rajkj]

Hi Chuck11,

I answered your last query from business perspective.

As you mentioned, PP/DS planning and scheduling purely based on order priority and product based priority does not have any role here.

Only SNP optimizers can consider the product priority based on configuration. SNP allows you to define priority classes based on cost groups or static prioritization i.e. customer demand 1, corrected forecast 2, forecast 3, and safety stock 4 in the optimizer profile. You can also instruct optimizer to consider product priority is more important in the profile. So, the functionality is little different here considering SNP as time bucket based planning rather than order based planning.

To summarize, business needs to setup priorities (product and customer). In APO, we don't deal with customer priorities but consider the sales order priority instead. The product priorities are used in  SNP(optimizers and capacity leveling algorithm) and PP/DS. However, PP/DS priority determination depends on the version setting "Determine Priority" (t.code /sapapo/mvm) and it can be altered either manually in the product view or executing heuristics SAP_PP_012.

Thanks,
Rajesh

[Former Member]

Thanks Rajesh

It was a wonderful explanation. It fully explains the concept. But one thing which surprises me is there are only 1 - 255 priorities and both Product priority and customer Priority has to manage between that number range. Seems like a constraint to me!!

Regards

Chuck11

[rajkj]

Hi Chuck11,

You are welcome.

The priority data element (/sapapo/prio) has a data type of INT1 that can hold numbers up to 255 i.e. (2^8 - 1).

INT1: 1-byte integer between 0 and 255. The length is set to 3 places for this data type. 
http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_04/helpdata/en/cf/21f2e5446011d189700000e8322d00/content.htm

If we use product/customer specific priorities, we soon can hit the upper limit. The better solution to avoid this issue is to use of product/customer hierarchies based priorities. Thus, we can set the priorities at higher level (for instance product families) and use them at the detailed level.

Thanks,

Rajesh