Forecast Consumption and Wthdrawal quantities

[former_member182607]

Hello Gurus,

I am sure many of you might have encontered this issue.

We use APO Demand Planning for our forecasting process. Forecast is done in Monthly buckets but it is released to SNP in weekly buckets using a Period Split Profile. This is probably one of the more used processes. The problem is the APO system makes the assumption that we are going to sell everything in the same week we planned for that material. Unfortunately it does not happen that way in real life.

The example below is an illustration:

The material has a value of 2 in SNP 2 screen field Period Split, which releases the forecast to the remining days in the month.

Forecast

Week 1-100 EA

Week 2-100 EA

Week 3-100 EA

Week 4-100 EA

Sales

Week 1-85 EA

When we enter Week 2 our remaining forecast is 315 EA, which we want to distribute to the remaing 21 days(assuming this is Feb of 2013 with 28 working days. We expect the sytem to put in a forecast in the following manner:

Re-released forecast in Wk 2

Week 2-105 EA

Week 3-105 EA

Week 4-105 EA

But what the system is doing is this:

System behaviour

Week 2-133 EA

Week 3-134 EA

Week 4-133 EA

The system completely ignores the quantity sold(which is 'Withdrawal Qty' in SAP language), leading to overproduction of 85 EA already produced and sold. As we proceed to the 4th week the situaton gets more 'dangerous'. Assuming I have sold 300 EA by end of Week 3, my production plan should be only 100EA. But the system completely ignores the 300 EA already sold and sends a forecast which looks like this:

System Behaviour

Week 4-400 EA

This leads to overproduction by 300 EA.

If any of you have faced this scenario how has this been overcome? Any guidance/hint/help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Subash Nanjangud

[m_manimaran]

Hi Subash,

Before releasing the forecast in the Week 2, you supposed to adjust your Monthly forecast in Demand Planning. Otherwise when you release it from DP to SNP in the second week, still the monthly forecast will be 400 and that will split according to your SNP 2 setting as 400/3 to the remaining 3 weeks.

Regards,

Manimaran M.

[former_member182607]

Thanks Manimaran,,,that is not going to work because once the monthly forecast is locked we don't change it.  Basically I don'e see any utility from Period Split = 2 as it does not provide a usable business solution. Also when you have 3000+ Product Location combination asking the end user to adjust the forecast every week is not going to make me a popular guy. I am thinking of  reading /sapapo/dp_sched table with some logic and use it before release.

Thanks again,

Subash Nanjangud