Limits of PP/DS

[Former Member]

Dear all,

I need help on the size of the data that should be considered in PP/DS. The question is, upto how many resources PP/DS can manage with a normal, not an advanced, hardware configuration? In our project we need to determine which materials and workshops to consider in APO. Since I have no experience I do not have any idea. To me the less the number of resources the better it is. However, the customer is very demanding that they want to plan around 100 workcenters in PP/DS. Can you please comment if PP/DS can manage it, and give examples from your previous projects for the number of resources planned in PP/DS?

Thanks in advance,

<b><i>Ergul</i></b>

[somnath_manna · Accepted solution]

Hi Ergul,

I hope when you mention 100 workcenters they are across multiple production locations (plants). Typically there is no specified limit on the number of materials and resources relevant for planning in PPDS. But then each resource capacity (and variants of it) are saved in liveCache. As a result as the number of materials and resources increase so does the liveCache memory consumption.

But rather than hardware and software constraints - it is business process which should determine the number of materials and resources to be planned in APO - PPDS. You use PP Production Planning of your finished materials as well as the major assemblies and potentially long lead-time or high valued components (you don't ant to carry high inventory thereby blocking more working capital). On the other hand DS Detailed Scheduling is used to sequence orders from different products on your capacity constrained i.e. bottleneck resources. So if you have a workcenter which is never capacity constrained or bottleneck - you need not plan and schedule on it in APO and so not even transfer to APO. In any case during execution it would be considered in SAP ERP from the routing/recipe of the production/process order.

In a past project of mine there are definitely more than 100 resources planned in PPDS but spread across 10-15 plants. Also please note scheduling is a pretty decision-intensive task and I am not sure if a master scheduler can effectively manage more than 20 odd workcenters.

Hope this gives you some idea.

Thanks,

Somnath

[Former Member]

Hi Ergul

In addition to what Somnath said...

I have seen more than 100 resources in previous proj. BTW, the SCM5 IDES for eg comes with a lot more resources than that

If you like lesser resources but your client wants more.... check out the option of capacity planning using SNP for the resources in the mid term and use Detailed Scheduling in critical resources in the Long term

you can also look at SNP Aggregated planning using (aggregated ) resouces.

and you can have an aggregated resource that will represent a few resources under it...

[Former Member]

Hi

As of now there is no limitation for the number of resource in PPDS as an application area in APO.

The onlything you need to take care is the Planning of resources which is involved at a time , this is the reason SAP had introduced the concept of workarea ,thro which you can restrict the resources,product etc to plan in a time thro interactive planning.

Grouping certain amount of resources to one planner will make sense in this case.

& Set Work area= Propogation range (propogation range is like a authorization element which allows the object to be changed)Refer the online document for more details.

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_scm41/helpdata/en/2d/765839a5688b20e10000000a11402f/content.htm

But in MRP Run you can add all objects & can schedule it in the background,the performance is having a proportionate factor with the amount of data & dependent data handling in the livecache.

I hope this helps you little more!

Kind regards,

sundar