Capacity planning in shipping

[Former Member]

I have a requirement from our business to get capacity planning in our shipping process. They want that apart from material availability the system should also check agains labor capacity at our warehouse/shipping point during creation of sales order. Lets say that we have a capacity of 64 man/women hours per day in our warehouse. During creation of sales order the capacity should be reduced and when all capacity for a day is booked the system should confirm delivery on the nearest day there is is available capacity.

I have been searching but so far I havent found anything useful. I did for example find the following SCN thread regarding some fields I've been looking at but it doesnt solve the requirement I have received.

In the F1 help for field Proc. time (MARC-VBEAZ) there is a text saying:

Use

The shipping processing time is used for capacity planning in shipping.

I have however not been able to find any details about "capacity planning in shipping".

Does anyone have experience about capacity planning in shipping that can guide me to more information? Or perhaps have own experience from working with it?

[Former Member]

Rickard,

...They want that apart from material availability the system should also check agains labor capacity at our warehouse/shipping point during creation of sales order....

I am not aware of any standard functionality in ECC that will meet this requirement.  In general, ECC availability checking does very little in the area of checking for available capacity and then scheduling accordingly.  Capacity problems in ECC are typically solved through a combination of capacity leveling, and capacity availability checking.  The typical Capacity availability check in ECC is a 'go-no-go' decision.  'Nearest available capacity' is not normally calculated during any standard ATP check in ECC.

APO has functionality within GATP in which sales requirements can be scheduled and confirmed based upon available remaining capacity.  I assume this functionality could be applied to 'shipping capacity', although I have never actually tried this myself.

For more information about Capacity Planning within Shipping within ECC, look through SAP help.  Maybe start at

Reports for Transportation Planning - Transportation (LE-TRA) - SAP Library

Best Regards,

DB49