SNP Optimizer generates infinite number of planned orders

[Former Member]

Dear SNP Optimizer experts,

just now we had the sitation that the SNP Optimizer was the reason for a complete abend of our APO System. Sounds incredible? But it is unfortunately true. The situation was, that the optimizer didn't stop applying planned orders. After the planning run in the night we had 3 million of planned orders for one product and the optimizer was still going on. Reams of queue entries and critical disk space was the impact. The connected R/3 was affected by these millions of RFC's too.

The reason for this desaster was a master data error. Due to bad maintenance we had one ppm without resource consumption and without costs for production and storage.

The SAP support said it is a correct behaviour in this particular situation. No costs and resource consumption leads to infinite production.

But i'm thinking it is a counterproductive behaviour from the technical side and from the business side too. I'm curious about our opinion.

Kind regards

Christian

[srinivas_krishnamoorthy · Accepted solution]

One possible cause of error other than missing reosurce consumption data could be max lotsizes.

Remove entries for Maximum Lotsize in your Location Products under optimizer scope. Remove Max lot size from PPM/PDS as well. Just keep min lot sizes and rounding profiles. THere must be a small entry somewhere in max lotsize causing this phenomenon. Please let us know if this works. (Try using apo tables to quickly identify where max lot sizes are populated)

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Srinivas,

thanks for your reply. I tryed it out for that product without Max lot size. Now the optimizer applieded 2 orders for each bucket (day) with size 99.999.999. OK, this avoids the big number of orders but i don't really understand the sense of this behaviour. Is it really correct to apply orders without demand? I can't imagine any business case which needs it working this way. We use Max lot size because they are the typical shift size for production.

I only want to avoid a system crash due to bad master data. Any suggestions to disable this great feature?

Christian

[srinivas_krishnamoorthy · Accepted solution]

Not sure I understand your comment on applying orders without demand. The idea behind removing the maximum lot size is to be able to have no limit in terms of order size that could even span shift sizes for production. Max Lot size only makes sense probably if there is some contractual restriction or transportation size restriction or rare production restrictions due to tooling capacity issues. Moreover this setting of max lot size should only have the effect of slowing down the calculations, but not actually crashing the server.

In SNP Global Settings, I would recommend that you play with the settings for optimizer namely "Opt:Lot Formation" and "Opt: Package Size". The latter can probably made a smaller number.(defualt probably is 500)

[Former Member]

i'm certainly curious about <u>your</u> opinion