Demand Planning (DP)
SAP Demand Planning is a powerful, flexible tool for supporting demand planning and forecasting at your company. Customer-specific planning layouts and interactive planning books let you map your processes and integrate employees from other departments and even from other companies in the forecasting process. Forecasts can be generated based on static, causal analysis, or hybrid methods.
Demand planning offers you a collection of statistical forecasting methods, together with an option to use your own custom macros for planning. Marketing information, in the form of campaigns, helps to improve forecasts. Life cycle planning supports the phase-in and phase-out of products and uses the historical values of previous products to generate the system-supported forecast.
Supply Network Planning (SNP)
SAP Supply Network Planning uses highly sophisticated optimization methods to plan a product flow along the supply chain. Starting with the demand plan and existing sales orders, requirements within the entire network (from production plants and suppliers to distribution centers and customers) are calculated, using heuristic and mathematical optimization methods, and then covered by appropriate proposals for procurement and stock transfers.
The deployment function lets you generate optimized distribution plans for delivering or distributing inventories to customers or distribution centers, based on capacities and defined rules. The TLB (Transport Load Builder) function helps you optimize transport load building taking account of the available transport capacities.
Production Planning/Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS)
SAP Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) is the module for detailed production and external procurement planning, including resource scheduling and sequence planning. PP/DS helps you create and optimize production and sequence plans, while at the same time minimizing your production costs. Multilevel and cross-plant checks of orders let you generate a feasible production plan, either interactively or in the background, with checks of both capacity and component availability depending on the requirement. The system supports your planning by displaying alerts, enabling your planners to concentrate on deviations and outliers. Industry-specific requirements such as block planning, campaign planning, shelf-life planning, and rapid planning matrix are also supported.
Global Available To Promise (gATP)
SAP global Available To Promise (gATP) lets you make reliable statements about delivery dates and quantities during the creation of sales and production orders. The global ATP check is initiated during sales order entry in the ECC system and provides information about availability in real time. The ATP check is also possible for the components within production planning. Delivery dates can be calculated using complex check algorithms and a combination of different check methods, including rule-based ATP check, product allocation, and substitution of products or sources of supply. In addition, when integrated with production planning, new production orders can be triggered when enough components and capacity are available. Even cross-system checks across multiple ECC systems are possible. The gATP module is integrated with the other APO modules (DP, SNP, PP/DS).
