Supply Chain Management with APO

300 15 Detailed Production Planning
15.1.4 Real Quantity
From SAP APO 4.0 on the planning mode in the product master determines
whether the requested or the confirmed quantity is used for pegging
and for production planning. Differing from SAP APO 3.1 it is therefore
not possible anymore to use the confirmed quantity for pegging and the
requested quantity for production planning.
There are different ideas about the significance of the ATP check for the
planning from company to company. While many companies want the
ATP check to limit the demand signal for production, other companies
think that the ATP check promises to the customer the least he can get and
therefore still want to meet the requested quantity, even when the customer
order is already confirmed with less. So therefore they want to plan for the
complete requested quantity. From SAP APO 4.0 on it is possible to
choose between these two options on locationproduct level.
15.2 Heuristics for Production Planning
15.2.1 Concept of Production Planning and MRP Heuristic
The production planning in SAP APO uses two heuristics – one is controlling
the production planning – i.e. the planned order creation – per
pegging area. A pegging area is a planning segment of a location product,
i.e. there can be more than one planning segments per location product.
The second heuristic is a MRP heuristic that controls the sequence and the
way the production planning heuristic is called.
• Overview of Production Planning Settings
The behaviour of the production planning run is controlled by the settings
for the MRP heuristic, the production planning heuristic and the planning
procedure. Figure 15.2 provides an overview of the settings in the heuristics,
the product master and the global settings.
The planning heuristic is either defined in the MRP heuristic or taken
from the product master. The default setting for the product master is
defined in the global settings with the transaction /SAPAPO/RRPCUST1.
Especially for the area of production planning there are very detailed
consulting notes available which are listed in collective note 441102. The
following chapter is basically a summary and visualisation of the information
in those notes. For more detailed information we recommend to read
the mentioned notes.