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SAP® ECC
New
Available Capacity
Understand and locate where available capacity is maintained
12 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CR01; CR02; CR03
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, I'm Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's capacity availability capability. When used correctly, capacity availability check provides real-time visibility of an organization's production work centers or resources and their availability, therefore enabling more informed planning decisions and the opportunity to optimize utilization. So Eacliffe, tell us more about capacity evaluation. Sure Martin. Capacity availability check is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to show you three things to focus on. How to maintain capacity for your capacity category. Recognize that available capacity can be maintained for different capacity categories. And finally, we will validate the results using capacity load transactions in daily, weekly, and monthly time buckets. Here we are in the capacity plan transaction CM01. To aid with defining available capacity for work centers and resources, regardless of which solution we're using via PPE, Repetitive or PPPI, the concept is the same. The goal is to reflect the correct amount of available capacity regardless of the time horizon we are looking at. So that could be looking at it in terms of daily, weekly, monthly, or even at a shift level. So let's take a look at the standard overview and we can see by default we are looking at capacity in weekly buckets. And our focus on this here is on this column here, available capacity. So for each week, how many hours of available capacity do we have and we can see that it's 40 hours per week. Where you see that 32 hours per week means it's a 4 day work week rather than a 5 day work week. So how is this information coming here? I'm going to switch over to the change mode of the work center. So that would be transaction CR02. So we can see that this is transaction CR02 and we specify the work center that we want to maintain their available capacity and click here on the capacity icon. Note, if we are working on a resource we would be going through transaction code CRC2, change mode for that resource. Basically given the premise that the work center or the resource already exists, the goal was just to maintain or update that available capacity. So here we can see we have two different capacity categories, 001 and 002. Where zero zero one represents machine capacity and zero zero two represents labor capacity. In terms of available capacity, we would maintain it, basically, hey, how much capacity do we have from a machine perspective? And then how much capacity do we have from a labor perspective? So let's take a look at the machine capacity, I'm going to double click on the 001 which brings me to the screen and just go to some key fields for defining available capacity. The first field I'm going to call out is this field here called pooled capacity. Just be aware that we can define available capacity from a pool perspective. We have a separate, video for this. If you think there is a need for this please keep an eye out for that video. The next field is the factory calendar. There's two ways the system, uses factory calendars. One is what you see here, where we said, look, we are going to create a calendar, that calendar is specific to how the operations run. You know, they could be like a 5 day work week, 7 day work week. We take holidays into consideration or we don't take holidays into consideration. So that's the type of information we would define in the factory calendar, and that's what we have reflected here. The alternative is there is a calendar associated with the plant, this plant being 1000. And if the belief is that the calendar that's associated with the plant is good enough we could have left this field blank and the system would then use the factory calendar that's associated with the plant. So be aware that this is not a mandatory field rather it's an optional field and if it's left blank, the information is then derived from the factory calendar assigned to the plant. The next field is active version. The question is for this work center, which version of data do we want to maintain? And what I mean by that is let's do the dropdown and we can see by default which version of data do we want to work with, is it normal, minimum, or maximum available capacity? Okay. So in this case we are going to work with normal. But if by chance we say, look, we want to alter the information in terms of available capacity and we want to reflect, let's say, maximum, where maximum is we are running a 3 shift operation, 7 days a week. Yes, we can come and modify this information and says that look, this information represents a maximum available capacity rather than normal available capacity. Okay, now come to the next field with the base unit measure in terms of the time that we are maintaining. So when we look at CM01, let's come back here briefly, what we will see is we can see that the timing it is H which is, look, when we present the information, please present it in hours and that's what, we are referencing on the other screen here. So this could be any time unit, it could be minutes, seconds. But again, when looking capacity, especially looking at it in weekly buckets and monthly buckets it's much easier to interpret when working with hours rather than minutes or seconds. But at the end of the day what is your business requirement? And that's what you would reflect here. And then finally, coming down in this last section here, what are the standard values of available capacity? In this particular case we're seeing based the available capacity, using a start time of 8 o'clock in the morning. We finish the line is shut down at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and by the way there's a one hour break. So the total duration here is 9 hours but because of the 1 hour break, It says the operating time for that piece equipment is 8 hours. Okay. In terms of capacity utilization I reflected a 100%. We recommend that you use a 100% but you don't have to. By using 100% it says, look, my operating time is 8 hours, and by the way, it means that I have 8 hours of available capacity. It's not uncommon for some folks to say, look, we know production lines are not perfect and because it's not perfect I don't want to reflect a utilization of 100%. We would recommend that you reflect that in the production rate rather than here in the capacity utilization. But again, it comes down to, what is your business requirement? And recognize that if I came here and I am going to put 90 and hit enter you could see the number of hours per day has dropped from, 8 hours a day to 7.2 hours a day. Again, you could definitely work with this but it does make it a little more difficult to sometimes interpret the information you're looking at, and for that reason we strongly suggest that you keep this at a hundred percent and that then says, look, my capacity is 8 hours a day and then like the production rate says, hey of this 8 hours I need maybe 16 hours or 4 hours. And then of course we have H here to again show that the information we're looking at is being looked at in terms of hours. This could also be minutes, seconds, what works best for you but again we recommend hours. Finally a screen I want to take you guys to is the intervals and shifts and basically want to show that the information from the previous screen was then brought over to this particular screen where we could see that we are looking with version one, which is a normal available capacity. We can now see additional information where it says, look from now to the end of time we are working with start times. You can see the start times is reflecting in the 8 hours. The end times the default is 5 with a length break of 1 hour. The utilization is a 100% and in this case the number of individual capacity is 1. Let me just talk a little bit about this number of individual capacity where if this work center had represented 2 machines then ideally the number of individual capacities would be 2, to show that by defining it 2 the number of available capacity per day would then be 16 hours. In this particular case we are saying look, this work center represents an individual or single machine hence that's why we're using 1 capacity and that then says look, that machine is running only 8 hours a day. It's a good habit to come into the screen only because as you start maintaining things like a shutdown for example, or downtime for that particular work center, you would come in here, create a new entry and say, look, this start date to this end date, the work center is not running it's done for maintenance for example and we will then reflect that there is 0 capacity available during that maintenance time. Okay, so, that's it for this topic. I will say be aware that in terms of available capacity, required capacity, this information can be rolled up to a higher level. So at, at the beginning in the capacity evaluation, yes, we should be looking at it for a single work center, but if it makes sense to look at 5 work centers together for example, we can take this information and roll it up. We will demonstrate that in a feature video. So in summary, we have covered. How available capacity allows the business to define each work center available capacity. The business to define available capacity for different capacity categories, such as machine and labor capacity. And finally, how the business can validate the available capacity defined for each work center using the capacity load transaction in daily, weekly, and monthly time buckets. Thanks, Ecliffe. Using this feature provides information and tools needed to optimize production resources and improve operational efficiency. So for all of you out there that want to know more about how to get the most out of the SAP system, please check out our other videos and if you can find the video or the answer that you're looking for, please submit a suggestion.
SAP® ECC
New
Capacity Backlog
Utilize capacity evaluation to view and address order backlogs
5 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CM01; CM04; CR02; CR21; CR22
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, I'm Martin, and in this video specifically, we're going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's capacity backlog capability. When used correctly, capacity backlog provides a clear view of all the production orders and process orders, allowing organizations to better understand the production and equipment capacity utilization. So Eacliffe, tell us a little bit more about SAP's capacity backlog capability. Sure Martin. Capacity backlog is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on two things. How to retrieve capacity data for the work center experiencing the backlog. And, how to modify the capacity load transaction settings to identify when that backlog will get resolved. The intent here is to illustrate how to use transaction CM01, capacity planning, to identify when you will get out of a production backlog situation due to capacity constraints. So here we are on the initial screen of transaction CM01. Going to click on standard overview and we can see that the first three weeks is over capacity, significantly over capacity. So the question is how many weeks will it take to produce all this inventory using this current production rate? So we start by coming into planning, actually, you're going to go into settings, general, and we are going to click on this icon and do a green check. And we can see that all the weeks over capacity. Basically it's doing accumulation where it's adding up the available capacity so you could see the available capacity increasing as well as the required capacity. Comes up to 640, hours and that's the max. So let's take this and move it into the future by coming back to the settings general. I'm going to increase this to, let's say 180 days, I'm going to hit enter and now we can see that, the capacity situation, we are in a over capacity situation for several weeks before we finally get into the clear. Now, this is based on the current demand so of course this, most likely will not represent the worst case scenario because there's a high probability of added demand coming within this time horizon over these many weeks. So it's about 17 weeks, it will take the credits so this is the way we get to do a quick evaluation to say, hey, that existing demand, how quickly can we get out of the situation? It's at least 17 weeks. This is from a machine perspective and then of course what happens is if we come down to labor, yeah, there's definitely a lot of labor requirements. So the point is that we would also need to see what we can do from a labor perspective to address the production requirements. So, depending on your manufacturing circumstances you might be able to add labor to resolve the issue, great, otherwise you would've to say okay, what else do we need to do to resolve the situation or to resolve the backlog? So on that it's a wrap for how we perform a quick assessment of a capacity backlog situation. So in summary, we have covered. How capacity backlog allows us to retrieve capacity data for the work center that's experiencing that backlog. Plus, the business to modify capacity load transaction settings to identify when that backlog will get resolved. Wow, thanks Eacliffe. I can see how this will be super helpful for planners and schedulers, making informed decisions, optimizing production lines, and managing customer expectations. So if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system, please check out our other videos and if you can't find a video or need an answer to a question that doesn't exist please submit a suggestion.
SAP® ECC
New
Capacity General Settings
Navigate through the most commonly used general settings
9 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CR02
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in the SAP system. Hi, I'm Martin and in this video we're going to discuss an overview of the business rules needed to help us set up our capacity evaluation settings within SAP. When utilized properly these settings and these business rules benefit the organization by providing a comprehensive view of production capacity, which enables more accurate planning of production processes and helps avoid overloading and underutilization of capacity. So Eacliffe how about you tell us a little bit more about these general business rules that we need to apply? Sure Martin. Capacity general setting is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. The different fields that influences both required and available capacity. Educate on how to apply the settings to the different capacity category. And educate on screen required maintenance for capacity evaluation to work properly. The intent here is to review and demonstrate some of the key settings in the general settings of transaction CM01 capacity planning transaction. These settings can be applied from either the selection screen, which is where we are sitting at right now, or within the transaction which you'll see later on. So let's go to the menu, get the settings, click in general and what we are going to do is start with the first option under general which is a cumulative over period. So I'm going to select that, the other thing I'm going to do is to show that I'm going to change it to minutes so that you can see the information in minutes rather than in hours. Screen checked. I'm going to bring up the information here and what you can see here is the available capacity is now displayed in minutes. Okay, as well as the required capacity. The other thing I want you to see is that you can see that the available capacity is cumulative, in other words it's increasing over time. Likewise, with the required capacity, there is one business scenario which is basically trying to clear backlog. So if you have a backlog of orders for example and you want to determine how soon you can clear that backlog. In other words, you have insufficient capacity, let's say in the first three weeks by taking this approach you will see that basically have an idea of when that backlog can be cleared. So let's go back into settings, I'm going to come here, go back into general, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to no longer do cumulative, I'm going to do what we typically do and I'm going to say derive the unit of measure from our master data or orders rather than using the min. Provided the min is not what on the documents. So green check, you could see that it switched over to hours, you could now see it's no longer cumulative, rather we are seeing the hours, we have 40 hours per week and here we can see the capacity requirements in hours for each week. Okay, so let's go back and look at other options within this pop-up. Again, settings general, I'm going to leave this on in this section here, the default is G, which is number of calendar days and you could basically say, start from the current date, that's what you have with a 0 and in this case up to 60 days into the future. You can change this to 90 days, for example and if I do a green check this did extend. We are going to come back here, do general, we are going to see is that it went from April to May when I changed it from 60 days to 90 days. The point is that you can work in daily buckets, there's a whole slew of options here in terms of do I work in calendar days, factory days, posting periods and so forth. It's typically easier just to work in days, but if there is some requirement where you need to use some alternative, like maybe you want to do it in monthly that's an option. Okay, so moving on one option, which is used a lot is in this section here, the period. So with the profile I'm using it defaults in to weeks you could easily look at it in terms of months. So by coming back here now you can see the information is presented in monthly buckets and this is especially true if you want to look at things like one year into the future, two years into the future. So if you maintain demand that far into the future, you can do a quick capacity analysis and monthly buckets to see, huh, do I need to make some key decisions now in terms of outsourcing to another plant or outsourcing to a vendor, et cetera. The point is you can really have vision not here as well as in long-term planning so long-term planning is other functionality the point is that regardless of which side of the fence you're working on you would use the same approach in terms of looking at the general setting. Okay moving on I'm going to come and look at the hierarchy. So there is the option to work with what we call a planning hierarchy. Typically I don't maintain things like available capacity and the planning hierarchy and if you don't the thing is you want the information from multiple members or multiple work centers to roll up to the superior work center for evaluation. So this is definitely another key field that you would use I know I do have a hierarchy out there let's take a quick look here and if I do this, let's see what happens. Okay, we're still looking at the work center. So here with an S this is the superior work center and the point is by maintaining that hierarchy it did pull in the superior work center and as a result of that, it then took information from the previous work centers CHEM_PK1, CHEM_PK2 and is now displaying it but a different capacity category, if I came down to 2 you can see there's information there. Okay and with that let's go back and see what are the options, e do have this option of distributing the capacity information so if the information spans over, let's say multiple days you would display the information in daily buckets for example you could use a formula on the work center to do the disaggregation. So it says, hey put so much capacity on the final day, the day before, basically do backwards scheduling, so that option is available. Otherwise, it would just pick up the distribution from the profile and that would be maintained down here. So if he came down here, you can see for the different capacity categories, so 001, you'll use SAP060 if you had a different rule, that different rule is sitting on the work center it would employ that otherwise this is how you would alter the distribution of capacity inform. Okay and then finally you have this here where in the intervals and shifts you can maintain three different type of available capacity, you can see what is normal capacity versus what's minimum capacity versus what's maximum capacity. So normal might be, let's say two shifts, minimum is one shift, maximum is three shifts. So you can do by picking one of these, the default is one and the point is that this information here at available capacity is based on the normal, and you can also see which profile is used to do this evaluation? Okay, so that's it for this illustration of how to use the general settings in CM01 to alter how this transaction behaves. So in summary we have covered. How capacity general setting allows the business to define settings required for required and available capacity. The users to apply the correct settings for the different capacity categories. And the users to maintain the work center type and screens required for capacity evaluation to work properly. Thanks Eacliffe. Using this feature allows a centralized real-time view of production capacity to quickly identify potential bottlenecks and take appropriate action to avoid disruptions. So if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system please check out our other videos and if you can find a video looking for please submit a suggestion.
SAP® ECC
New
Capacity Overloads
Effortlessly view and manage capacity overloads in work centers
9 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CM01; CM05
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video series that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's capacity overload reports. When used correctly, capacity overloads can help organizations better utilize their resources such as machine and labor, and detect when the capacity requirement exceed the available capacity. Eacliffe, how about you tell us a little bit more about capacity overloads? Sure Martin. Capacity overload is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on four things. Distinguish capacity overload from capacity backlog. How to perform capacity valuation using capacity load and capacity load transaction. Distinguish the difference between capacity load and capacity overload. And why you may not want to just use capacity overload transaction. The intent here is to discuss working with capacity planning to identify where capacity overload is taking place within your manufacturing plant. Typically capacity or throughput analysis is done based on mission capacity. Basically how much output can we process, so generate in a 24 hour day for example. Then the next step is to determine is there sufficient labor for the amount of production that's assigned or scheduled for that production asset? So let's go into transaction code CM01 and I'm going to bring up work centers that's starts with CH in plant 1000. So let's go into the standard overview and in a weekly bucket, before we get into the details here let's first take a look at things in the monthly bucket. So I'm switching over to a monthly view and we could see for this work center CHEM_WK1, both machine capacity category 001, we have sufficient capacity in the month of February and also from a labor perspective, we also have sufficient capacity. So let's go back into the weekly view because we did see some red. Every time we have a red row it means we are overloaded for that particular week. So first year we are looking for week 7 and right now there's 0 capacity available in week 7. So the point is that we need to take just 10.66 hours and move it into the future. We know that the sufficient capacity, because from a monthly perspective it told us look for the month of February, we can cover these capacity requirements, hence we can move this into the future. However, when we just look at this from a label perspective 002, what we are seeing is, again there's 0 capacity available for week 7. Okay, so 14 hours we need to move into the future, and even though we could move, if I come to week eight I more than have ample capacity from a machine perspective, but from a labor, I'm already over the amount of labor I have available for week 8. So this is where we have a conversation with operations to determine, hey can we address this issue here by adding more labor, and typically based on how that conversation goes, it dictates whether or not we add additional labor here, or do we need to reduce the amount of available capacity so that when we do schedule production, we are not having so many issues from a labor perspective and of course you can see which orders to move. We can take from a machine perspective, you could drill down, see all the orders, which is contributing from a, from a machine perspective. So let me arrow back, you know, and if I came down to, from a labor perspective and drill down, we will see the same orders. Each one of these orders, you can get to them from, either from a labor perspective or from a machine perspective. Make the change, so I can take this for example, come into the plan order, and I can change the timing of this. So let me come here, I'm going to drill down and I can say, look I'm going to move it to like week 24, I'm going to reschedule this. I got a warning, okay it calculates the new timing. I can click save and what you can then observe when I do a refresh this one line item is going to move and by moving into the new timing it also takes the required capacity, both from a labor and machine perspective. So refresh and the line did decrease. I can then come back here, I can do a refresh and we should see these numbers up here adjust. The point is it already adjusted. So that's one way of addressing capacity overloads. What I'm going to do is take you into another transaction, this is CM05. The selection screen looks exactly the same, and the options are also the same. So what's the difference between the two, CM01 versus CM05? The difference is that, let me go in here, CM05 only brings up those weeks or months that has over capacity. So yes, I can come settings general, you know, you can also look at it from a monthly perspective so we can see here from a monthly perspective it is highlighting some issues the issues based on what I had initially retrieved, so the work centers category one, category two, they disappeared. Why did it disappear? Because of the fact that when we looked at it from a monthly perspective there was sufficient capacity. So the information we are seeing here is only based on remaining work centers in the facility that has a bottleneck or capacity overload. If I come back and I switch back to weekly bucket, then the initial work centers that we were working with will then come back. So you can see now this is the work center we are working with capacity category 001, week 7 versus 002, which is week 7, 8, 9, and 11, and week 10 is not here. So with week 10, we do have sufficient capacity but the fact is that with transaction CM05 it only focuses on the weeks and work centers that has capacity overload. We saw that when we went into the monthly bucket, this work center for this labor category, it did not have any issues, hence it was not presented as an issue. So you can really zero in on, hey, where do I truly have capacity issues, depending on if I'm working on daily, weekly, or monthly buckets. Okay, so that's the concept of capacity overload, doing analysis, identifying where the overloads are located within your facility. So in summary we have covered how capacity overload allows users to. Perform capacity evaluation using capacity load and capacity load transaction. Uses to understand the difference between capacity load and capacity overload transcation. And users to appreciate the value in using capacity load transaction. Thanks Eacliffe. Using this feature will provide the planner and schedule with greater visibility on when the capacity overload will happen and allow them to prevent it and therefore increase production efficiencies. So if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of the SAP system check out our other videos and if you can't find what you're looking for please submit a suggestion.
SAP® ECC
New
Checking Rule for Created Process Order
MAC tutorial around the component checking rule for a created process order
7 min
Production Scheduler
Production Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP
COR1; COR2; COOHVPI
Hey folks, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Martin here and as we know the best way to learn is by doing, so let's get going here. In this video, we want to identify how the system determines which checking rule to use for each component required to create a process order. As we migrate through the maturity of a manufacturing order from planned order, to create a process order, and finally to release process order. We typically want to apply different business rules into which inventory supply elements we want to include in our checking rule to be able to make sure that we know that in the process order or production order for the scheduled and production timing. So once again, Eacliffe you're the best guy I can think of to help explain this, take us away. Thanks Martin. This is a process that is automated in SAP with configuration. The key to getting the desired results is ensuring that the scope of check configuration aligns with the business rules regarding which inventory elements to consider. Too often, many clients do not use this functionality because they don't understand what the system is doing or it is configured incorrectly. By demystifying what the system is doing and having the correct configuration, this functionality improves scheduling, productivity, and eliminates guesswork. So let's look at how process order component availability check determines which checking rule to apply for each component needed. Do all components use the same checking rule? By default, the checking rule for each component is based on the material master setting for each one of these components on the MRP3 view and the business process that is triggering the check. In this case, it is the process order and it creates status that is triggering this check. In this session, we're going to take a look at component availability check for a process order in create mode. So here's my process order, let's go into it and here you can see that looking at the system status, it is sitting in a create status, and we can also see that ATP was ran previously where it had missing parts. So the question is, do we still have missing parts or not? So we're going to come here, click on this icon to determine if there are any missing components, and this pop up is telling us that yes, we still have missing components. So let's go into this pop up and we can see that we have two components where they each have insufficient inventory. We need a quantity of 78.75 units of each and it is needed by the 19th of April versus the commitment date of 12/31/1999, indicating that we don't know when that supply is going to be made available. So what's being taken into consideration, at least for this first component? So we're going to select it, come in here, and what we can see is that for this item, the first component, again, we can see the requirements, how much is needed. and we see the date it's needed and the confirmed quantity is 0. So whether or not we see a confirmed quantity is dependent on things like what supply elements have been taken into consideration, as well as taking a look at a replenishment lead time, for example, again, depending on the settings. To see what settings is being employed, what we're going to do is take a look at this scope of check, and here we can see things like, in create mode we can say that, hey, take a look at safety stock and whether or not to take in transit, quality stock, and so forth. In this case, this check mark says do not take replenishment lead time into consideration, rather we want to look at more firm source of supply, things like a purchase order for example. If we were making it we know that it's a produced item, so, semi finished material, so in this case, we're not even taking process orders into consideration. So depending on what you are trying to accomplish, or what rules you employ to say whether or not you have a sufficient source of supply this is the area that you would take a look at to say hey if I'm doing this manually, which elements do I take into consideration? What inventory supply elements do I need to compensate for some of it? Looking at some demand, maybe demand for shipment to another plant, for example. So these are the things that we then reflect here in the scope of check. And then what happens is when you click on this icon here you can then see, hey, is there any inventories, like what receipts are we looking at? What sort of issues or goods issues that we can expect? And what's being confirmed in terms of if any of these demand elements were confirmed, we would see a quantity sitting here. Sometimes you want to see this because the fact that look, something may have reserved inventory and the point is you no longer wanted to reserve inventory. So again, this is just some of the insight you can gain by coming into this screen for that particular component to say, can I get inventory or not? Can I juggle things around so that I can run this specific process order? Hey, welcome back. In this demo, we showed. How to identify which checking rule was applied to each component in the process order with a create status. For a process order in this status, inventory elements are considered to say yes, no, or partial in terms of component availability to meet the demands of the process order. Checking each component for inventory availability should be the same as if you were making this decision manually. Wow, that's extensive Eacliffe, thank you so much. The last thing we want users to do is guess the results the system is providing. What's probably worse is duplicating work that the system should be doing for us. So as a manufacturing order goes through the different stages of planning a production run, going from planned order to created process order to finally to be a released process order, we typically want to apply different rules for the checking component of the availability of that component and the reliability of that availability. So folks, if you want to learn more about checking rules, ATP, and even just process orders, generally speaking, there's a whole bunch of other videos you can check out and of course if you have a burning question please submit it below.
SAP® ECC
New
Create Hierarchies
Aggregate capacity utilization effectively using hierarchies
10 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CM01; CR01; CR21
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's capacity hierarchy capability. When used correctly creating these hierarchies can really help organizations roll up their capacity requirements that will provide planners with greater visibility across their capacity constraints. Eacliffe, how about you tell us a little bit more about how to use this capacity hierarchy? Okay Martin. Create hierarchies is a powerful feature when used correctly, provides summarized capacity information for multiple work centers or you can use it to retrieve your subset of work center information or work centers themselves in various transactions. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. How to set up a superior work center needed for a work center hierarchy. How to set up a work center hierarchy itself. And how to use the work center hierarchy in capacity evaluation. Here we are in transaction CR02 work center change to review a superior work center, which I created to work with the work center hierarchy. The superior work center is a light version of any other work center required to define a works of hierarchy. So looking at the basic view what we can first notice is, yes, we have some of these fields maintained but observe the standard value key 000, the point is we don't need any standard values parameters. Okay, the other thing I'm going to call out is when we go to the capacity view, this is during the interview which I've maintained for this work center and all I'm really doing is identifying which capacity categories I want to report on using this work center, superior work center. So we have category 001 machine time, again no formula needed and when I go into the details, you could see there's no calendar, no start finish time because this information from a reporting perspective is going to come from somewhere else. So this observation can also be applied to capacity category 002 label, again I drill down and literally we don't really need all these settings is irrelevant, we don't need these settings. And then finally I have a third capacity category, so let me scroll down, page down and now I can see I created a pooled capacity category and also with this again, if you go into the details, there's nothing maintained. So now that we have this understanding, what I'm going to do is go into the work center hierarchy, create transaction, so this is transaction CR21 and what I want to do is identify the name of the hierarchy I'm going to create. So with the superior work center I basically use the same name but I put an S just so we can make the distinction of, am I looking at the superior work center versus am I looking at the hierarchy? Okay, and so I have the H to represent the hierarchy and I'm going to hit the hat, go to the header and then give it a description, so I'm going to use the name it's two packing lines that this hierarchy is going to represent, packing line 1, packing line 2. Okay, and I am now going to say, okay, let's do some work center assignment, so you maintain your parameters that will bring up the work centers of interest, I know with me I can use this as an example and here we will get a listing of all the work centers that began with the letters CHEM. Okay, so I'm interested in the superior work center and then packing lines 1 and 2, not the last one. So I'm going to come here, do a select all, I'm then going to deselect the one not of interest since this was the fastest way of getting what I wanted and before I save it it's a good idea to come and look at the graphics of this. So looking at the graphics, what you can see is we have the superior work center again the one ending in S and the goal is to take information from packing line 1 and pack line 2 accumulated together and presented against the superior work center and that's why I call this work center lite because all the details we need from a reporting perspective will come from these two work centers. Also, please be aware that the superior works and must sit on the top when you do this graphing. If it's not on top you need to fix that and make sure the superior is sitting on top. So I'm going to come here now, hit save and that's it. I have now defined this hierarchy, so what I'm going to do is return to transaction CM01. So let's do this /ncm01. Okay, which is capacity planning transaction and if I want to bring up information I'm going to get rid of that work center. I can now retrieve my reporting based on under work center hierarchy, so click on selection, work center, I'm going to come here and do it through this transaction, so you could see I have the hierarchy again it's the object name ending in H. So here we can see again there's the representation of the hierarchy where we have the superior work center and then the individual work centers. So with that said I can then green arrow back, we could see it listed here, these are the objects I'm going to retrieve the data for and then go click on standard overview. So here we have the superior sitting on top. Currently, everything is sitting at 0 in terms of requirements and available capacity that holds true for machine. Just to aid with visibility I'm going to present the data in monthly buckets, and by doing that I can now get more information presented all at once. So again, machine capacity, everything is 0 at the superior level, same thing with label. Let's go down one page, I am now looking at the pooled capacity again, this is also at 0. Now we get to the individual capacity and you can see packing line 1, there's 50 hours needed out of availability of 96 hours, and let's scroll down again, we could see the pool, the red means it's over capacity I need 225 hours I only have 192. And then for parking line 2, similar situation, there's also 50 hours required out of 96 and the pool issuing, it's also over capacity which makes sense because the pool is really sharing a labor force between packing line 1 and packing line 2. So what I'm going to do is do one more thing by going to settings general, and you can see my hierarchy, in this case it defaulted in. If it ain't default in you can find it with a dropdown and I'm going to say, look accumulate the requirements, capacity requirements, and also the available capacity, green check and you could now see again we had a superior resource and now we could see, remember we had 50 hours coming from parking line 1, 50 was coming from packing line 2, so that summation of that is 100. We had an available capacity of 96 on both machines so that also got reported here and we could see for the other months the available capacity in terms of labor, there was no labor defined that's why everything is 0 and. I am going to come here and scroll down slowly so we can validate this and then we could see that the pool, even though we said to accumulate the information, because this is a pool it did not accumulate because that logic has already been taken into consideration saying, look, you don't double up the requirements and you don't double up the available capacity. Okay, so this is how we go about defining a work center hierarchy, this is how the functionality works and this is how you can use it to retrieve work center information within the capacity planning transaction, for example. So in summary we have covered. How to create work center hierarchies, which allow users to create a superior work center which is needed to create a work center hierarchy. It allows the users to set up the work center hierarchy itself. And it allows users to perform capacity evaluation using the work center hierarchy. Thanks Eacliffe, a very underutilized feature for sure. However I can see how this feature can allow users to aggregate the data to better support their decision making. So once again, if you want to know more about this particular feature or other features in your SAP system please check out our other videos and of course if you don't find what you're looking for please submit a request.
SAP® ECC
New
Create Pooled Labor Capacity
Master the maintenance and assignment of pooled labor to work centers
9 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CR11; CR12
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's pooled labor capacity capability. When used correctly creating pooled labor capacity can help organizations more effectively manage and allocate production capacities and resources. Eacliffe tell us a little bit more about this pooled labor capability. For sure Martin. Pooled labor capacity is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things about pooled capacity. Define what pooled capacity is used for. How to create pooled capacity. How to assign pooled capacity to a work center. Here we are in the pooled capacity transaction, CR11, to provide a perspective of what pooled capacity is and how to apply it to work centers and resources. We use the same transaction regardless of which manufacturing solution is being used in SAP. The solution could be PP, repetitive or PPPI. Before maintaining data it's good to know what we're using the pooled capacity for. The typical business scenario is to reflect more than one work center or resources that share a common labor pool. I will illustrate the scenario with 2 work centers. So I'm already sitting in the initial screen of transaction CR11, I'm going to maintain a pooled capacity in the manufacturing plant 1000, the pooled capacity I'm giving it the name labor pool 1 and because it's a labor capacity we are going to use capacity category 002, where 002 is labeled. So I'm going to head enter and here we can give it a description, I'm going to cheat a little bit I already have predefined a description, packaging labor group 1. Again it's being done for labor capacity, I'm going to put this indicator on to indicate that it is pooled capacity that we are defining and then the factory calendar, I'm going to use the same factory calendar we use for the machine capacity which was in category 001. So this one is 01, something that I know ahead of time. Okay, and the other thing I'm going to change is, the machine capacity says that the line starts at 8, we expect the people to start working at 8, so I'm going to modify this 7 to an 8. Okay, so the labor force is going to start at 8 o'clock, they're going to finish at 5 o'clock, there's a 1 hour break. So when I hit enter, what we'll see is operating time is 8 hours and we are going to say the number of people that reside in this pool is 10 people. Okay, so my capacity is going to be 80 hours and the interpretation of this is 80 labor hours. I am going to turn off the relevant to finite scheduling since we are not doing any kind of finite scheduling on the labor force, rather we just want to do capacity evaluation. Then finally, like what we did with maintaining capacity for an individual work center, we are going to take a quick look at the interval and shift only because this is where we would come and maintain the labor force over time. So for example, if we know that starting 6 months from now the pool is going to go from 10 individuals down to let's say 5 individuals, we can reflect that change here so that when we do capacity evaluations 3 months out, 6 months out, 1 year out, we can pick up the correct labor capacity as part of our evaluation. Okay, so I'm going to click save here and now we have the labor pool. I'm going to copy this, so highlight it, control C, let's go into maintaining the work center, so transactions slash 0 for a new session, CR02. Okay, I'm going to bring up the first packing line, which is PK1, I'm going to go to the capacity tab, right now there's only 1 capacity category, so what I'm going to do is scroll down, click on create, I'm going to enter capacity category 002, and I'm going to do a control V here and then we should have formulas. This should be SAP007 for working with labor hours. Hit enter and you can see this information is now sitting here and this is how we now link the first work center to that pooled capacity, and I'm going to save. I'm going to go now to the second work center that shares that labor pool, so that's packing line 2. Again, I'm going to go to the capacity tab, there's no capacity category 002, so I'm going to scroll down, create a new capacity, maintain 002. Again, I'm going to maintain the labor pool and I'm going to maintain the formula for calculating labor hours. Okay, and with that I'm now going to hit save. So these two work centers, packing line 1 and packing line 2, when we create a plan order or production order that puts requirements in terms of labor hours against these work centers, the goal is to do an evaluation against a common labor pool. So let me illustrate that, at least from an available capacity perspective, so I came here what I'm going to do to bring up both my work centers, I'm going to use a wild card, so I'm going to get rid of the one, put an asterisk and click on standard overview. Okay just to provide better visibility I'm going to go to settings, general, let's look at it in monthly buckets and what we can now see is we have packing line 1, we have the capacity, available capacity in terms of machine hours. So January has 16 hours left versus when you come to capacity category 2 which is labor, we can see that because we said there's 10 people available under labor pool, you can see available capacity is down at 160. You can also see clearly called out that we are dealing with a pooled capacity situation here. So if I come down to the packing line 2, it has its own individual machine hours. Basically doing the same profile as packing line 1 but in this case, we can also see the 160, which is also coming from the pool and again this allows us to say, look, when I have labor requirements, that labor requirement, let me compare it to the pool of people rather than comparing it to available direct labor on that work center. So in summary we have covered how pooled capacity allow users to. Understand what pooled capacity is used for. It allows the users to correctly create a pooled capacity. And finally to allow users to correctly assign pooled capacity to work centers. Wow, once again thanks Eacliffe much appreciated. A powerful feature for sure. Something that I can really see benefit the planner in their job. Once again if you want to learn more about this feature and others please come back to our other videos in our catalog and of course if you don't see what you're looking for please feel free to submit a suggestion.
SAP® ECC
New
Drawing Insights From Capacity Evaluation
Explore SAP's Capacity Evaluation to uncover constraints and opportunities
7 min
Customer Service
Demand Planner
Production Planner
Production Scheduler
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PTM; DM; OTC
CM01; CM04; CM05
The best way to learn is by doing, so welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hello everyone, Martin here, and I'm thrilled to engage with you on some of the information insights that you can draw from capacity evaluation in SAP. This powerful area of SAP is often underutilized. So today, we'd like to show you some ways that it can be used to help with answering questions in your organization. To lead us through this walkthrough today is Tom, who has a ton of practical information and experience in this area. So, Tom, take us away and share a lot about capacity evaluation. Hey, Martin. Well, when we think of capacity evaluation, it's often around the challenge of either being over capacity or figuring out a run plan for a work center or resource that are not fully booked out. Both are good uses of this functionality. But today, I want to take it a little further and hopefully show something that is new to you. First, we'll go in and look at our work centers that have a current backlog that needs addressing. Next, I'll show you how to accumulate capacity and requirements to see what the planned recovery date or next bookable date for that work center looks like. And lastly, I'll extend the time horizon and change to monthly buckets for a longer term outlook. Let's go in and take a look. Now we're going to dive into SAP and look at capacity planning and how we can understand our current state of what's happening, and also future state of what's going to happen. We'll begin our journey today by looking at CM04. CM04 is going to show us any backlogged production that we have on a work center. So this list, if we come in here, I'm going to put in my work center, which is already limited in my plant. When I look at this work center in this plant and select the overview, it's going to pull up any backlog work that's on this work center for me to see. Now as I click deeper into this, just by double clicking in, I can see the requirements of what's out there that what my production is behind on. This allows me to focus on these orders first, knowing that we're behind in its tying up capacity that we did not plan for today because these are past due orders that have not been completed. So using this CM04 tool, we can understand where we're truly behind and what specifically the orders that we're behind on to get caught back up in production. Once we understand and know where we're behind and what's affecting past dues for capacity, we can now turn our attention to looking at a current state of capacity. For that, we'll go in and look at CM01. CM01, again, gives us the same sort criteria as we can look at a work center in a plant, or we can look at all work centers in a plant, just to know that is also an option. As we look at the standard overview for this one, we're going to see a much different picture. So instead of just showing us what we're past due on, it's going to show us current and future requirements as well. So as we can see here, clearly anything that's red shows that we're over capacity. That's a concern for the shop floor. We need to understand why we're over capacity and how we can overcome that situation. Whether that's going in and looking at the details again and understanding can I move any of these orders out to lighten the capacity load. Or do we need to work overtime to overcome those capacity requirements? The other thing I can do inside of CM01 is I can break it down into different buckets. Currently, we see we're looking at it in a weekly bucket. However, if I were just to go up to the general settings, I have the option in here to change the capacity into any buckets that I prefer. I can see right down here I have a selection of different periods. First we'll look at it in a daily bucket. If I look at it in a daily bucket, this allows me to understand on a daily basis how am I utilizing my capacity. It could be that I'm over capacity on Monday, but fine on Tuesday and Wednesday, which then I know I can smooth those requirements to the other days of the week. In this current example, we can see here we're over capacity on most days in the current periods, but I can go out and look and see, okay, what's the next day I can actually put orders in where my capacity is open again? And in this example, I can see out on 12/9, I have 88 percent of my capacity remaining. So again, I can possibly move orders out into these dates, or new orders can go in those dates because I have capacity. In the short term, if I can't move orders out, I'm going to need to work some significant overtime or possibly hire more employees. But this gives me a picture of when I can recover and when I can actually add new orders into my production. The other thing we'll look at now, as we look at longer term planning, we may want to look at this again in weekly buckets, which we already saw an example of, but if now I pull it up in monthly buckets, I can start to look out to the future to see, okay, how are my monthly buckets of capacity looking in the future? This allows me to have more of a long term planning picture of what's going on in my production environment. As I can see here I only have three months showing with loaded requirements. So when I go out to the third month, I've got plenty of capacity and I can add tons of orders and lots of production in that, and I'm getting a little tight in the month of December, but my current month is way over capacity and I need relief. But this allows me to have a picture as far out as I'm holding a forecast or customer orders, any requirements I can see in the system, I can evaluate how that looks on a long term basis. So when we look at capacity in SAP, we not only have the ability to look at past due requirements, current requirements, we can also look at it with future requirements to understand our capacity situation and what we have to do about it and what we have to do to resolve any issues. So I have to confess, today we only hit three features on my favorites list. There are more, but this is a good start. With the features we looked at today, we can start to draw some insight of capacity evaluation. Are we ahead, or are we behind? What is our current lead time to put more work on that work center or resource. And we can proactively identify challenges or opportunities as we look across the broader horizon. There's a lot here, and I hope you'll go back and see what you can find. Thank you, Tom. That's such good information, and it's really easy to navigate. But folks, the challenge is making sure that we have the right rules to give us the right information. If capacity evaluation isn't SAP's part of your process, there a number of other videos that you should explore. This is a great gateway between S&OP and S&OE. So folks, if you're looking to maximize the value in your SAP system, please check out our chatbot that will share with you what recommendations can provide, specifically on capacity evaluation as an example. Or if you have a specific question, please submit it below.
SAP® ECC
New
Leadtime Scheduling
Learn how to trigger lead time scheduling and harness its full planning potential
7 min
Production Planner
Production Scheduler
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PTM
MD01; MD02; MD03; CM01; CM25; MD01N
Martin: Hey folks, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. So the best way to learn is by doing so, let's just get straight into this. This video in particular, we're going to be focused on using SAP's production planning lead time scheduling to generate machine and or labor capacity requirements to produce the required inventory. So I'd imagine I'd be preaching to the choir if I rattled off some statistics around related to being able to provide a quality promise to your customer. Making and keeping that reliable promise to a customer in many areas is a right to play and in others just purely a competitive differentiator. This of course, strengthens the integration between ATP, order fulfillment, procurement, and of course even product costing. So that's a lot. So how about we get into it and of course, tell us more about this Eacliffe, love to hear more about scheduling. Eacliffe: Thanks Martin. This topic allows production planners to aggregate capacity data to perform a relatively quick evaluation of manufacturing assets, for the short, medium, and long-term time horizon to make key decisions in honoring the commitments to providing manufactured materials in a timely manner. Production planning often occurs outside of SAP, given the existing solution needs to be fixed or takes too much effort in SAP. Unfortunately, this approach does not work well when integrating with other supply chain activities such as exception monitoring, purchasing, and finance, just to name a few. Why, of course, you should be able to promise against what you have. Why would you not be able to do that? If you are in this situation, don't worry, we are going to walk through what you need to be doing about it. Let's get into SAP. Let's explore how lead time scheduling works and let's understand its impact.What I've done is I've taken this material, put some demand in SAP or MRP as generated plan requirements. And when I ran MRP, I did not tell it to generate or use lead time scheduling. The results of that is when I double click on the plan order, I come into change mode, we can see that there are only three tabs, the header assignment, and master data. When I come to the master data tab, we can see that there is nothing related to the routing or master recipe. So that's issue number one. Okay the way this shows up in capacity evaluation is when I come over to the capacity evaluation transaction, the expectation is in this particular demonstration, we would expect requirements against this particular resource. So let me click on standard overview, and right now what we see is just 0 requirements. So even though we have planned orders out there over this time horizon the system is saying, look, don't need any capacity on the resource at this time. So I'm going to go back into the stock requirement list, and I'm going to rerun MRP using lead time scheduling functionality. So, the parameter of interest is this one down here, the scheduling parameter. When I do the drop down, there are two options. One is which is what I used before , is basically just give me timing. Based on other criteria I just need basic dates, but don't really give me capacity information versus option two. Option two says not only calculate the dates, the start and finish dates, but also tell me how much capacity I need to fulfill each of the planned orders for this material. So let’s select 2, I’m going to hit enter, enter to run MRP, come back over here, I'm going to do a refresh and now I'm going to take a look at the planned order. Let's come to this plan order, come in to change mode. What we can see is first, that there are now four tabs rather than three. But let's go to the master data tab and we can see that there's additional data now on the master data tab where the master recipe got pulled in. So this master recipe is now providing the production rate in terms of, hey, this is how many units we can produce over a certain duration of time. And then if I come to the scheduling tab we get the exact information in terms of basically what we will see is, let me scroll over or make this smaller so that we can see that basically 30 hours of time is needed. So 30.32 hours is needed to fulfill this particular, planned order. So when we convert it into a process order, that's how much time we would expect. And of course, when I come back to capacity evaluation, I'm going to do a refresh over here, and now we can see that we also have capacity information sitting over on this side. Okay, so you could see the impact of doing lead time scheduling and the fact that if the desire is to do things like work on the scheduling board, do capacity evaluation, we want to run MRP in lead time scheduling, regardless of if it's being done in background mode every night or it's being done online one material at a time. Hey, welcome back. In this demo, we have covered a few things. First, how to quickly perform capacity evaluation when performing lead time scheduling. Secondly, how to trigger lead time scheduling. And thirdly, the information required to perform lead time scheduling and strategic integration points. Martin: Eacliffe, thank you so much. Much appreciated. That's a lot of detail. So lead time scheduling allows for lengthening the runway on identified bottleneck challenges, and improving your supply chain integration. This is a topic often isolated in a spreadsheet that is poorly integrated with the remainder of the supply chain information in SAP due to data inconsistencies, et cetera. It's also going to be a journey to get us there. We have got to go from basics and kind of grow into maturity. But there's no question that this is a hot topic and can make a big difference in how we apply this to our supply chain. So folks, if you want to know more about this topic and other scheduling related issues related to SAP, please check out our other videos. And of course, if you have a particular question, feel free to raise it below.
SAP® ECC
New
Maintain Multiple Capacities
Learn how to effectively maintain multiple capacities
5 min
Production Planner
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PP; PTM
CR01; CR02
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's multiple capacities capability. When used correctly maintaining multiple capacities can help organizations manage the capacity utilization of multiple resources such as equipment or personnel in a much more effective and efficient manner. Tell us how to make the most out of SAP's multiple capacities capability Eacliffe. Sure Martin. Maintaining multiple capacities is a powerful feature when used correctly, it'll allow us to look at different type of capacities for a single work center. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on two things. How to assign and maintain different capacity categories for a single work center. And how to evaluate capacity for these different capacity categories. The intent here is to discuss working with multiple capacities for a work center. Let's look at an example of what I'm referring to by looking at the capacity planning transaction CM01. So here I have this single work center. We are going to take a look at the standard overview. Just aid with visibility I will change my settings to look at things in a monthly bucket and so here we can see that for this single work center, I have this capacity category of 001 machine and I have a second capacity category ZLB which is a pool labor group. So the point is, it is possible to define different categories of capacity for a single work center. What I'm going to do now is jump into the change transactions for work center and add an additional capacity category. So I have this session queued up here is the work center we are going to modify, we are going to go to the capacities tab and here this is where the existing capacity categories are defined and the goal is to add a third capacity category. So scroll down, got these icons, click under create capacity icon, and here I'm going to create one for labor. So the existing labor capacity we have, ZLB, this is for a pool capacity which is covered in a separate, session, but the point is that the labor force here is shared among more than one work center versus 002, this is direct labor, in other words any labor that's maintained in the routing is dedicated to this particular work center. So I'm going to use 002 maintain the formula for calculating the capacitor requirements. You have to come in here, do some added maintenance, and that maintenance can be, using a calendar. If you don't do the calendar then it picks it off the plant. I am going to change this to, starting at 8:00AM so when I hit enter it comes down to eight hours per day and this is a default I'm going to work with for now. I'm going to save this. We have now defined an additional capacity category. So with that, coming back to the capacity evaluation, let's see if we could do a simple refresh, and by simply doing a refresh, this third line showed up down here. So let's scroll down and confirm that new capacity category of 002 is now included and if there were any orders that had that capacity category, which it wouldn't have at first, because the point is we first have to maintain the master data, then we have to maintain the routings and then the third step was that when we then create plan orders, production orders, it would pick up this additional capacity category and it would populate this column, the requirements. Okay, so this is how we go about defining multiple capacities for a single work center. So in summary we have covered how to. Maintain multiple capacities, which allows us to assign and maintain different capacity categories for a single work center. And how to evaluate capacity for the different capacity categories. Thanks Eacliffe. I can see how this feature will help us optimize resources and increase our overall productivity while reducing waste and downtime. If you want to learn more about this and other topics in your SAP system please feel free to check out our video catalog and if you have a specific question feel free to log it below.
SAP S/4HANA®
New
Right Place, Right Time: Aligning Material With Pace of Production
For material not expected to be fully available at production start
4 min
Materials Manager
Production Planner
Production Scheduler
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PTM
MD04; CS02; MD02
Hey there, fellow supply chain superstars. We love getting questions from you. It helps us drive prioritization of our content, and today is one such video. Do you ever find that you're having trouble planning materials for the pace of production? Do you have particular materials that need to be delivered throughout the production run versus being a hundred percent available and in stock at the beginning of the production run? Well, we want your exceptions to mean something, and we don't want you to have to break down your delivery schedule manually. So who better to ask about this particular topic than Nicole? Nicole, this is an area that you are very familiar with. Why don't you share some more details on it? Hi Martin. This is such a great question. Anything we can do to make a planner or buyer's job easier, I'm in. SAP offers several tools that can help us refine the timing of requirements, and one such tool is called the distribution key. This is targeted for our longer runs of production where we may need to receive several deliveries of particular materials to properly feed manufacturing. Once this rule is in place, MRP understands what we're trying to do, and it splits the dependent requirement for that planned order. This then gives us a proper requirements date to align our deliveries to. It also helps us to get a more and meaningful material availability check based on our plan for replenishment. Let's get into SAP and take a look. Today we're going to talk about how we can use a distribution key within the bill of material in order to evenly spread a dependent requirement out over a period of time. As you can see in this example, I have a component and my stock requirements list is indicating that I need 20 million pieces of this component available on 04/10 for dependent demand. Now, that is a lot of material to use on a single day, especially if we look deeper at the dependent requirement, we can see that this planned production order is actually going to take place over a matter of years. Wouldn't it be easier if we were able to evenly distribute this dependent requirement over the period of time for the planned order? Well, we absolutely can, and we're going to do that by using the distribution key within the bill of material for the assembly. I'm going to navigate to the bill of material for the assembly, and I'm going to navigate to the line item details for the affected component, and I'm going to set a distribution key which will equally distribute that component over the dependent requirement. I'm going to save. Once the bill of material is saved, all I now need to do is rerun MRP for the assembly and re-explode that bill of material. Easy. Now, refreshing at this level is not going to show any improvement. However, if we navigate back to the component in question, we will see the dependent requirement coming from that assembly is now evenly distributed over the years of which that assembly is going to take place. This means instead of procuring a single incoming receipt of 20 million pieces, we can plan receipts across the time period that is intended for that planned production order, with just the click of one button. I love it when a good plan comes together. So let's go over a few key reminders. First, SAP and MRP in particular love rules. So the more rules that we know and can get into the system, the better MRP will do at giving us a reasonable plan for supply. Second, not only is this conversation around the right time, but also the right place. As we break down those requirements, we want to make sure we know the operation and the location where we'll be introducing that material into the process. And third, flow in parts productivity and manufacturing. Let's get the timing right so we can perform well and efficiently. Back over to you, Martin. Hey, thank you so much, Nicole. That was awesome. Love the walkthrough and I'll bet the Reveal TV folks and community love the idea of knowing how to use and align materials with the pace of production. So once again, thank you. Hey folks, if you can't find the video you're looking for and the AI is not giving you the recommendations you need, hey, please just submit the question below and we'll build some content for you.
SAP® ECC
New
Work Center Hierarchies and Superior Resources
How to evaluate capacity across similar resources using work center hierarchies
10 min
Production Planner
Production Scheduler
Supply Planner
Production & Capacity Planning
PTM
CR31; CR32; CR33; CRC1; CRC2; CRC3; CM01
Martin: The best way to learn is by doing so welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this particular video we'll focus on using SAP's work center hierarchy to perform capacity evaluation for a group of liked work centers. A debate may take place to define one work center to represent a multiple like machines, or create a work center for each physical like machine and use a group center hierarchy with a superior work center to perform capacity evaluation. So let's get into this. Eacliffe tell us more about how do we do this specifically in this grouping of evaluations of work centers, specifically in a hierarchy. Eacliffe: Hey, thanks Martin. I have set up a demonstration to. Illustrate the functionality of a work center hierarchy and a superior work center. So while it be easier to generate a single work center, or let it represent multiple work centers, this approach can sometimes be challenging when assigning a particular manufacturing order to a specific work center, for example. Regardless of the reason for having a one-to-one definition between a work center in SAP versus the physical, uh, machine on the production floor. By defining a work center hierarchy, capacity evaluation can be done for both the individual work centers and the superior work center. So let's get into SAP and look at how this functionality works. So this is a demonstration on how to aggregate production capacity information for resources or work centers. So you have the situation where you have like multiple, resources or work centers, and the whole point is you want to see, if I combine the capacity information for more than one resource am I able to do so? So the answer is yes, and you have the ability to do this either under discreet production and with production you would use a combination of work center master data setup along with hierarchy information or master data setup, as well as under the PPPI, you would use resources and also the hierarchy master data setup. So I've set up some data to illustrate exactly how this works. First, let's take a look at the resource that I created that basically represents the superior resource. I'll come into change mode, I called it this name here, and let's just walk through some of the views. So on the basic view it's a very light version of a resource. Basically what I'm doing is really creating this object to say, look, this resource represents a superior resource. And you could see that I don't need to maintain any kind of standard value information for this particular resource. Likewise, if I come to the capacity tab, yes I maintain the capacity category because I want to see information from a machine perspective. If I want to see labor, I would create a second entry here for labor category. But again, I would not maintain any kind of formulas. The whole point is that we would obtain the information from the, call it the children resources or work center. And finally, coming here to the scheduling tab, again, there's nothing maintained because again, the information that's needed or that is used by the system would be derived, from the, resources that’s actually doing the production. So with that said let's come back out and now I’m going to come to the hierarchy. So let's look at it in change mode, I gave it the same name as I did the superior resource, the names do not have to match. Okay? So it's your prerogative in terms of what name and convention works for you. You can use the same names or you can use different names. It all depends on what works for you. So with that said, I'm going to come and click on this icon. And it's basically saying, hey, I have this superior resource, you could see the first entry here, and then we have the, what I've been calling the children resource. So we have these two packing lines, 1 and 2. The thinking is that the materials which I produce on, let's say line 1, the majority, if not all of the materials on line one can also run on line 2. So it makes sense to do an evaluation with the two of them combined, just in case I have insufficient capacity on one line, then I can say, okayoverall, do I still have sufficient capacity? And if I do, then I'm not going to worry about it. I'll just move some of the production from line 2 to line 1. So what I'm going to do next is let's take a look at the capacity evaluation itself. So here I am in CM01 and I'm going to come in here. I maintain my plan, and on the planning I'm going to go to work center and I'm going to click on this icon to work with the hierarchy rather then the individual resources. So this is the hierarchy name. I'm going to do a green check here. It gives you a illustration of what the hierarchy looks like. So here's the superior resource, and then I have the individual. I'm not aware of any limitations of how many resources or work centers you can have attached to a superior resource. And of course you can also do multilevel. So I can have SP2, and SP2 could be something, you know, let's call packing line 4 and 5, and then you could have it all roll up into, hey, give me an overall SP network. Okay, so it could be multilayers from top to bottom, and I've got multi resources work centers. With that said I’m going to green arrow back and from here you could see the superior resource as well as the individual resources sitting here as part of the selection criteria. Here, I'm going to do a standard overview. You could see that right now I am sharing that there's 0 capacity required at the superior level and as well as available everything is sitting at 0. If I scroll down we can see that hey, we have a little bit of capacity requirements sitting down here. And then if I come further down, we could see, hey, this resource it does have capacity requirements, and the red lines indicate that I am over capacity. So what I can do from this point is then come here, click on settings general, and you can see in my case, the hierarchy ID, popped in here. And I'm just going to say, okay, you know what show me the capacity, the requirements only at this point. I mean ideally we’d look at two but I want to show the fact that just by turning this on I'm going to do a green check and we can see that, all the requirements capacity required is now sitting up here in the superior. Of course, everything is red because of the fact that we did not turn on the indicator for available capacity. So of course, all entries are over capacity of each week. So what I'm going to do is come back up here and I'm going to come back and let's go back to settings, general, I'm going to turn on the accumulation of capacity. This is the available capacity now we're looking at, I'm going to green check, and you can see that, suddenly everything is white. So the available capacity for the superiors, 32 hours for the first week because of the fact that we got 16 hours coming from packing line 1. And if I come into parking line 2, we expect to see 16 hours also. So you can see, look, still looking at the individual resources, I'm over capacity. But looking at it from a superior perspective or hierarchy perspective, I have more than sufficient capacity week after week. So this tells me quickly that I can move production from one line to the next. Hey, welcome back. In this demo, we covered. What capacity evaluation looks like when we use a work center hierarchy solution in the capacity evaluation. With this approach, a finite production schedule is done to a specific work center. Hence, we would schedule to that specific work center rather than a generic one. Plus, you can specify downtime to a specific work center instead of reducing the number of individual capacities with that generic work center. Of course, the work center hierarchy would pick up all these business scenarios I just identified. Martin: Thank you, Eacliffe, that's actually brilliant. It's good to know that these kind of options exist, right? When it comes to how to set up work centers in SAP, it's not uncommon to implement a solution that works for many business scenarios, but when it comes to finite scheduling, for example, the production planner or operations requires a lower level of detail that may be required creating additional work centers. Regardless of the need for the additional work centers, using a work center hierarchy could be the compromise to bridge the gap. So folks, if you want to learn more about capacity planning, generally speaking, or in the hierarchies, there are other videos for you to check out as well. And of course, if you do have a particular question for us, feel free to submit it below.
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