At Dr. Schneider in Kronach, SAP PP/DS was not used in a side-by-side scenario before the start of the project. As in many companies, S/4HANA quickly brought the potential benefits of PP/DS into focus.
The following was clear from the outset: when S/4HANA went live, extended planning in S/4 was also to be put into operation and finite planning was to be mapped in embedded PP/DS. CONSILIO's consulting and development expertise in the area of SAP PP/DS was required for this.
There are two options for creating a finite, feasible plan. On the one hand, it can be generated using heuristics, but this has the disadvantage that it is not possible to create an optimised production sequence.
However, this was one of the Dr. Schneider's requirements. A setup-optimised sequence should not only be possible for dome production, but in general.
The challenge of the project was therefore to define and then implement the best way to achieve finite planning with the optimiser in embedded PP/DS under S/4HANA.
Finite planning in PP/DS under S/4HANA was to be implemented with the mapping of the optimum production sequence. An important goal of the optimisation was to increase adherence to delivery dates and, in this respect, was primarily aimed at reducing delay costs.
Further added value was to be created through personnel deployment planning, the multi-level propagation of order priorities and the realisation of customer-specific delay alerts, which a planner uses to keep an eye on any delays. There was also a need for customised reports, for example for the automatic creation of the setup matrix or the automatic sending of CIF post-processing records.
The extended planning with PP/DS enables many functionalities, such as the use of the optimiser and the PP/DS heuristics, which in turn open up many possibilities. This potential benefit can now be fully utilised at Dr. Schneider.
The PP/DS optimiser can be used to create a feasible production plan in which finite resources, component availability and alternative sequences and set-up times are taken into account. Finite planning in PP/DS ensures that only pre-defined capacities at the work centres can be used to load the orders.
CONSILIO has implemented a customer-specific realisation concept for delay alerts at Dr. Schneider. For example, if a planner produces an assembly and is at the stage of a component, it is difficult to identify in the SAP standard which customer order he is currently working on and to recognise whether and which delay is already imminent in the entire chain to his customer order.
CONSILIO has therefore implemented an alternative to the SAP standard that provides the planner with precisely this multi-level view ‘from the bottom up’ and uses customer-specific delay alerts to tell him how many days behind schedule he is.
An extremely high-performance algorithm is used to calculate the time deviation from the customer order - whether it is late or early - across all levels and with buffers and lead times for all orders involved.
The algorithm is available in many transactions. This is not a standard SAP alert, but a customer-specific CONSILIO realisation concept that can be used to display alerts for ‘days in arrears’ in many transactions such as the product view, receipt view and the resource and product planning board.