HYDRO | SAP SCM APO Implementation

HYDRO assigns different priorities to orders to ensure that critical production orders are not only kept in view by the planner but also during optimisation. As part of the optimisation process, delays are then assigned corresponding costs depending on the respective priority.

For the reliable and consistent consideration of order priorities, it is important on the one hand that the priorities are passed on across the entire order network and on the other hand that the allocation of prioritised accesses to the corresponding requirements is maintained. CONSILIO has developed a clever concept for this based on multi-level fixed pegging, which ensures that our prioritised orders are actually given priority.

The product overview in APO is the planner's tool of choice for a quick overview of the planning situation for a selection of products. All planning-relevant data and exception messages relating to quantity or deadline problems are displayed here.

But for HYDRO this was not enough. Further information, including reorder levels, additional purchasing and batch size parameters, have found their way into the product overview according to HYDRO's specifications. ‘The product view has thus become one of the central planning tools for us,’ says Mr Biegert.

An overview of missing parts and therefore of potential risks in production is essential for monitoring material availability. Here too, HYDRO wanted more. ‘It's not just enough for us to see which components are not yet in stock and are therefore being procured externally or are in production,’ explains Mr Biegert, ’we also want to recognise the critical order that is relevant for the timely delivery of a customer order in the network.’

The solution for this consists of several parts and is fully embedded in the context view of the product view. The order context represents the complete network of receipts and requirements. To display the missing parts list, all stock elements can be filtered out here using an additional switch. 

The critical order is determined according to the HYDROlogic via the critical start date and is marked in the order context. Additional fields such as start date, difference between requirement and availability date, ATP category, comment field, etc. provide the planner with all the necessary information.

The critical resource is also entered in the context view. By definition, this is the resource for which the order has the longest delay. With these enhancements, the order context has become an important tool for HYDRO in the regular monitoring of material availability.

One of HYDRO's planning requirements is the interactive scheduling and defixing of orders. ‘The most convenient way for us is to do this in the product view,’ explains Mr Biegert. ‘CONSILIO has expanded the planning options for us accordingly.’

This was made possible by implementing customised heuristics that can be used both interactively, e.g. via additional buttons in the menu bar of the product view, and for the planning run in the background.

When using the APO PP/DS optimiser, the focus is on demand or schedule-controlled products. However, HYDRO also produces consumption-controlled materials on bottleneck systems. To ensure that these products are also scheduled correctly in an integrated optimisation run, taking finite capacities into account, an adjustment was necessary.

Normally, during optimisation, receipt elements without a requirement date are scheduled at the end of the optimisation horizon. ‘To prevent this for consumption-controlled products, the consultants at CONSILIO came up with a creative solution,’ reports Mr Biegert.

Correct scheduling in external procurement is often a tricky issue, partly because determining the requirement dates for stock transfers and parts provided for subcontracting in ERP and APO follows a different logic. In ERP, scheduling is usually based on the planned delivery time, whereas in APO it is based on the transport duration.

‘In order to create clarity for us and to enable the use of our HYDRO logic for the individual determination of the planned delivery time,’ explains Mr Biegert, “CONSILIO has also used planned delivery times in APO for the determination of requirement dates”.

A work centre often provides several individual capacities and can therefore be occupied by several processes at the same time. As part of an operation split, an operation can be distributed to several individual capacities in parallel, thereby reducing the processing time. HYDRO wanted to use this functionality in APO, but the standard does not yet offer the use of splits in APO. A corresponding extension in APO provides a remedy here. The set-up and processing times of an operation are reduced according to the specified split factor.