Detailed planning

Historically, the ECC had a graphical planning board, which only provided a representation but no support for the actual planning - it was not possible to implement reliable production planning or plan shifts, for example. The effort involved was therefore as great as with manual planning and was entirely the responsibility of the respective schedulers.

This is why SAP has developed an algorithm-supported state-of-the-art tool for detailed planning: SAP APO. Planning scenarios can be saved and visualized there in order to coordinate them with other affected departments and thus provide maximum support for scheduling. The decentralized APO, which has since been discontinued, had other areas of application in addition to detailed planning and was primarily designed for companies with complex planning scenarios. In our experience, however, the solution was not commercially viable for medium-sized companies and was too complex for the specialist department and IT - both in terms of operation and implementation.

To take this into account, SAP has brought detailed planning back into ERP (SAP S/4HANA) so that the new detailed planning tool MP&S (formerly PP/DS or extended planning in S/4HANA) now has fully integrated access to all relevant data and information (without duplicate data storage).

• MP&S is delivered with SAP S/4HANA and then only needs to be activated and set up or licensed, and at a significantly lower price than before.
• MP&S supports the creation of production and sequence planning and can simulate it, it can work in a setup-optimized manner and all relevant information stored in SAP can be included.