Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(3-4 min read)

In Part 1 of this blog series, we started talking about the benefits provided when your scheduling solution is made up of a perfect blend of automation and exception-based alerts, including improved asset utilisation, greater visibility of inventory, and increased agility.

In this second part we will be exploring a little bit more around the types of exceptions that can be used within SAP Production Planning & Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS), and in what way these are beneficial compared to building the same restrictions into your automated solution.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(3-4 min read)

“We switched on alerts when we first went live, but we just ignore them now as there are far too many”

Does that sound familiar?

Incorrectly configured alert profiles achieve little more than noise creation within an organisation and provide a distraction from where a planner should really invest their time and attention. However, focused alerts with clearly defined tolerances allows schedulers to focus on real supply issues and is proven to provide real time and cost savings within your business.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(3-4 min read)

Business background

One of the key functionalities expected from an ERP tool is an “Order Fulfilment” process. The expectation is to provide an accurate and dependable order promise dates upon entry of a sales order. These dates should be proposed based on consideration of relevant stocks and in real time. As a next level of requirement, in situations where demand is greater than supply the system should be capable of taking business priorities as well as profitability into account and provide reliable dates.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(4-5 min read)

Conceptual Details

The term “Predictive” should not be confused with use of any “machine learning” or “artificial intelligence” capabilities but needs to be related with simulation capabilities. The simulation capabilities help planners to take decisions with changed conditions. One of the goals in S/4Hana, is to deploy most of these functionalities as part of Fiori Apps. This means there are no transaction codes that run the process. The whole process is covered by two Fiori Apps.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: chris.curtis@olivehorse.com.

(4-5 min read)

• Are production planners within your organisation spending a lot of time creating schedules manually within SAP PP/DS?
• Is there a need to optimize short-term production based on multiple constraints, at the same time as producing based upon a preferred cycle?
• Can products be produced over alternative resources of varying costs, and if preferred sequences are not adhered to, can it result in costly and time-consuming changeovers, which in turn reduces overall throughput?

(2-3 MIN READ)

Interested in SAP IBP for Inventory but unsure whether your business will realise the benefit? Olivehorse can provide you with a 6 week Proof of Value, with your data to enable understanding of how the solution will deliver benefit to your organisation.

Together we can build your Supply Chain, to enable a fast and informed decision on the benefits of SAP IBP Inventory in your company. At Olivehorse we can provide calculations, analytics and planning views to evaluate the proposed plans versus your current Inventory Plans.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(2-3 min read)

During scheduling of orders on the shop floor as a scheduler/planner, the main objective is to generate a schedule, which follows a sequence in which the resources are utilized optimally. In a manufacturing process, most of the time a scheduler/planner wants to make sure that the generated schedule has minimal ‘Change Overs’. These changes can be due to factors related to flavours, allergens, colours, cleaning between orders, tooling changes etc. depending on the industry. If these factors are not managed efficiently, it results in loss of capacity, and lowers asset utilization. These changes are commonly referred to as ‘Change Over’ or ‘Setup’.

(3-4 min read)

In today’s competitive business environment, Sales Managers manage complex demand streams spread across various geographies. These demand streams can have different priorities; and based on the highest priority demand, business wants to allocate first available constrained resource and supplies to this highest priority demand.

In my following Blog we will see how the Demand Prioritization function provided by SAP IBP will help businesses planning their resources based on the prioritization logic.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" - Niels Bohr and Others

(6-8 MIN READ)

Since predicting the future is not that easy, let’s get started with a statement about the present: We live in the age of information.

Everybody – including planners and business leaders for the case in point – have access to a great volume of information and content on how to better plan the demand and increase the accuracy of the demand forecast. And I am sure that you, reading this, already have read a lot about it.

So, why another blog yet mounting on the existing pages that already cover demand planning? Because “prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future”. And predicting the demand is not only difficult, but pivotal for now-a-days demand driven organisations. The demand forecast ripples through the organisation and has major impact in Inventory Planning, Revenue Estimates, Budgets… and this relevance is what pushes heads of supply chain and other decision makers to find new ways to improve their predictions.

Free ‘Planning & Scheduling Advisory Day’

In order to understand your companies options and requirements with regards to your SAP APO PP/DS roadmap and scheduling challenges.

Please get in touch now on: carl.dakin@olivehorse.com

(6-8 min read)

Quite often, specially in process industries it is observed that there are some specific production restrictions. The restrictions may be in the form viz. a specific sequence of processes using the processing units. The sequence may be derived due to the upstream semi-finished goods complexity or availability of several downstream resources. It is a good practise to decide which downstream resources are to be used before the production process starts.