85% of clients who we engaged with in the past 12 months admitted that their scheduling process was more manual than they would like it to be. Do any of these pain points sound familiar?

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.

“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: 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?

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

(3-4 min read)

A lot of companies have already taken the time to understand the power that S/4HANA can bring to their business, leveraging its in-memory capabilities and enhanced user experience provided by SAP Fiori, to name only a few of its facets. It is widely acknowledged from companies across all industries that this could be the next logical step to take in the ERP world if they have not already done so, but the main challenges that constantly arise in relation to this are “When?” and “How?”

(2-3 min read)

As a business, you have probably already started considering a move to S/4HANA, that is if you have not transitioned already. At this point a series of questions arise…

• This is expensive! It is a major decision! What is the payback?
• Is S/4HANA the way to go? What are the available options for me in scheduling? Does it provide the right short-term planning and scheduling functionality for my business?
• Would it be a whole new project to embark on?
• Is now the right time to commit?

For many manufacturing organisations, Detailed Scheduling is mainly driven by the need to perform manufacturing by following a specific preferred sequence whilst generating an achievable finite plan. It is quite normal for companies to use Detailed Scheduling heuristics for this function, but there are scenarios where this does not quite fit the bill.

When scheduling production order sequences in a manufacturing process, there are times when capacity losses are incurred when transitioning between orders. This can be due to changes in materials, cleaning between production, tooling changes etc. This loss in capacity can be referred to as ‘Change Over’ or ‘Setup’.

By reducing changeover times, you can increase the efficiency of the manufacturing asset and the productive manufacturing time.

A common way to represent change over losses is via a ‘Setup Matrix’. Here the transitions between different characteristics of the products being manufactured are represented.

A high-level insight on Resource Networks was provided in one of our earlier blogs entitled “Semi-Finished Goods Scheduling within SAP APO”. In this blog, I intend to provide a more detailed insight on how Resource Networks can be utilised in both SAP APO Planning and Scheduling scenarios.

A Resource Network is best described by the physical connection between Resources of different production lines. It models the flow of materials through these lines from one Resource to another. Some scenarios include:

• Scheduling across the allowable connections between packaging lines and semi-finished goods lines
• Recognising the prioritisation across multiple semi-finished goods lines feeding into a packaging line
• Providing flexibility to switch between alternative input resources in the case of capacity constraints

Short-term production scheduling is a key business process that ensures efficient use of scarce manufacturing resources, alignment of raw materials and flexibility when tackling manufacturing challenges. Whilst scheduling of Finished Goods (FG) is common place in SAP Advanced Planning & Optimisation (APO) Production Planning/Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) implementations, an area often overlooked is the scheduling of Intermediates or Semi-Finished Goods (SFG) production.

Quite often this is a manual process, or is controlled by spreadsheets and/or third party/non-SAP systems which makes it challenging to manage the alignment between the SFG and FG schedule.

This blog is intended to highlight the main challenges and importance of the SFG scheduling process and present an overview of the capability within APO PP/DS that can be used to deal with these challenges.