Business Drivers

In the many SAP Advanced Planning & Optimisation (APO) Supply Network Planning (SNP) implementations that Olivehorse has been involved with over the years, we have identified a common mid-term production planning issue – especially in the consumer products and food industries.

The standard APO planning solution will plan to demand, however, such a plan will usually not be efficient to produce due to cost of changeovers and reduced capacity utilisation etc. There is therefore, a requirement to group production orders of different SKUs together into the same period to ensure that a more feasible and efficient plan is created in the mid-term. The standard solution in APO, whether it be Heuristics, Capable-to-Match or Optimiser, does not support the concept of Group Planning.

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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

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Supply Planning is an important function in every industry which tries to achieve a balance between customer service, inventory targets and resource utilization. A supply planner’s primary role is to deliver a tactical plan which meets the demand on time, covers safety stock targets at the distribution centres in the supply chain network while also ensuring that resources in the factories are utilized efficiently. A supply planner basically works on integrating the manufacturing and sales side of business and aims to optimize both ends.

The Manufacturing or Production function always prefers to produce according to cost effective lot sizes, minimal changeovers, production cycles and sometimes other constraints like labour or semi-finished material. On the other hand, Sales or Customer Fulfilment functions have different priorities which mainly include meeting customer demand in full and on time, and meeting inventory targets without going below or above targets significantly. These two sides of business often contradict each other and achieving a plan which has been optimized from both angles is challenging.

Usually, a medium term tactical supply plan is generated periodically (weekly, fortnightly or monthly). This plan is normally capacity constrained and contains decisions regarding production, sourcing and distribution of products through the supply chain.

A lot of companies who purchased  SAP’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) application use the Advanced Planning and Optimisation (APO) Supply Network Planning (SNP) Optimizer as a tool to generate the capacity constrained mid-term plan. It is a powerful tool which delivers a plan that respects resource contraints and optimizes the supply chain within a given cost framework. If implemented correctly, it can result in big cost savings for any organization. In this blog, I will try to cover several aspects related to the SNP Optimizer.

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