In Today's competitive world every Organization wants to be on top. In order to achieve this - planning is most important for them. By doing efficient planning this can be achieved.
Nowdays SAP SCM APO is widely used to meet the above objective. There are different planning modules in SAP SCM APO-
1) SNP- Supply Network Planning
2)DP- Demand Planning
3)PPDS- Production Planning Detailed Scheduling
4)TPVS- Transport Planning Vehicle Scheduling
5)Global Available to Promise
Here I will limit discussion to DP and SNP. DP means demand planning where Organization generates Forecast for the products. There are different methods to generate the forecast liks based on past sales. Generally BW sends sales data to APO cubes and based on this forecast can be generated or in some cases Organizations have Non SAP system as well where they create Forecast and then file is send to interface of APO system and it gets loaded to DSO,cube in APO and then finally to DP planning book. For better planning - Forecast should be as accurate as possible.
DP plan is released to SNP for further planning. When DP plan is released to SNP - the system checks if based on current supply- the demand be met -else SNP plan will be adjusted as per changed demand..
SNP is linked with ERP system as well via CIF interface so any order creation in R3 gets reflected to SNP immeditaely. This will it is very helpful for the users in planning and streamlining the whole Supply chain process. It gives planners the visibility of stock at Global level and this is more important in case of Organization operating in multiple countries and each country have their own R3 Transaction system.
So in short we can say that using SAP APO for planning is very useful for the organizations.
Thanks
Nilesh Pathak
