Interchangeability groups (ICGs) and Planning packages
Well, it doesn’t happen across any standard SAP system, but we have been encountering regular errors while trying to update/delete the interchangeability groups which says “Package xxxxxx doesn’t exist”.
The system checks for and creates/deletes the Package ID (in table /sapapo/heurpack) when creating/changing/deleting an Interchangeability Group (ICG). It then populates the Package ID field in the Product-Location master(PP/DS tab).
In standard SAP, the package ID is used in ICG for PP/DS only. Additionally, in standard SAP, the system doesn’t allow the user to create multiple ICGs for the same product. The root-cause of receiving the error message above in our system is because we have changed the system to allow users to create multiple ICGs for the same product.
Under SPRO / APO / Master Data / Product and Location IC / Consistency Checks / Maintain Validation, we have deactivated S_V18 thus allowing a product to be part of multiple ICGs.
We could have, rather than, completely deactivating this check – at least allowed ‘Warning’ message instead of error in the node “Maintain Consistency profiles and Assign Validation” (S_1, set S_V18 to “Warning” instead of error) under “Consistency Checks”.
As a fix for this problem – we had to implement a workaround. This is possible for us as we are not using PP/DS in our system as of now. What we did is to deactivate the creation of any packages.
Under Prod/Loc INC of SPRO: choose “Application Settings / General Settings” and deactivate the PP/DS functionality so the concept of ‘package’ doesn’t at all come 🙂
But for this setting to successfully be able to carry out – we need to address some checks which SAP has provided:
- The planning packages from the mat1(prod/loc) should all be cleared,
- All the planning packages from /SAPAPO/HEURPACK and /SAPAPO/HEURPACKT should be deleted,
- All the current ICGs should be blocked.
Once the configuration settings are done, the blocked ICGs can be ‘Released’.