Hi Community and SAP Product Management,
At the moment, the system uses the calendar of the location for planning/scheduling production proposals and the calendar/operating times of the resources for planning/scheduling production requests. This causes inconsistencies in the productions scheduling of the system and a lot of exceptions due to stock shortage that should not occur. Therefore, the production proposals should also be scheduled based on the resource calendar.
Ideas/Suggestions to resolve the issue (sequence according to priority):
- The production proposals should be scheduled using the operating times on the resource
- If not 1 then the production requests should be scheduled based on a backward termination starting from the latest availability time of the production proposal.
Here the background: Since the calendar on the location cannot be maintained the same way as on the resources (Only start and end time on the location, but operating times with breaks and downtimes on the resource) inconsistencies are inevitable which cause big confusion and dissatisfaction on customer side. For example following scenario (common in production facilities) cannot be configured properly:
Operating Hours
- A company has daily lunch time from 12:00 to 13:00, operating hours in production are from 7:00 to 12:00 and from 13:00 to 17:00
- On Fridays the operating hours are from 7:00 to 12:00
Configuration of Calendar on the location and operating hours on the resource
- Location Calendar: Standard Calendar for Germany, Start time 07:00, End Time 17:00
- Ressource Operating Hours: Mo-Th. 7:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00, Fr. 7:00 to 12:00
System behavior for 2 examples, each time we have a production proposal/request that needs 3 hours for production:
- Due to primary/secondary demand the latest availability time of a product is Monday 14:00. So the production proposal is planned to start at 11:00 and finish at 14:00 on Monday. Then the production proposal is released and the production request now uses the resource operating hours for scheduling. The system behavior is that now that the start time is taken and a forward termination starting from 11:00 is executed. Since a break from 12:00 to 13:00 is maintained on the resource the system now calculates an end time of 15:00, which is too late. This also causes an exception due to stock shortage.
- Expected result: The product should be available at Monday 14:00. So latest availability time If there is a break of 1h the scheduling has to set the starting time one hour earlier.
- Due to primary/secondary demand the latest availability time of a product is Friday 16:00. The production proposal is scheduled for with latest availability time Friday 16:00 and start time Friday 13:00. After releasing the production proposal the production proposal is scheduled to start on the following Monday at 7:00 with an end time of 10:00, since on Fridays production is only working until 12:00 (resource calendar). However, this is 3 days too late.
- Expected result: The production proposal/request should be planned with an availability time on Friday 12:00 so that the product can be shipped on time.
Furthermore these inconsistencies happen for example when down times are maintained on the resource operating times. Since these are common planning scenarios for multiple customers the standard planning/scheduling behavior of the system is not correct. Also refer to the incident 3101007811.
In addition the resource load in the system also used the operating hours of the resources for planning the capacity with production proposals. So there is already a link between production proposals and resources, making it more inconsistent that production proposals are scheduled with the calendar of the location.
If you have a work around to resolve these scenarios it would also help a lot. I know that the scheduling of the production requests can be changed manually as long as they are not released automatically. However, due to the huge amount of production proposals this is not feasible and in most cases production orders are created from production requests and released automatically.
It would be nice if you could also vote on this idea on the ideas place.
https://ideas.sap.com/D44478
BR Stefan
