Advanced Available to Promise(aATP) – S/4HANA 1809 advanced features

Available to Promise (ATP)

1. The process of checking the stock availability of the materials while creating the sales order.  This is one of the processes in Availability Check in ECC system.

Advanced Available to Promise (aATP)

The updated version of checking the stock availability of the materials while creating the sales order with new additional features and different strategies.

Functionalities of aATP

• Product Availability Check (PAC)
• Back Order processing (BOP)
• Product Allocation (PAL)
• Alternative Based Confirmation (ABC)
• Release for delivery (RefDy)

ATP Vs aATP

Product Availability Check (PAC)

The PAC in S/4HANA can be used to determine on which date and in which quantity a requirement can be fulfilled, based on a specified checking rule and the current supply situation for a specific material. The availability check takes current requirement of different types and their respective confirmation situation into consideration.

Scope of Check – The document types and the stock are considered by the product availability check to calculate the available quantity for the requirement which is done through calculation of the available quantities. The calculation is done by cumulated available quantity by adding stocks & receipts and subtracting the requirements on their respective dates.

Scheduling – The requirement will be fulfilled by earlier confirmed dates. The system first performs the backend scheduling. If it fails, the system will perform the forward scheduling. During this, the system considers various parameters like replenishment lead time, pick pack time, loading time, transportation lead time and transit time.

Check Levels – At the time of confirmation, the system checks if a requirement is already existing and up to which level (Plant/Storage location/batch). In addition to this, the product availability check considers the other existing document types.

Temporary Quantity Assignments – The system creates temporary quantity assignments at the time of check, so that immediately the confirmed quantity will be reserved. It also prevents other product availability check from using the quantity for completing requirements.

This will be created at the time of creation of sales order/contract and this will be automatically removed after 8 hours based on the system’s situation

• A Document is saved
• Any unsaved change in a document is discarded
• A newly created document is cancelled

Delivery Group – If multiple items are required on a single delivery date, the product availability check calculates a common available date for the requirements in the delivery group.

Back Order Processing (BOP)

If a high priority customer places an order and the stock is unavailable, then we go back to the open orders of the low priority customers, cancel the confirmation and assign the stock to high priority customer.

In S/4HANA, the aATP function is used to define the business rules for order confirmations. BOP in aATP can be processed automatically for confirmation of any existing orders according to the business rules.

In S/4HANA, BOP uses five predefined strategies for the confirmations.

WIN: Confirm as requested shall be fully confirmed in time (No Sorting criteria).

Example – All orders from Priority customers (that day), all rush orders and all back orders.

GAIN: Improve if possible, keep all the confirmations and gain (Sorting – Requested delivery date).

Example – All orders from high and medium priority customers (for a week/10 working days).

REDISTRIBUTE: Might gain/lose (Sorting – Order Creation date and Delivery priority).

Example – All stock transport orders and all standard sales order for a week/10 working days.

FILL: Delete if required (Sorting – Order creation date).

Example – All quality inspection orders and all internal stock transport orders.

LOSE: Delete all confirmations – No Sorting.

Example – All orders from customers under credit block.

Product Allocation (PAL)

This function in aATP is provided for carrying out these control options intended to help the organization to avoid the critical requirement and procurement situations. This enables the organization to keep production to a minimum at the same time as allowing you to react quickly to bottlenecks and changing situations in the market. Few key concepts to implement PAL in S/4HANA are discussed below.

Alias

This is the field in Manage characteristic catalog to define the user-specific description for a characteristic.

Allocation Quantity unit

Allocation quantity is to be defined when a product allocation object is created, which represents the UOM for all the planned allocation quantity.

Consumption unit of measure/Allocation rate

• The consumption unit of measure corresponds to the UOM maintained in the material master for the material assigned to the product allocation object.
• Allocation rate will enable the conversion from the required quantity UOM to the planned quantity UOM.

Characteristic catalog

• This represents a selection of fields which are a part of the data model for sales and STO.
• The catalog also provides characteristics which can be chosen while configuring the product allocation.

Collective allocations

This will allow to allocate collective quantities to a set of characteristic values to which allocation quantities need not be assigned explicitly.

Product allocation object

This is the main business object in the product allocation functionality which describes the purpose of the business for using product allocation.

Alternative Based Confirmation (ABC)

This functionality is similar to plant substitution – SAP APO Global ATP (GATP), i.e., if the material is not available in the sales order plant, then the system will automatically check for the stock availability in other plants.

ABC is based on the “Building Rule” technique, which is mentioned below:

1. FULL_CONFIRMATION – The other plant which has the complete sales order stock confirms for the requested delivery.
2. MAX_EARLIER CONFIRMATION – The other plant can confirm the maximum sales order stock and confirms the maximum requested quantity for delivery.
3. ON_TIME_CONFIRMATION – The other plant which can confirm the maximum quantity of the requested sales order quantity on the requested delivery date is the valid alternative.

Restrictions of ABC in S/4HANA

• ABC in S/4HANA can be used only to process requirements from order documents of the business documents class sales order only.
• ABC in S/4HANA supports substitution method, Plant Substitution (from all eligible plants) and Force Inline Substitution method.
• ABC in S/4HANA does not support the delivery or production process and the substitution of the sub items within an order item
• ABC does not work with Product Allocation (PAL) and Back Order Processing (BOP).

Release for Delivery (RefDy)

FIORI-based interactive changes to the sales order confirmations before releasing the orders for delivery.

Key Features

• Display sales orders containing materials for which the sales team were responsible in a specific time period, which includes sales order items of materials with limited availability.
• Display the availability of the materials for which the sales team are responsible.
• Display the potential financial impact of the organization if materials are not available and material redistribution is not optimized.
• Manually redistribute material quantities between sales order items, as required, to fulfil a sales order partially or completely.
• Apply confirmation strategies such as Confirm from Top to enable efficient, semi-automatic processing of mass data.
• Protect quantities of sales order items from further processing.
• Postpone further processing of sales order items.
• Release the materials for delivery, thus triggering subsequent logistics processes (such as picking, for example).