Blocking Products for Supply Planning

Businesses control their active products, intermediates, or components on a regular basis. It may happen that no new supplies shall be created anymore for these products. In addition, those products should also not be visible anymore to the end user in supply planning or certain master data like BOM.

To allow a better control of the active products we introduce the option to set a material to blocked for a planning area in the ‘Planning’ tab of the material master maintenance UI:

This status change has an impact on various aspects for blocked products:

• It is not possible to create new production or purchase or stock transfer proposals
• Existing proposals cannot be released to execution anymore.
• Manual creation of purchase order for a ship-to location with a blocked planning area for the item product is prevented.
• It is not possible to create a consistent production model for an output product not active in the supply planning area
• A demand plan created for blocked product cannot be released.
• Demand forecast (maintained in the ‚Supply Planning work center) cannot be created for blocked product.
• The following value helps will only show products per default that are active in at lease one planning area:
  • Planning run product selection
  • Common tasks
    • New planning proposal
    • Maintain Demand Forecast
    • Forecast consumption report
  • Work center views – advanced filter
    • Supply Planning – Products
    • Supply Planning – Exceptions – Products
    • Supply Control – Production Proposals
    • Supply Control – Purchase Proposals
    • Supply Control – Stock Transfer Proposals
  • BOM maintenance for input and output products

Nevertheless, certain functions are still possible for products blocked for a planning area. The reason is that a company might still be interested to use remaining stock for sales or production. Here you can find an overview of functions still supported for blocked products:

• Sourcing a product in a sales order from a blocked planning area.
• Creation of stock transfer orders for products blocked in the sending or receiving site.
• Creation of a consistent production model and releasing it to planning and execution with a blocked component. The reason is that it shall be possible to still consume the remaining stock in production.
• The supply planning run can still select the production models with a blocked components, however the planning run will not be able to create proposals to cover the component demand for a blocked component. It can only use existing stock or released receipts.
• Change or delete planning proposals.
• Forecast created/released before the product is blocked for planning, can only be deleted and cannot be changed.

In certain cases, it might be needed to set a blocked products back to an active status, which is also supported.

Please also check out the following video.