SAP S/4HANA 2021 Manufacturing for Planning and Scheduling (ePPDS) is now available

As our team further enhances and expands our Digital Supply Chain and Manufacturing SAP S/4HANA product portfolio in support of Intelligent Enterprise, I am excited to announce the October release of the SAP S/4HANA 2021 version of SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling.

SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling allows the creation of feasible production plans and schedules that optimize your scarce resources and labor to stabilize production and help you make reliable commitments to your internal and external customers. This SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management core extension, available both on premise and as private cloud edition, in stack and extra stack (side by side), ensures that planning and execution are syncrhonized in real time so that everyone in the company can access up-to-date planning information. With this latest release, SAP reinforces the intelligent enterprise strategy, adds customer value, and strengthens our position in the supply chain-/ manufacturing planning space.

We are happy to deliver on our promise we made with the last years roadmap update. To recap what has happened recently – a Customer Engagement Initiative was launched early last year where customers from different manufacturing industries signed up and provided direct feedback for key improvement areas. This input helped shape and influence the overall development roadmap for ePPDS in SAP S/4HANA and is now updated again with new planned innovations for 2024.

Major innovations in business process coverage, flexible integration and UI-modernization have been announced and are started to be shipped now to our customers such as:

Tank Planning

A first step of our multi-year roadmap to improve tank planning capabilities has been made with the ability to visualize tank fill levels now better for interactive planning. It comes with new charts and detailed lists in the PPDS Gantt Chart and product planning table. This foundation provides a starting point for major tank planning improvements to cover more complex material flow scenarios e.g., splitting from and into tanks or draining and filling with external demands and supplies.

Time dependent stock levels

With the release of SAP S/4HANA 2021 we enable time dependent stock levels in the PPDS standard solution. The stock level values have been integrated into selected PPDS screens and are considered in PP Heuristics and PPO. The stock values can be imported as optimized inventory targets from SAP IBP (for inventory).

Demand Driven Scheduling

With demand Driven Scheduling we introduce a new heuristic to prioritize orders for scheduling according to DDMRP buffer status. It fits very well into SAP´s DDMRP solutions space which spans across SAP S/4HANA and SAP IBP. It complements the existing Replenishment Planning and Execution methods and supports our customers on their journey towards a Demand Driven Operating Model (DDOM) -based process.

Production Planning Optimization (PPO – Evolution of initial 2020 Release)

Complex (multilevel / multi resource) production planning scenarios require sophisticated solver approaches to come up with intelligent sourcing and lot size decisions. Customers in manufacturing industries (process and discrete) benefit from new solution capabilities delivered in this 2021 SAP S/4HANA release. This has now been significantly extended to support time dependent max days of supply, static and dynamic safety stock methods, and product interchangeability. It also features an improved visualization of the PPO result and additional key figures in the product planning table. Furthermore, now it supports the handover of the finite bucket-based production plan to a time-continuous production schedule respecting the optimization results of PPO.

Flexible Integration

Providing more flexible integration capabilities is a key enabler of deploying PPDS more effectively and efficiently within SAP S/4HANA and across the full E2E process including SAP IBP with Synchronized Planning. Production Planning Integration is a core piece of synchronized planning supporting the process and data integration between SAP IBP and SAP S/4HANA ePPDS (available with SAP S/4HANA 2020). A new switch for controlling the advanced planning behavior in SAP S/4HANA allows now the flexible usage of PPDS in subnetworks e.g., only at production plant or a plant internal upstream component manufacturing area or the combination of PP for MRP and ePPDS for detailed scheduling. This new switch enables also further use cases like using MRP Live for Production Planning and using PPDS just for the sake of scheduling.

Synchronized Planning – Production Planning Integration

Synchronized Planning is a strategic topic in SAP Digital Supply Chain and many of our key customers. Supply chain planning is often siloed and transactional and does not span several departments and organizational alignments. With synchronized planning, we see the convergence of the different supply chain planning capabilities bringing together supply planning, distribution planning and production planning in one place, enabling a holistic planner’s workspace.

We are continuously combining SAP IBP and SAP S/4HANA ePPDS planning capabilities by providing an operational plan in SAP IBP with fine tuning the scheduling in ePPDS. The detailed scheduling results are visible in SAP IBP – thus transparency is guaranteed.

With the 2108 release of SAP IBP combined with 2021 release of SAP S/4HANA, we can delegate short term production planning from SAP IBP to SAP S/4HANA ePPDS and have a controlled handover process of short-term production planning responsibility from SAP IBP to ePPDS.

Synchronized Planning as a concept will also be enabled for PPDS in the Digital Supply Chain Edition for S/4HANA (DSC-Edition) which is another highlight of the development roadmap for PPDS and offers now the possibility to connect to multiple ERP systems.

Additional information on SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing planning and scheduling can be found here:

• SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling – Roadmap
• SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling – on SAP.COM