Unconsumed and Unconsumable Protection

How to create a virtual emergency inventory using supply protection?

A Best Practice Example

One of the most important use cases of supply protection is to protect quantities for special groups that can either be consumed, or will expire over time, if the demand was less than expected.
In this case, there is a transition from protection towards a “first come, first serve” logic again. 

However, the consumption of protection is not the central element of supply protection. The key concept of supply protection is that protection works as a restriction for demands with a lower priority. A protected quantity is not a restriction if the demand belongs to a group matching the protection group of supply protection. 

It does not matter whether there is a high protection planned for the matching protection group. It is only important that this protection group has a higher importance compared to other protection groups of the same supply protection object. 

This logic might be interesting for several use cases where, for example, a safety stock for exceptional cases is required. With supply protection, an extra physical stock is not required. It is sufficient to have a protection group that cannot be consumed. All demands of lower priority must respect this as a restriction. 

In our example, there is a small group of customers with a high priority, and these customers should receive articles, even in shortage situations. 

This works if there is one protection group defined with a characteristics value that does not match any sales order. It is possible to have real protection groups of lower priority, but in principle it does not matter if the order matches a protection group of a lower priority or no protection group at all. As protection group with priority 2 never matches a sales order, there is also no consumption. 

In our example, there is also a protection group that does not have a protected quantity, but the priority is the highest. No ordinary sales order matches this protection group. 

The restriction prevents the confirmation of the sales order at the requested date

Depending on the available stock and supply, a sales order will be confirmed with its requested delivery date, or it will be moved to the date when enough unrestricted supply is available. 

For important customers, it might be an issue if the demand is moved. In this case, the sales order will be promoted, for example, via a report that changes a value so that this sales order matches the supply protection group with priority 1. 

The sales order is not restricted anymore and has access to the onhands stock

In this case, the sales order is not restricted by the protection group with priority 2 anymore and will be confirmed at the originally requested date (t0). 

Additional Information:

Incident component for clarifications: CA-ATP-SUP

SAP Community Blog:

• Increasing Reliability with Supply Protection

• 2022 Release Highlights of SAP S/4HANA advanced Available-To-Promise (aATP)

SAP Help Portal: Manage Supply Protection