SAP MPS (ePP/DS): Transparent Production Planning with SAP S/4HANA

Due to the increasing complexity of supply chains, creating a finite and feasible production plan is becoming more and more challenging. Traditional MRP calculations do not take into account many of the constraints that apply to procurement and production and require a high level of manual effort on the part of planners. This method quickly reaches its limits, especially in complex production scenarios. The lack of transparency and the resulting inefficient use of resources lead to suboptimal solutions. The ability to simulate different scenarios would help to find the best scenario, but this is often very difficult.

SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for Planning and Scheduling (formerly known as Production Planning/Detailed Scheduling, or PP/DS for short) closes this gap and offers advanced tools for both rough planning and detailed planning. SAP MPS is directly integrated into SAP S/4HANA and is therefore also known as embedded PP/DS (ePP/DS).

Benefits for your production planning

Features

Take advantage of numerous features that optimize your production planning:

• Detailed planning board: tailor the display of your detailed planning to your needs to provide a comprehensive overview.
• Pegging: provides planners with transparency on how demand is being met
• Real-time alerts: help planners draw attention to potential problems in the production network
• Comprehensive heuristic framework and optimizer: provide planners with a powerful toolkit to solve problems flexibly depending on the situation
• Simulations: offer extensive possibilities for testing with productive data by creating simulation versions.
• Supply-creation based confirmation (SCB): If there is not enough material available to confirm the requirement during the ATP check, a receipt is automatically created in ePP/DS. In addition to the ePP/DS license, a license for aATP is also required for this FSBC functionality.
• Solutions for the process industry:
  • Tank planning: helps you plan the use of container resources and optimize storage functions.
  • Campaign planning: serves to group similar orders into campaigns with the aim of reducing setup and cleaning costs during production.

• Solutions for the discrete manufacturing industry:
  • Block planning: Production capacities are divided into different blocks based on resources, each of which is characterized by a specific duration and set of characteristics. During planning, orders whose characteristics are compatible with those of the respective block are scheduled within that block. The aim is to produce similar products together in order to keep setup costs as low as possible.

Flexibility

Our services

Benefit from automatic and flexible production planning. MPS (ePP/DS) offers a flexible toolkit, and we help you get the most out of your planning. We specialize in digitization projects in manufacturing companies. Our consultants have many years of experience with implementation projects in various industries, such as the steel, paper, and pharmaceutical industries. Our services include:

Examples of MPS enhancements we have already implemented:

• Enhancements to the detailed planning board to add certain functionalities or highlight information.
• Adjustment of heuristics, e.g., to take underdelivery tolerances into account
• Direct jump to S/4 transactions
• Campaign planning: Automatic generation of setup matrix transitions based on predefined rules
• Adjustments in the core interface to extend the data transferred from SAP S/4HANA to ePP/DS