Production Planning Cockpit - PPC

Advanced Planning System - APS

 


The production planning cockpit “PPC” as an “Advanced Planning System” in SAP offers comprehensive planning across the entire supply chain, ensuring multi-level material availability and taking any restrictions into account.

Features of an Advanced Planning System

An APS system enables comprehensive planning abilities that encompasses various planning criteria. APS systems differ from simple planning software products mainly in the following features:

  • Planning across the entire supply chain (also called "multi-level planning"), which can include all factors of the supply chain as planning components: from purchasing to delivery
  • Using a combination of the following components:
    • Ensuring material availability across the entire supply chain
    • Planning against restrictions (especially against limited production resources)
    • Planning against rules, which guarantees a high planning quality in addition to compliance with the restrictions (e.g. short set-up times, short storage times, use of the most efficient resources)

APS systems cover all planning horizons, from the very short-term (the next few days) to a long-term horizon (several months). To achieve this, especially in the long-term area, an APS tool must also be able to perform simulations: Production plans are drawn up and compared on the basis of hypothetical assumptions (e.g. development of orders from key customers, expansion of machinery, hiring of additional employees, relocation of production to other sites).


The production planning cockpit "PPC" for SAP as an APS tool:

ITeanova's planning tool, which is completely integrated in SAP, contains all the essential components of an APS tool and has proven itself in demanding and often complex scenarios and requirement specifications.

The most important APS functions are:

  • Modelling of multi-level production as a combination of in-house and external production (entire supply chain) in presentation and planning
  • Modelling of numerous restrictions with an adjustable rule set and easy expandability
  • Possibility of taking into account material availability and requirement dates for all planning algorithms during scheduling
  • Flexible planning cockpit for displaying comprehensive plans across the entire supply chain according to various aspects:
    • Aggregated data (such as display of capacity totals, overview of penalty costs, alert monitor)
    • Detailed data views (e.g. all operations/orders per resource or resource groups)
    • Modelling of supply chains via hierarchical representation
    • Dashboard with flexible key figures
  • Optimisation heuristics according to various criteria
  • Building what-if scenarios with simulated master and transaction data
  • Planning algorithms based on simulated scenarios
  • Compare different simulations