Process Flow Within SAP SCM APO System
So here is the process flow within the APO system and how APO works:
The fundamental problem of Supply Chain Planning is that the delivery time of products to customers is supposed to be substantially shorter than production time or lead time. In order to be able to realize a short delivery time, a pre-planning procedure is carried out that predicts future customer requirements as planned independent requirements. By using pre-planning, procurement is planned well in advance and stocks or safety stocks are produced on component or finished-product level in plants or distribution centers (DC) that, with good planning, enable a short delivery time to be realized.
You use what are called postponement strategies to define the extent to which the sales order penetrates the supply chain - in other words, the point at which there is a departure from anonymous make-to-stock production (push strategies) and make-to-order production (pull strategies) commences.
Generally speaking, supply chain planning is divided into several steps, some of which are executed by components in SAP ECC and others by components in SAP SCM. It is possible and advisable to integrate these two systems and use both together when planning.
Demand planning forecasts future customer requirements using past sales figures. This can be carried out in SAP ECC as part of flexible planning (using the special instance of the so-called standard SOP-Sales and Operations Planning) or in SAP SCM in Demand Planning. Demand planning is then used to deduce planned independent requirements.
Demand management in SAP ECC can be used for administration (creating, changing and deleting) of planned independent requirements and for consuming planned independent requirements with sales orders. In SAP SCM you cannot maintain planned independent requirements manually. Planned independent requirements in SAP SCM are created from SAP ECC or from Demand Planning and are consumed in a similar way to requirements strategies in SAP ECC. You can also derive SAP ECC planned independent requirements from SAP SCM DP.
Sales orders are only created in the SAP ECC system. The ATP check of a sales order can take place globally in SAP SCM (integration with PP/DS is also possible).
Cross-plant planning is possible using Supply Network Planning in SAP SCM. Material requirements planning and capacity requirements planning can be executed in either SAP ECC or SAP SCM.
Production execution, in other words, the processing of manufacturing orders (production orders or process orders) takes place in the area of Supply Chain Manufacturing.
