What does S/4HANA Supply Chain offer production planning?

S/4HANA Enterprise Management has been expanding its line of business products, and that's a good thing for supply chain leaders. Its S/4HANA Supply Chain product offers innovations in production planning that enable better materials planning and productivity. Let's take a look.

Material Requirements Planning tool. MRP is a materials planning tool that calculates components' quantities required for producing a material. If the required component quantity is insufficient, MRP creates proposals to either procure the material or produce it in-house. SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management uses MRP Live and is far more responsive to materials' demand and supply sensitivities and creates highly reliable procurement or production proposals. Also, the MRP Areas takes care of outsourced manufacturing as well as materials that are planned for specific storage locations within a plant. Further, the maximum length to maintain a material master's code has now been increased from 24 to 40 characters. 

Production Planning tab. A brand new tab -- or a "view" in an SAP ERP system -- is now available that offers an option to maintain production planning parameters for improved and realistic production planning. The number of materials planning steps using SAP ERP and Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) systems has also been significantly reduced. Another aspect that is significantly improved is the materials planning data transfer between SAP ERP and SAP APO using Core Interface (CiF) -- all this has been possible due to fast processing power of HANA.

Production Performance Management features. Central to every materials and production planner are dashboards and analytics that stream in real-time data for important decision making. Dashboards, apps and analytics available in S/4HANA Supply Chain's product planning include a missing parts information system that shows components shortages, shift reports to provide an overview of activities or issues that are faced during a shift and what actions were taken, actual production scrap, and even production capacities shortages. Also available are user-defined alerts and system-suggested solutions to mitigate supply chain disruptions.