SAP SCM: Applications and Modeling for Supply Chain Management (with BW Primer)

Chapter 6. Analytical Master Data: BW Primer Part I

Until now we have been primarily concerned with configuring APO to model the actual physical components of the supply chain. Of course this has been essential as APO’s value is in simulating the supply chain and running advanced planning runs or solves to coordinate and guide purchasing, production, storage, and delivery. We will see that by using Supply Network Planning (SNP), it is possible to execute any of three different kinds of runs or solves to derive schedules both for individual sites as well as for entire global vendor-factory-customer networks. Using Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) it is also possible to do some cross-site planning runs, but more important, there are powerful tools for developing short-term factory schedules and highly optimized line-by-line schedules in the very near term.

But APO does more than this. Prior to either supply network planning or production planning, APO provides the Demand Planning (DP) module, which may be used for demand forecast development and analysis. This is a fundamentally analytical activity that relies as much on analytical data objects as it does on physical supply chain objects. Though obscured somewhat behind a “planning area,” SNP in fact also makes use of these same planning objects. Moreover, APO is directly integrated with SAP BW, the Business Information Warehouse, which provides advanced reporting capabilities for all of the APO modules, even those ...