SNP

M a n a g e Su Su p p l y N e t w o r k P l a n n i n g & C T M i n SAP APO (3.x ) / m ySAP SCM SC M (4 .0) B e s t P r a c t i c e f o r So l u t i o n M a n a g e m e n t Version Date: April 2004 This version is valid for SAP APO 3.0A , 3.1 and mySAP SCM 4.0 The newest version of this Best Practice can always be obtained through the SAP Solution Manager Contents

Applicability, Applicability, Goals, and Requirements....................................................................................................2 Requirements....................................................................................................2 Preliminary Preliminary Information .......................................................................... ......................................................................................................................3 ............................................3 Procedure...........................................................................................................................................9 Business Process Step 1: Initialize Planning Version..................................................................9 Version ..................................................................9 Business Process Step 2: Load Data.........................................................................................10 Business Process Step 3: Safety Stock Stock Planning ......................................................................11 Business Process Step 4: SNP Heuristic Heuristic Run ...........................................................................12 Business Process Step 4a: CTM Planning Run.........................................................................14 Business Process Step 5: SNP Optimizer Run..........................................................................19 Run ..........................................................................19 Business Process Step 6: Capacity Leveling.............................................................................21 Business Process Step 7: SNP Interactive Planning Planning .................................................................22 Business Process Step 8: Execute Batch Macros .....................................................................23 Business Process Step 9: Exchange Requirements Requirements with Supplier............................................25 Business Process Step 10: Load Data into BW.........................................................................26 BW .........................................................................26 Business Process Step 11: Create/Update Planned Orders, Transfer Orders, and Purchase Requisitions................................................................................................................................28 Business Process Step 12: Release SNP to DP........................................................................29 Business Process Step 14: Deployment Deployment Heuristic .....................................................................30 Business Process Step 15: Deployment Optimizer....................................................................31 Optimizer....................................................................31 Business Process Step Step 16: Transport Transport Load Builder (TLB).........................................................31 Business Process Step 17: Delete Transaction Data.................................................................32 Data.................................................................32 Further Information Information ................................................................................................. .................................................................................................................................33 ................................33

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Best Practice: Manage Supply Network Planning & CTM in SAP APO (3.x) / mySAP SCM (4.0)

2

A p p l i c a b i l i t y, Go Go a l s , a n d Re Re q u i r e m e n t s To ensure that this Best Practice is the one you need, consider the following goals and requirements.

Goal of Using this Service This Best Practice enables you to set up a business-process management and monitoring concept for the business process "Supply "Supply Network Planning" Planning" which is part of the mySAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) solution using the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimizing (APO). (APO) . This business-process management and monitoring concept aims to: •

•

Define procedures for business-process oriented monitoring, error handling, and escalation management for Supply Network Planning Define the roles and responsibilities for all persons involved in the customers’ support and monitoring organization with respect to Supply Network Planning

These procedures ensure the smooth and reliable flow of the core business process in order to meet your business requirements.

Alternative Practices You can get SAP experts to deliver this Best Practice on-site if you order a Solution Management Optimization (SMO) service, known as the SAP Business Process Management service.

Staff and Skills Requirements To implement this Best Practice, you require the following teams: Application Management Team The SCM / APO business process management concept (which this Best Practice aims to produce) should be created by the Application Management Team. This team combines experts from your company: 

Business department



Solution support organization (for example, the IT department and the Help Desk)



Implementation project team

Execution Teams The execution teams are the following groups, which taken together form the customer’s Solution Support Organization: 

The Business Process Champion for each business process



Application Support



Development Support



Program Scheduling Management



Software Monitoring Team



System Monitoring Team

More information about roles and responsibilities of these teams can be found in the superordinate Best Practice General Business Process Management , which you can obtain through the SAP Solution Manager.
















3

Duration and Timing Duration Creating a business-process management concept may take around one week per business process. Implementing the business-process management concept may take around one additional week. Timing The best time to apply this Best Practice is during the planning phase or during the implementation phase of your mySAP solution.

How to Use this Best Practice Firstly read the whole document to get an overview of its structure, contents, and details. Determine the APO SNP core business process to be monitored. If you use the APO Core Interface (CIF) within this process, you should also see the respective Manage APO Core Interface in mySAP SCM Best Practice. Record all the relevant steps in your core business process; use the example business process as a template. Exclude template process steps that you do not perform. For every process step, take the monitoring elements from the tables and insert them into your own template. Complete the information according to your specific requirements, for example, frequency and time of monitoring activity. If the process step includes CIF data transfer, add the information from the CIF document, section Operation and Monitoring of the APO CIF. Do not forget to include the respective information for interfaces other than CIF and for business process steps performed with your own (Y-, Z-) programs. Determine the related monitoring activities, tools, and responsible teams and fill in the table accordingly. For activities that are not directly related to a business process step, like those mentioned in section System Administration Related to the APO CIF in the CIF best practice, create a separate table. Proceed in the same way with all your other core business processes and other activities you want to monitor.

P r e l i m i n a r y I nf nf o r m a t i o n

The SCM System Landscape The substantial components of an SAP SCM system landscape are summarized in the following table and shown schematically in the subsequent illustration. SAP APO System

The SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization system facilitates the strategic, tactical, and operational operational planning processes. APO consists of several software components: a relational database system (RDBMS) just as there is in any R/3 system, known as the APO DB; an SAP Web Application Server (or for releases up to APO 3.1 an R/3 Basis); the APO application programs; a separate, very fast objectoriented SAP DB database called liveCache; application programs running in liveCache – the COM routines; and a number of programs that execute elaborated optimization algorithms, algorithms, called the optimization engines. These components can run on the same or on different servers.

OLTP System

The Online Transaction Processing system covers functionality for sales and distribution, material and inventory management, controlling, shop floor control, logistic execution, and so on.
















4

OLTP System

SAP R/3 Plug-In RDBMS

SAP APO System

live Cache

OLTP System

OLAP System

RDBMS RDBMS

SAP R/3 Plug-In RDBMS

The various strategies for using SAP APO, SAP R/3, SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), and possibly other data processing systems in combination are called integration scenarios. Data for planned independent demand can enter the Supply Network Planning (SNP) module either through the Demand Planning (DP) module, or from external systems. Since SNP can have some or all of its Key Figures in the time series liveCache, liveCache, data can enter it in the same manner as they enter Demand Planning. Planning. Usually, an APO system is connected to one or several systems that provide historical and actual data, for example, sales figures, for your Supply Network Planning business process. These systems can be SAP R/3, SAP BW, and / or third party and legacy systems or a combination of these. As APO comprises a complete SAP BW, the tools for extracting data from other systems and transferring them to APO for demand planning purposes are the same as those used by SAP BW. The APO BW reads the data using remote function call (RFC) techniques, IDocs, or OS file access. In addition, data such as sales orders, stock, production orders or purchase orders can be sent from R/3 to SNP as order objects through the Core Interface Function (CIF), which is described in the corresponding Best Practice Manage APO Core Interface in mySAP SCM. SCM . On the other hand, the planning results of the supply network planning process are fed into other applications for further planning or execution purposes. The system types that can be used here are APO itself - in particular its modules DP and / or PP/DS -, SAP R/3, or again third party, or legacy, systems. The latter is not considered considered in this Best Practice document. This Best Practice is therefore based on a general and common integration scenario for setting up a mySAP Supply Chain Management solution using SAP APO. As data sources, SAP BW, SAP R/3, and flat files can be connected to the SAP APO system. SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) is the planning component of mySAP SCM, the Supply Chain Management solution provided by SAP. SAP APO is used to make strategic, tactical, and operational decisions and supports you in performing the following planning activities:
















•

Demand Planning (DP)

•

Supply Network Planning (SNP)

•

Production Planning (PP)

•

Detailed Scheduling (DS)

•

Deployment

•

Transport Load Builder (TLB)

•

Transport Planning and Vehicle Scheduling (TP/VS)

•

Global Available-to-Promise (gATP)

5

SAP APO is most of all a planning tool, although some industry specific execution functions are available, for example, production backflush for repetitive manufacturing. manufacturing. In standard business scenarios, execution functions, such as confirmations, confirmations, goods receipt, purchasing, and so on are performed in the SAP R/3 OLTP system, which contains all functionality for, among many others, Material Management MM, Sales and Distribution SD, Production Order Processing PP-SFC, Logistics Execution LES, and Controlling CO.
















6

Supply Network Planning The individual core business process and its modeling in SNP for planning your supply network, may differ more or less from the canonical process described and illustrated as follows.

Description: The process flow above describes a typical SNP process flow. Before data can be loaded into Supply Network Planning, a planning area and planning version must be created and initialized. The planning planning version can consist of order key figures, time series key figures, or both. After initialization, data can be loaded into SNP in several ways: by releasing a forecast from Demand Planning, by CIF transfer from R/3, or from a flat file using a BAPI (Data from BW can only come to SNP either via BAPI or by transferring it through the APO data mart into a DP planning area, from


















7

Most customers then run either the SNP Optimizer or the SNP Heuristic, depending on the size of the problem and whether they can meet their needs with the infinite planning considered by the Heuristic. After the run is complete, planners usually check the results in interactive planning, possibly using alerts. If the SNP Heuristic has been run, Capacity Leveling is often performed on bottleneck resources to ensure that a feasible plan is created. Often customers perform a variety of tasks via batch macros: these can be used to generate alerts and perform further calculations on the data either before or after the planning run. Many SNP process flows then exchange requirements with suppliers – often using collaborative planning. At some point in the planning flow, some SNP customers use remote InfocCubes in a BW system for reporting on the SNP plan. The SNP planning results can also be sent to R/3 using the CIF interface, where the planned orders and purchase requisitions produced by SNP planning are then further processed using MRP. In other cases, the constrained forecast calculated by SNP can be released back to DP, and used in evaluating the feasibility of a forecast. Still another use for the SNP data is to transfer it to PP/DS, where a more deta iled, single-location planning is performed. After the PP/DS run occurs, the deployment algorithms - either a heuristic or an optimizer based approach are available - can be used to plan transfers of single location-products location-pr oducts from one location to another, and to implement fair share rules. Although deployment deployment is a short-term planning, it uses algorithms similar to the SNP heuristic or optimizer, so it is classed within SNP. In some cases, a detailed transport load is needed to consider transport load building constrains (min-max load) and to ensure that loading of the transportation resources for multiple products is feasible. Some comment is also needed about the use of /SAPAPO/RLCDELETE: since SNP alone is not an execution system, many customers also use this report to clean the order objects from the planning version used for SNP Planning after the results of the planning run have been sent to their respective destinations.

Capable to Match If you are using CTM as a planning tool within your Supply Network Planning network – please also consult the above picture and paragraph – there are usually some differences to the SNP standard process. For this purpose we provide here also a typical business process involving CTM. The numbering of the process is oriented on the SNP process to make finding of relating chapters in this document easier. Of course your specific process might differ more or less from this canonical process:

The process flow is quite similar to the process flow of SNP above and therefore not


















8

Multilevel Supply and Demand Matching (SDM) is the umbrella for the SAP APO solution for matching prioritized customer demands and forecasts to a set of supplies, while taking the current production capacities and transport capabilities into consideration. SDM aims at a medium to long-term planning horizon and guarantees a timely multilevel synchronous production flow, triggering flow only when necessary. Because SDM is order-based, it requires a tool that also supports a multilevel dynamic order split. Capable-to-Match (CTM) is the central planning tool of SDM. In addition, an order-based method of Supply Distribution, as well as a tool that provides a graphical, flow-oriented view of the supply chain, complements complements this application. application. SDM complements the cross-plant supply chain planning strategies of the SAP APO applications Supply Network Planning (SNP) Planning (SNP) and Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS). Scheduling (PP/DS). Therefore it is also necessary to read especially the SNP Feasibility Check Assessment Guide for understanding understanding the entire business process. The business area Multilevel Supply and Demand Matching – similarly to SNP – covers the following activities; Supply Chain Planning 

Creating feasible plans for purchasing, manufacturing, distribution and transportation



Integrating purchasing, manufacturing, distribution, and transportation planning for the midterm



Making sourcing decisions through the Supply Network



Categorizing supply to meet prioritized demands



Synchronizing activities and plan material flow throughout the supply chain

Capable-to-Match (CTM) planning is the planning tool of SDM. It uses constraint-based heuristics to conduct cross-plant checks of production capacities and transportation capabilities based on predefined supply categories and demand priorities. At the same time, existing supplies are cleared when matching them with demands. The aim of the CTM planning run is to propose a feasible solution for fulfilling demands. CTM first prioritizes the demands then schedules them one after the other in the prioritization sequence. CTM then matches the supplies and demands on a first come, first served basis while taking the production capacities, transport options and existing supplies into consideration. consideration. Customers often use CTM as an alternative to the SNP heuristic or SNP optimizer. However, there are also customers using CTM in the PP/DS environment. For such cases, please also refer to the Best Practice document Manage Production Planning in SCM / APO. The CTM engine runs on an extra optimizer server, which must be based on Windows NT/2000/XP. This will connect to an APO application server using Remote Function Calls (RFC). During installation


















9

Procedure In applying this Best Practice procedure, you create a company-specific process-oriented monitoring concept. This concept consists of monitoring activities to be performed for each business-process step and its respective monitoring objects. When adapting this concept for your company, you must specify the times, responsible teams, and escalation paths (teams) for the monitoring activities associated with each business-process business-process step and its monitoring objects. In each of the business process steps described below, you will find the following information: •

A detailed functional description of the process step

•

Monitoring activities for the process step

•

Error handling, restartability, and escalation

A monitoring object table, listing each relevant monitoring object, showing the: o Monitoring object o Monitoring transaction or tool o Monitoring frequency o Monitoring time (intentionally left blank, to be filled in according to your schedule) o Indicator or error o Monitoring activity or error handling procedure o Responsible team o Escalation procedure As the frequency of SNP planning processes varies from daily activities at certain companies to only monthly or quarterly at others, the monitoring frequency in these monitoring object tables is partly only a rough estimate and has to be adapted to your particular business process. During the Going Live and stabilization phase of your APO implementation project, all items listed in this document should be monitored tightly. After becoming more experienced with system behavior, error occurrences, and application operations, the monitoring frequency can be decreased, but should never be reduced to zero unless you do not use the respective function. Important planning jobs usually have to be monitored after each run. Regular jobs of minor priority, for example, certain clean-up jobs, can be checked less frequently than the actual scheduled run times. For example, daily jobs can be checked weekly. The following seems obvious but should nevertheless be mentioned: Besides the monitoring of jobs described in the business process steps below, it is essential that you check all jobs that are running in your system at least several times per day for abnormal terminations. For status “cancelled”, see Error Handling, Restartability and Escalation. You should investigate and correct these terminations appropriately. This check can be done easily, for instance, with transaction SM37 by entering the time interval since the latest check and selecting all jobs with status “cancelled”. “cancelled”. If you have no automatic notification in place that informs the people responsible for Program Scheduling Management in your •


















10

background” option. General information on handling problems with version management is available in SAP Note 519014. When you need to change the validity period on a planning area with time series objects, simply enter transaction /SAPAPO/MSDP_ADMIN, right click on the planning area, and choose “Create Time Series”. Then enter the existing planning version and the new start and end dates for the time series that are desired. For large data volumes, it is preferable to use the option “Execute in Background”, both so that the program will not time out and so that the monitoring tools of SM37 are available.

Monitoring Activities Jobs for Running and Monitoring "Initialize Planning Version" (APO) If the planning area used for SNP contains time series key figures, you should periodically check for inconsistent time series objects using report /SAPAPO/TS_LCM_CONS_CHECK_ALL or /SAPAPO/TS_LCM_CONS_CHECK. The difference between the two reports is simply that /SAPAPO/TS_LCM_CONS_CHECK_ALL runs the report in display mode for all TS planning objects, while /SAPAPO/TS_LCM_CONS_CHECK has a parameter screen that allows the user to choose a planning area and to decide whether to correct the inconsistencies. SAP Note 358283 gives a description of the report.

Monitoring Object

Monitor Monitor TA/Tool Freq.

Initialize planning version

Report /SAPAP O/TS_L CM_CO NS_CH ECK

Initialize planning version Initialize planning version

Monit or Time

Indicator or Error

Monitoring Activity or Error Handling Procedure

As often as you change master data

Status

Run the job periodically to Program ensure that processes such scheduling as delta initialization of the management planning area have not created extraneous objects in the liveCache

Contact application support

SM37

Depending on business process

Status

Ensure that job completes successfully

Program scheduling management


SM37

Depending on business process

Status/mes sages

Whether or not the job completes successfully, monitor the messages in the job log to ensure that no errors occurred

Application support

Contact process champion

See general issues of Error Handling, Restartability and Escalation below.

Business Process Step 2: Load Data

Responsibility

Escalation Procedure


















11

Additionally, the consistency check report can be used in repair mode. The consistency check should also be executed if the master data are changed in APO but not visible or accessible via SNP. For additional information see SAP Note 577038. Usually, master data changes are sent by CIF from R/3 to SNP. If this is the case, you need to regularly check and update the selection data tables for the Planning Area(s) used for SNP. To do this, execute report /SAPAPO/MCPSH_GEN_SELTAB_MGM. There exists a consistency check for selections, in addition to functions for adding and deleting the functions. However, please read Note 332812 carefully before using this report to automatically correct inconsistencies. All CIF data interchanges should also be monitored as described in the Manage APO Core Interface in mySAP SCM. Some customers also load data using a BAPI. If large amounts of data are loaded by BAPI, it is possible that tables /SAPAPO/TSQ* can become very large and cause performance problems. Ensure that only delta records are loaded by the BAPI, and reinitialize the planning area using report /SAPAPO/TS_PAREA_INITIALIZE to prevent this problem.

Monitoring Activities Apart from safeguarding the general availability and consistency of the system components SAP APO, SAP BW, and SAP R/3 OLTP, to safeguard this business step SAP recommends that you monitor the objects listed in the following table. Monitoring Object

Monitor Monitor Monitor Indicator TA/Tool Freq. Time or Error


Responsibility

Master data

/SAPAP When O/CON data are SCHK modified

Messages

Check log of consistency Application check for master data objects support team that display inconsistencies.


Master Data

/SAPAP When O/CON data are SSHOW modified

Messages

Check log of consistency check


Application support team


See general issues of ofError Error Handling, Restartability and Escalation below.

Business Process Step 3: Safety Stock Planning There are two types of safety stock methods in SNP: standard methods (SB, SZ, SM, MB, MZ, and MM) and advanced methods (AT, AS, BT, BS). Standard methods are performed in macro SAFETY_CALC, see note 504253 for an introduction. Advanced methods are performed in report /SAPAPO/RSDP_CALC_SAFETY_STOCK (transaction: /SAPAPO/MSDP_SB). In the remainder of this section, only advanced methods are considered.




















12

Also make sure that the supply chain does not contain "cycles" for the location products to be planned. In this context, a cycle is a sequence of PPMs and/or transportation transportation lanes that transform a location product on to its self. If such cycles exist Safety Stock Planning will be caught in an endless loop unless note 547049 has been applied. Safety stock calculations for different location products are independent of each other. Therefore, the order of calculations is arbitrary. If you need to improve performance, you can execute parallel processing by creating separate variants for transaction /SAPAPO/MSDP_SB and run them at the same time. In general, to avoid lock issues, it is advisable not to make changes to the SNP planning version in which safety stock is run. Please also consider notes 599871 and 600766. Be aware that with release SCM 4.0, the results of extended safety stock planning can no longer be saved in auxiliary key figures, but in time series key figures only. In addition, the previous SNP standard planning folders (9ASNP94, for example) only support the methods SB, SZ and SM for safety stock planning. As of Release SCM 4.0 Support Package 08, a new 9ASNP_SSP SNP standard planning book exists for the safety stock planning, planning, which contains two specific time series key figures for safety stock planning (9ASAFETY, 9ASVTTY). The 9ASNP_SSP folder supports all methods of the safety stock planning in SNP (SB, SZ, SM, MB, MZ, MM, AS, AT, BS, BT). Please consult SAP Note 646738 for details.

Monitoring Activities The monitoring activities needed to ensure that safety stock planning runs are executed correctly are indicated in the table below. Jobs for Running and Monitoring "Safety Stock Planning" To ensure consistency and good performance of safety stock calculations, schedule the following jobs to run on a regular basis: Calculate safety stocks with advanced methods with report /SAPAPO/RSDP_CALC_SAFETY_STOCK. This report calculates the safety stock associated with reorder point methods (either alpha or beta service level; reorder cycle or reorder point). When checking the spool file, look especially for messages in the form of: "Product &1 in location &2 cannot be procured.” •




















•

13

The heuristic can be executed in two modes. Network (selected products in all locations) or Location (selected products in selected locations).

In addition to both modes you can set a flag to perform a full BOM explosion. This enables to plan a part of the network but on all levels. o For this the report /sapapo/rsnpllcset has to be performed to determine the low-levelcode of all products of a version. This should be done on a regular base but has to be done after relevant master data changes (e.g transportation lanes or PPM’s) Use of the Net Change planning flag is not recommended, unless the number of location products is high and the number of changing demands is comparatively small. Net change planning is only available in the active version (000). The entries of objects flagged for net change planning can be viewed from transaction /SAPAPO/RRP_NETCH. •

If the heuristic run is executed in Version 000, the inbound or outbound queues in the R/3 system should be locked during the time of the heuristic run: •

•

If you cannot rule out that, during the heuristic run, data will be transferred from an SAP R/3 system to the SAP APO system (or from APO to R/3) over the core interface (CIF), you can lock inbound or outbound queues queues in the SAP R/3 system from the SAP APO system. This should prevent inconsistencies inconsistencies occurring in the planning if, during the heuristic run, transaction data is transferred from SAP R/3 to SAP APO that is ignored by the heuristic. To lock outbound queues, you can use the /SAPAPO/CIFSTOPQUEUES and /SAPAPO/CIFSTARTQUEUES reports in SAP APO. Reports RSTRFCI1 and RSTRFCI3 are available for locking inbound queues. See also SAP note 487261 / 528913.

Occasionally, with the import of a support package, the length of data fields in report variants can change, which can cause inconsistencies if not corrected. Fortunately, this problem can be alleviated by running report RSVCHECK after implementation of a new support package.

Monitoring Activities Regarding SM37: when several heuristics identify large values of “Delay(sec)”, it is recommended that you investigate the possibility that another process (or several parallel jobs) are locking one another. While the processes are running, locks on the APO database can be seen with transaction SM12.




















Monitoring Object


SCM report /sapapo/rsnpll cset

Sm37

Report variants

RSVCH ECK

Monit or Time

14

Indicator or Error


Responsibility


On a regular base but after relevant master data changes

Status

Look for error messages like cycles. They are not allowed for SNP.



Once a month, or after importing new support packages

List of variants with problems

Check if any variants have problems




Business Process Step 4a: CTM Planning Run Critical steps in CTM The three critical areas for performance during CTM run are •

loading and preprocessing of data

•

runtime of the CTM engine

•

writing of the results to liveCache

In case of performance performance problems it is crucial to determine which which of the areas are critical -> Please see




















15

c) Slow prioritization prioritizat ion of demands Possible solutions: - The time for prioritization prioritiz ation is dependent on the amount of selected orders. Therefore, a primary goal should be to only select the orders necessary for the CTM run. - The time for prioritization prioritiz ation of demands also includes the rule determination determinati on and evaluation. The best way to improve performance here is to use the setting “Do Not Apply Rules”. However, if rules are necessary, try to use “Apply Default Rule” instead of “Apply Rules!” and evaluate whether the planning parameter “DEFAULT_RULE” is applicable (see SAP Note 441723). 2) CTM engine is slow: Possible solutions: - Use Aggregation. - Reduce horizons for late and early demand fulfillment as much as possible. - Filter demands by order category and date. 3) Writing to liveCache is slow: Possible solutions: - Use asynchronous liveCache update. - Optimize package size for creating orders; - Optimize package size for creating pegging relationships. - Optimize package size for asynchronous liveCache update.

Important additional performance settings Some specific performance relevant settings and referral notes are briefly discussed in the following paragraphs: •

Set the indicator “Do not Evaluate Pegging Relationships” in the technical settings of the CTM profile, in order to delete all non-firm orders without any further checks. (In APO 3.0A and 3.10 this setting must still be carried out via the planning parameter “FAST_DEL”.) The system then does




















16

approximately approximately the same this setting can save up to 50% of the time, as those steps will then run in parallel. •

The runtimes of “order selection” and “writing to liveCache” also strongly vary according to the chosen package sizes. The relevant parameters are maintained in /SAPAPO/CTMCUST. However the package size parameter for asynchronous liveCache updates can also be maintained via the variable planning parameter “PackageSize” for each CTM profile. Please consider the following for optimal settings of these parameters: 1. The setting for Order Selection is based on location-products location-prod ucts rather than on number orders. If, for example, the parameter is set to 5000, CTM reads the orders for the first 5000 locationproducts in one package from liveCache. If the average amount of orders per location-product combination is a.

0.2 (each fifth loc-prod. has an order), the result is 1000 orders per package

b.

10 (each loc-prod. has on average 10 orders), the result is 50000 orders per package

As you can see, this setting strongly depends on the orders (including fixed orders, PP/DS orders) existing per location-product. location-product. Therefore it is important to try different settings to clarify performance issues. As a guideline SAP expects values of 10000-50000 orders per package for optimal performance 2. The setting for the package size for asynchronous liveCache Update considers the existing requirements and creates orders for them. The PackageSize parameter determines here the number of requirements considered before sending the resulting orders to liveCache. The possibility exists that several orders may have been created per requirement or just one. Therefore the parameter does not imply that the package includes 500 orders, if this is the current setting. It means that 500 requirements are considered and the respective orders are sent in one package. It is only necessary to change this parameter if the CTM engine is waiting for liveCache (the queue for packages to be transferred to liveCache increases as liveCache is not dealing with the necessary updates fast enough). One can then look into the CTM Application log and find the number of orders transferred per package depending on the most relevant categories: a.

planned orders / production orders






















17

2) A rough estimate for CTM engine runtime (This might be wrong with asynchronous liveCache update, if writing is so slow that the CTM engine stops. In case of doubt about the runtime estimate for the CTM engine, look at the CTM trace file, and consider the time stamps for “Engine Start” and “Engine Finished”. This time estimate is more exact, but also more time consuming;): end time of entry for CTM Planning run in SM37->Job log - end time of reading transports; 3) A rough estimate estimate for writing data to liveCache: Sum of the differences between End and Start times of each package to be written to liveCache. 4) A second CTM run will occur after the end of the first one if there is safety stock being built up. Determining times here works accordingly.

CIF Queues In addition to those steps please note that the CIF Queues should be locked during the execution of the planning run to prevent inconsistencies. Please see SAP Note 528913 for a full discussion. Note that this does not apply if the CTM run is executed on an inactive planning version. version. Also note that you should upgrade your CTM engine in parallel with support package upgrades to ensure optimal functionality and performance. In general it is always good to take the newest available CTM engine.






















Monitoring Object

Monitor TA/Tool

Monitor Freq.

APO report CTM: /SAPAPO/C TMPLRUN

SM37

Dependi Status ng on your process.

This report runs the CTM in the background CTM application log

/SAPAPO/ After CTM -> every result run analysis -> display logs or /SAPAPO/ CTMAPLO G

Indicato Monitoring Activity or r Error Handling or Error Procedure Check if job is running as scheduled. If the report is not scheduled as provided by Application Support, schedule it accordingly. accordingly.

Responsibility


Program Contact scheduling application managemen support t

Messag Review messages in log Application e Type with stop, red or yellow support indicator


18






















Monitoring Object

Monitor TA/Tool

Monitor Freq.

User list for Optimizers

/SAPAPO/ See OPT03 above

Running optimizer processes

/SAPAPO/ See OPT12 above

Indicato Monitoring Activity or r Error Handling or Error Procedure

Responsibility


Displays a user list of optimization runs

Software monitoring team


Displays a list of optimizer processes on the optimization server

Software monitoring team


19


Business Process Step 5: SNP Optimizer Run The CIF Queues should be locked during the execution of the planning run to prevent inconsistencies. Please see SAP Note 528913 for a full discussion. Note that this does not apply if the optimizer is executed on an inactive planning version. Also note that you should upgrade your optimizer in parallel with support package upgrades to ensure optimal functionality and performance. To get an overview of the optimization system steps, refer to note 587407.






















Monitoring Object


APO report SNP: /SAPAPO/RM SNPOPT

SM37

Monitor Time

20

Indicator or Error


Responsibility


Dependi ng on your process.

Status

Check if job is running as scheduled.




If the report is not scheduled as provided by Application Support, schedule it accordingly.

Deployment: /SAPAPO/RM DPLOPT This report runs the optimizer in the background Optimizer log

/SAPAP O/SNP OPLOG

After every run

Status

Review messages in log with red or yellow status

Application support

Verify and maintain RFC connections

SM59

During installatio n or after

Status

Check that the TCP/IP connection to the optimizer server is open and

Program Contact scheduling software management. monitoring






















21

Business Process Step 6: Capacity Leveling The SNP heuristic performs only infinite planning: that is, without considering the available capacities of resources. In order to create a feasible plan, it will sometimes be necessary to adjust the results of the SNP heuristic to change the production times of quantities to ensure that no resource is overloaded. SNP Capacity Leveling underwent a complete redesign in SCM 4.0. The new version is also available in APO 3.0 as of SP 22 and in APO 3.1 as of SP15 as an alternative to the original version. Among other features, the new version offers three different leveling methods - heuristic, optimizer, and BADI. It is activated by creating a user parameter /SAPAPO/SNPCAP with value 'X'. Both versions can be executed interactively from transaction /SAPAPO/SNP94. Click on the icon "Capacity Leveling" in Capacity View. The new version can also be executed as a background job using transaction /SAPAPO/SNP05. Further information on the new version, including full documentation, can be found in release note 564702. Due to the improvements made in Capacity Leveling regarding result quality, performance, and stability we would like to encourage customers to test the new version for their business scenario and to use it instead of the original if it works well. For performance, consider the recommendations in Note 493258. Use an auxiliary table rather than the macro function for getting the date, and use macro function ACT_VERSION instead of macro function KEYFS_VERSION.

Monitoring Activities for Capacity Leveling
























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Business Process Step 7: SNP Interactive Planning In the following we discuss transaction /SAPAPO/SNP94, as most customers using CTM use this transaction for interactive planning. planning. However it is also possible to use PP/DS transactions like /SAPAPO/RRP3, depending on the customer scenario, e.g. in some cases when using CTM. In such a case, please refer to the Best Practice document Manage Production Planning in SCM / APO. Within transaction /SAPAPO/SNP94, you can do almost everything that SAP APO Supply Network Planning offers. In particular, you can evaluate planning results, compare different scenarios, enter management overwrites, correct key figures manually, run macros, aggregate data, and create or view






















23

Jobs for Running and Monitoring "SNP Interactive Planning (APO)" To ensure a timely and efficient notification of exceptions in Supply Network Planning, schedule the following jobs to run on a regular basis: •

•

Send Alert Monitor mails with report /SAPAPO/AMON_MAIL_BROADCAST. Depending on user profiles, mails are sent with an overview of existing alerts. The responsible persons then should call up the APO Alert Monitor, investigate the reasons for the alerts and take corrective actions in order to keep the production plan close to the needs of your company. Delete Alert Monitor alerts with report /SAPAPO/AMON_REORG. It deletes old alerts and is of particular importance if you use alerts stored in the database. Information on database alerts and dynamic alerts in Demand Planning can be seen in the APO Alert Monitor and below.






















•

•

•

•

24

Remove all unused macros from planning books associated with mass processing jobs, as they can be very performance-intensive and are not helpful to your business process. The planning book used for batch macros should have only the functionality it uses: in the case of SNP macros, the planning book should have no macros selected. All macros in mass processing should be defined as manually executable, and only in the planning book for the mass processing job in which they are used. In general, you do not need automatic macro execution for mass processing jobs. Furthermore, defining macros as default macros and to be executed at another time is redundant and extremely performanceintensive, since default macros are executed upon entry, loading a selection, changing data, and exit. Create several background jobs with roughly equal numbers of location products and run them in parallel. Make sure that no individual location product belongs to more than one selection






















Monitoring Object


APO report SM37 /SAPAPO/TS_ BATCH_LOG FILE

Dependi ng on your process.

Status

APO report

SM37

Dependi

Status


Responsibility




Contact software monitoring team

Program

Contact


This report deletes old SDP Job Logs.

25

Check if job is running as






















Monitoring Object


APO Report SM37 /SAPAPO/RD MCPPROCES S This report publishes the results of automatic and interactive planning to

Dependi ng on your needs, or at least once a week

Status

26


Responsibility




Contact Application Support.
























Best Practice: Manage Supply Network Planning & CTM in SAP APO (3.x) / mySAP SCM (4.0) BW releases 2.x (affects APO 3.0A and 3.10) this is not recommended. Please refer to SAP

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28






















Business Process Step 12: Release SNP to DP

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•

Release SNP Orders to PP/DS with report /SAPAPO/RRP_SNP2PPDS. This converts the

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Monitoring

Monitor Monitor

Monitor

Indicator

Monitoring Activity or

Respon-

31

Escalation













































































































































































































































SNP

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