I did create an integration model for master data and location and so on. After activating and CIF processing, no planner is transferred into APO.
Do I have to create the planners again in APO ?
MSP controllers in R/3 are location specific whereas in APO planner codes are applicable to all locations.
If you do copy your MRP controllers from R/3 to APO you will have to make sure that you do not have conflicting controller numbers e.g. MRP controller 001 in plant 1000 is for APO FGs, MRP controller 001 in plant 2000 for MRP procured plastics, MRP controllers 099 in plant 3000 for APO FGs.
As you only have MRP controllers in R/3 but in APO you
have production planner, SNP planner, Demand planner and TLB planner,
I would suggest that you create some MRP controllers in R/3 that you use
to filter your products for selection into your integration models and
then concentrate on creating sensible APO planner codes that match your
requirements.
How to set Planning Time Fence in APO?
The planning time fence in R/3 (MRP views) becomes the
PP/DS fixing period in APO. This period is protected from heuristics
in APO although this only prevents orders being created that finish within
this period. Orders can start within this period so long as they
finish outside of it. This usually confuses people the first time
they see this.
I have 10 different countries settle up in my system, and of course each of them have their own demand planners. I set up a planning area and a planning book for one of them and my idea is to set up identical planning books and areas for all of them, having then 10 different planning areas. These planning areas will have exactly the same structure.
Is that the best practice, or shall I have to try to set up just one planning area for all of them?
Do the users are going to be blocked when they start
working?
I would recommend one planning area/book. You can control
who accesses data via the selection profiles. As long as the selection
profiles don't overlap, the users will not be able to lock each other.
Would be advisable to restrict the number of planning areas to one and make as many planning book/data views as required out of it. 10 planning areas are going to take a lot of livecache
If not allowing visibility to the other countries planning books is an issue you can restrict the data view authorizations to the relevant users or if using the dame data view restrict the selection profile authorization and create country specific selection profiles.
The other problems with the 10 planning areas would occur when you consolidate data for all countries, data backup etc. then 10 planning area consistency cheecks and reinitializations and a lot of other issues multiplied 10 times
Planning area locking might happen but I guess you need
to train the users to be on display mode when not using or how to find
who is locking and ask them to come out if needed.
Its OK it have a single planning area for if the countries
are sharing same process but few other aspects that I thought are like
1) If there is any change in process requested by a single
country it would become difficult to manage considering tha fact that all
other countries also share the same configuration
2) Using a single planning area and POS will also increase
the CVCs handled can detoriate the performance
3) The data management will be bit tricky and functions
like realignment (if required) should be handled carefully
4) impact of mismanagement (scheduling a wrong background
job for instance) would me on higher side with such set of configuration
Of course there are also many advantages of having a single planning area.
So you you can evaluate the Pro's and Con's of both approaches.
