Availability Check and Order Network Simulation
In an increasingly complex and volatile supply environment, ensuring that materials and production capacity are available when needed is fundamental to operational reliability and customer satisfaction. The PPC ATP Planner, a key component of msg’s Planning Production Cockpit (PPC), enhances SAP’s standard availability logic to deliver multi-level, capacity-aware planning aligned with the broader SAP IBP framework.
By uniting material availability, resource capacity, and dynamic order networks in a single cockpit, the PPC ATP Planner gives planners a powerful tool to ensure delivery reliability, resolve conflicts early, and simulate realistic production scenarios with full transparency.
What´s your Business Impact?
With the PPC ATP Planner, planning accuracy is significantly improved. It enables:
- Faster order commitment with real-time capacity and material visibility
- Improved on-time delivery performance through realistic confirmations
- Proactive issue resolution, reducing last-minute disruptions
- Cross-plant transparency in complex supply networks
- Full alignment with SAP IBP and msg’s SCM solutions
Core Capabilities
The PPC ATP Planner builds directly on SAP’s standard ATP logic and adds multi-level visibility of material flows and capacity constraints. It allows planners to assess whether demands — such as sales or production orders — can be fulfilled on time, considering both material availability and resource utilisation.
Order networks are dynamically created across all production levels through pegging, linking receipts to demands. Even in make-to-stock environments, this enables planners to understand where bottlenecks may emerge, helping anticipate delays before they escalate.
Flexible configuration allows customer orders or critical demands to be prioritised. Priorities can be passed down across all related production levels, ensuring important orders are fulfilled first.
A multi-level upstream analysis traces the impact of supply shortages on higher-level demands. For example, planners can see which sales orders will be affected if a component is delayed.
The system conducts a simultaneous multi-level check to confirm whether materials and capacity are available to support a production order or meet a delivery commitment.
Resource overloads are visualised within the same cockpit. This early visibility allows planners to resolve capacity conflicts before they affect deliveries.
Planning, Simulation and Automation
Customisable alerts highlight issues such as delayed receipts, missing pegged relationships, or capacity constraints. These alerts support proactive planning and reduce response time.
Working directly with SAP master and transactional data, the PPC ATP Planner avoids the need for interfaces or duplicate maintenance. All updates are saved instantly and reflected in the core system.
The analysis can span multiple plants, offering a comprehensive view of supply chain dependencies across the enterprise.
The cockpit provides a range of configurable views with filtering options tailored to planner preferences. Intuitive navigation and links to relevant SAP transactions streamline daily planning tasks.
From Check to Action: Automated Planning Support
Shortages identified during the check can trigger the creation of MRP-relevant receipts or adjustments to existing orders. Capacity overloads can prompt rescheduling of production steps.
The PPC ATP Planner includes logic to automatically resolve scheduling conflicts. For instance, it adjusts production dates in response to late incoming purchase orders while preserving feasibility across all levels.
Working in conjunction with other PPC components, the ATP Planner can perform automated capacity levelling and scheduling to generate a fully feasible production plan (CTP – Capable to Promise).
What-if scenarios can be explored by simulating new demands or modifying existing ones. New MRP elements can be generated in simulation mode and, if desired, written directly into SAP.
Realistic customer delivery dates are calculated using a simultaneous check of multi-level material and capacity availability. Confirmed dates can be automatically updated in the sales order.
The PPC ATP Planner can be launched directly from SAP standard sales transactions (VA01, VA02, VA31, VA32) without any modifications. Confirmed availability results can be transferred back into the order.
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