Integrated Business Planning & Reporting

Demand Planning (DP)

The Demand Planning Benchmark is one of three benchmarks in the SAP APO Benchmark suite. Demand planning enables supply chain partners to forecast and plan demand in consideration of historical demand data, causal factors, marketing events, market intelligence, and sales objectives. Results from the planning process can be automatically fed to other nodes of the supply chain.

DP Benchmark Description

In the benchmark, mass processing is used allowing you to create demand forecasts for large numbers of products while optimizing system resources. All mass processing jobs run concurrently in the background.

For the Demand Planning Benchmark, the baseline scenario assumes that each of 2,000 customers buys 500 products, resulting in 1 million characteristic combinations (2,000 customers times 500 products). As demand planning considers the last two years to plan for the next two years, the total number of time buckets (measured in weeks) is 208 (corresponding to the 208 weeks of four years). Therefore, the total number of data records considered is 208 million. The number of automatically aggregated characteristic combinations (combinations of products and distribution centers) is 100,000. (Under the condition that all products are available in each distribution center.) The results of the benchmark are demand figures that result in actual demand.

Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS)

The Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) Benchmark is one of three benchmarks in the SAP APO Benchmark suite. Companies use the component Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS) to plan and optimize multi-site production, while simultaneously taking into account product and capacity availability.

PP/DS Benchmark Description

Based on heuristics the Production Planning Benchmark solves specific planning tasks for selected objects, depending on the focus of planning – for example, products, operations, resources, or line networks – using a particular planning procedure algorithm.

This benchmark creates customer demands in each production plant and uses the production planning run to fulfill them. The benchmark covers two layers:

• Plants that produce materials
• Suppliers to the plants

Supply Network Planning (SNP)

SAP APO integrates purchasing, manufacturing, distribution, and transportation into one consistent model enabling organizations to create a very close match between supply and demand. SAP APO is able to synchronize activities and plan material flow throughout the entire supply chain. The results are feasible plans for purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and transportation.

SAP APO also enables organizations to dynamically determine how and when inventory should be distributed. The system draws on the data universally available in liveCache to optimize deployment plans based on available algorithms, as well as user rules and policies.

In the benchmark, mass processing is used, allowing you to run the heuristic planning for large numbers of product-location combinations, with mass processing jobs running concurrently in the background.

SNP Benchmark Description

This benchmark covers the demand of the distribution centers (DC) that has been created by the demand planning run. The benchmark covers three layers:

• The DCs that have the demand
• Plants that produce the materials needed
• Suppliers to the plants

For example, a supply network contains 20 suppliers, 10 plants, 10 distribution centers, and 250 transportation lanes. We assume 93 raw products and 10,000 finished products. In total, there are 120,093 location products. Each plant manufactures 2,000 finished products. At each DC, all 10,000 products are available.