Production Planning
Which orders are exposed to something that has not arrived
Production orders, operations and component demand: where a schedule is exposed to something that has not arrived yet.
See it answer one of theseAsk it
Questions you can ask on day one
Asked in plain language. Each answer prints the SAP entity, field and period it was computed from, underneath the figure.
- “Which orders are at risk from a material that has not arrived?”
- “Where is production running behind plan?”
- “Which work centres are the constraint this month?”
- “What has been confirmed against what was planned this period?”
- “Which orders have not moved in the last two weeks?”
- “What is our scrap rate by material this quarter?”
What it reads
The production objects behind an answer
Production orders
Header and status: planned against confirmed quantity, start and finish dates, and the orders that are simply not moving.
Operations
The routing steps behind an order, with the work centre each runs on and the time it was confirmed at.
Component demand
What each order needs, in what quantity, by when, which is the half of the risk question production owns.
Work centres
Where capacity is consumed, and where a queue is forming.
Material master
Lead times and procurement type, which decide whether a shortage is recoverable inside the schedule.
Why it is hard
What no standard report does for you
Risk is a question about two modules at once
Whether an order is exposed depends on what it needs and on whether that has arrived: demand on one side, goods movements and open purchase orders on the other. Neither module answers it alone, and joining them by hand is why the answer is usually a spreadsheet.
Behind plan is a comparison, not a status
An order is not flagged as late; it has a planned quantity and a confirmed one, and a date that has passed. The interesting figure is the gap, which nothing stores.
A constraint only appears in aggregate
No single order tells you a work centre is the bottleneck. That shows up when confirmations are grouped by work centre across a period, which is a report nobody has until somebody asks for it.
The question production actually asks
Not “how much did we make”. That one is on a screen already.
The question is what is about to go wrong: which orders are exposed, where the queue is forming, what has stopped moving. Each of those is an aggregate across documents that individually look fine, which is precisely the shape a standard report is worst at and a compiled query is good at.
Two modules in one figure
Exposure is the clearest example of a question that no single module can answer. The demand sits with the production order; whether it has been satisfied sits in goods movements and open purchase orders.
AnrilX reads both and states which entity each half came from. Where the relationship it would need is not one SAP models, it says that rather than inferring a link from dates and quantities lining up, the approach that works until two things happen on the same day.
Behind plan is arithmetic
An order is not marked late. It has a planned quantity, a confirmed quantity and dates, and the gap between them is a calculation nothing stores. Computing that in code rather than leaving it to a model means the same question asked twice returns the same number, which is the minimum standard for a figure anybody schedules against.
One of these questions, answered
Which production orders are at risk from a material that has not arrived?
Twenty-three orders, covering 4,180 units due in the next fourteen days. Nineteen of them wait on the same component: TG-2207, whose purchase order is eleven days past its confirmed date. Fixing one receipt clears most of the exposure.
Source: A_ProductionOrder_2 and A_ProductionOrderComponent · open reservations with no goods movement · joined to I_PurchaseOrderHistory on Material for the receipt position · scheduled finish within 14 days
Assumed: at risk means the component is short against the reservation, not that stock is merely low. An order with enough on hand is excluded even where the purchase order is late.
Where it stops
What it will not answer here
The limits particular to this module. Worth knowing before a pilot rather than during one.
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Order confirmations are read as posted. Where a stage was confirmed late, the dates reflect the posting rather than when the work happened, and the answer says which it used.
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Capacity analysis reflects what is confirmed in the system. It is not a scheduling engine and does not propose a revised plan.
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MRP figures are as current as the last run left them. The answer states when that run was rather than presenting a requirement as though it were computed this morning.
Questions people ask us
Can it tell us which orders are at risk?
It reads component demand against what has actually been received, which is a question that crosses production and procurement. Both sides name the entity they came from, so the answer can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Does it replace our planning system?
No. It reads and explains what is in SAP; it does not reschedule, re-plan or propose alternative sequencing.
Can it show where we are behind?
Yes, as a comparison between planned and confirmed over a period you choose, grouped by material, order type or work centre.
Questions often cross into
Purchasing, read at the grain the money sits on
Purchase orders and their items, goods movements, supplier invoices and info records, with spend sitting on the item, where it actually lives.
Which defects keep coming back from the same supplier
Inspection lots, defects and notifications, traced back to the supplier, the batch and the process step that produced them.
Equipment that costs more to keep than to replace
Equipment, work orders and downtime: the cost of keeping a machine set against what it would cost to stop.
Bring the question your reports cannot answer
Thirty minutes against a live SAP system we provide: no access to yours, nothing to set up. If it cannot answer, you find that out in half an hour rather than three months into a pilot.