PPC Capacity and Constraint Maintenance

It is the everyday requirement of any production and trading company to create feasible plans for production, procurement, and material supply. Similarly, specific constraints on the use of storage and transport capacity are to be considered.

SAP handles this topic within capacity planning as part of the PP component. Work centres with defined capacity types make use of formulas to realistically show how long resources are utilised. This calculation is then compared to a predefined available capacity. The approach is engineered to efficiently solve production problems. However, the settings are very complex, oversized in some scenarios and insufficient for others.

The module “PPC Capacity and Constraints”, which is fully integrated into SAP, closes this gap, and offers key benefits:

Mass maintenance of work centres

Customers using the ERP capacity planning and the modelling of PP work centres obtain a substantial efficiency increase and comfort in maintenance.

For this purpose, the collective maintenance of work centres can be used to jointly view and maintain shifts of related work centres (machine, personnel) neatly in any chosen time frame and periodicities. No longer must numerous clicks be made to navigate in the shift sequences of every capacity type to set these individually per day.

Shift maintenance: periodic mass maintenance of work centres with multiple capacities (machine, personnel) - here per week

The following figure is an example of a change in the shift sequence of several work centres for two weeks in just one step. Permitted shift sequences are:

"866": Early shift 8 hours – midday shift 6 hours – evening shift 6 hours
"880": Early shift 8 hours – midday shift 8 hours – evening shift 0 hours

Appropriate maintenance could also be done on a daily or monthly grid. In this manner, intervals for the work centres are easy to change and may be adapted better to the real situation in the plant if necessary.

Shift maintenance: mass change of the shift sequence

Planning constraints

Additional periodic constraints that apply in the planning can be maintained. For example, quantity restrictions per day, availability of the main component per week, storage bin availability per day, transport capacity, tools and restrictions concerning personnel.

In addition to the available capacity of a work centre, a further restriction of the amount can be defined, either in general or for a specific product. For example, limitations of 100 kg on machine A per week or 10 pieces of material X per day are easily implemented.

Definition and maintenance of restrictions: the number of the quantity available per month of a main component (maximum value) compared to the already consumed quantity (actual value). Exceeding the restriction value triggers a warning (percentage red/yellow).

Machine restrictions

This functionality provides the ability to model machines, for instance by defining sequence constraints for the sequencing per bottleneck.

Exclusion matrix: permitted and prohibited sequence of operations on a resource based on characteristics, e.g. to avoid large setup transitions.

The module "PPC Capacity and Constraints" offers options and analyses for the exceeded restrictions in all the above scenarios.