SAP S/4HANA provides a comprehensive ERP solution that many manufacturing companies use to manage their business processes. The integration of finance, HR, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain and customer management, among others, into a single platform makes everything seem well organized. And with “SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling,” the picture seems complete for production planners as well. Or is something essential missing?

In our blog MRP and deploying ERP for production planning, we discuss generically the challenges of setting up Advanced Planning and Scheduling within an ERP. In this blog, we pay special attention to production planning within SAP S/4HANA.

Experiences around production planning with SAP from the market

Based on communications from SAP, the possibilities for planners with SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling seem almost limitless. But when we start talking to customers about manufacturing planning and scheduling working with SAP, the same 3 bottlenecks often come back:

• Rigidity: When setting up production planning, there appears to be a rather rigid separation between production lines. The production of certain products are thereby assigned by default to a certain production line. But actually you want to work with preferences, since that makes the planning possibilities much more flexible. So for the production of a certain product you prefer production line A, but under certain circumstances that product can also be produced on production line B.
• Calculation time: Changes often have to be made to the production schedule at the last minute. For example, because a last-minute order has to go through or when a malfunction occurs on line A causing line B to be more heavily loaded. Then you want calculations to be calculated in real time; with SAP systems, however, this can take longer.
• Cluttered: A third shortcoming that SAP customers often share with us is that scheduling information is presented visually cluttered. And to have quick insights into day-to-day planning, good overviews are essential.

What we see and don’t see in SAP demos

Triggered by customer conversations, we watched several demos and presentations of production planning in SAP S/4HANA. Here, we initially noticed that production planning is presented as a convenient functionality that includes fine real-time insights for planners. Here, SAP incorporates functional wishes from planners to increase usability. Some examples are:

• Drag & drop: The drag & drop functionality in the scheduling board allows planners to easily move production batches forward and backward in the schedule.
• Manage capacity utilization: Through the Work Center Capacity functionality, you can see which spots in the production environment are overstaffed, information you can use to adjust the production planning.
• Configuration and personalization: You can personalize the “tiles” in the application as you wish, and the system can also customize fields as needed An example of this is the capacity planning table that users can now expand with their own fields to include recognizable designations, for example.

But the demos do not emphasize the software’s role in proactively creating an optimal schedule. Solving that puzzle optimally lies with the planner himself. So, for example, SAP gives you insight into which spots within the production environment are overstaffed, but does not suggest a new and optimized schedule. So planners can work with more useful insights and tools, but in the traditional way. It is not a revolution aimed at creating an optimal schedule.

So we pay particular attention to what SAP does not tell us. And then we miss, among other things, the following important prerequisites for seeing SAP’s planning tool as an Advanced Planning & Scheduling tool:

• Use of AI: SAP production planning does not use AI to automatically generate the most optimal production schedule based on the latest information. Consequently, the package is not optimized for the most efficient use of people and resources, predicting demand and automatically adjusting schedules based on real-time data.
• Limited flexibility: The planner has to puzzle to optimize the day-to-day planning while getting relevant and up-to-date information from the system. But calculating new schedules takes time and effort which makes the solution less flexible.
• No external data sources: SAP production planning relies primarily on information from the system itself, whereas external information can be highly relevant for creating optimal planning. Consider, for example, the dynamics in demand forecasting.

Additional restrictions in the SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud edition

In addition to the above limitations, the Public Cloud edition has some additional concerns. These stem mainly from the fact that SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud is designed as a standardized solution with limited customization options compared to the on-premises version. Organizations with specific or unique business processes may face considerable limitations in adapting their processes to the cloud version. This can be challenging for organizations accustomed to on-premises or older SAP ECC versions. You can read more about common challenges in this article.

Integration of Planwisely with SAP S/4HANA

The limitations of SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling can be a reason to look at Planwisely as a complement to the SAP environment. The open APIs of both SAP and Planwisely allow for custom linking. Working with leading SAP partners, we offer SAP customers an optimized solution for Advanced Planning & Scheduling.