How to Carry Out Resource Leveling

Use

Effective resource planning is vital to the realization of operational targets. With SOP’s resource leveling function, you can assess the viability of your targets in terms of the resources required to meet them. This gives you the knowledge you need to fine-tune your targets and optimize the use of resources.

SOP’s resource leveling function enables you to take the resource load into account when planning, by allowing you to directly check how changes to your plans affect the resource situation. You can adjust your plans to make optimum use of available resources.

Since sales and operations planning is generally carried out at an early stage in the planning cycle and on an aggregate level, the resource load for work center groups or product families⎯rather than individual work centers or materials ⎯is of particular interest. SOP typically focuses on a superior work center in the hierarchy (for example, the root of the hierarchy), a bottleneck work center, or a product grouping.

Prerequisites

Before you can carry out resource leveling in SOP, you must:

Create a PP task list (a routing, a rate routing, or a rough-cut planning profile) for the material, product group, or characteristic values combination whose resources you want to plan.

Configure resources planning in Customizing for Sales & Operations Planning.

If you use routings or rate routings to do resource leveling, define the key figure to which the resources are tied. Do this in Customizing for Sales & Operations Planning under Set parameters for info structures and key figures.

Define the planning plant of any information structure whose plant is not uniquely identifiable (that is, either your information structure does not contain the characteristic "plant" or your rough-cut planning profile covers more than one plant). Do this in Customizing for Sales & Operations Planning under Set parameters for info structures and key figures.

Set the default SOP plant for Sales & Operations Planning. Do this in Customizing for Sales & Operations Planning under Set planning plant for SOP.

Process Flow in Standard SOP

You perform resource leveling for the production quantities of a product group or material. The following resources are possible: work center capacities, materials, production resources/tools and costs. These resources are recorded in a rough-cut planning profile. Work center capacities may also be read from a routing or rate routing.

Resource leveling may be carried out for the active version or any inactive version in a single-level planning screen.

You view the capacity load for work centers at the following scheduling levels:

Detailed planning

Rate-based planning

Rough-cut planning

The system generates resource requirements for the quantities that you have entered in the Production line of the standard planning table.

From the split planning screen of the standard planning table, you can can branch into a standard analysis of the resource loads for materials and production resources/tools or costs.

Process Flow in Flexible Planning

In Flexible Planning, you perform resource leveling in the same way. Here, however, a resource may be tied to any key figure (not just production) and characteristic values combination (not just to a product group or material).

The system generates resource requirements for the planned key figure. If resource leveling is based on a rough-cut planning profile, this is the key figure defined here. If resource leveling is based on a routing or rate routing, this is the key figure defined in the information structure parameters (see "Prerequisites" above).

If resource leveling is based on a rough-cut planning profile, it must contain the same characteristic values combination as the one you are planning in the planning table. This means, for example, that you cannot view the resource requirements of just one product if you created the rough-cut planning profile for the whole product family.