Planning Activities

You create a planning activity in order to carry out mass processing for the following actions:

Forecasting

Copying key figures from one information structure to another

Executing macros

Transferring data to Demand Management

Transferring data to Profitability Analysis

When copying key figures from one information structure to another, you do not need to create an activity if both of the following apply:

Consistent planning is defined for both the source and the target information structures.
You require a high-level copy with subsequent distribution.

For more information on high-level copying, see Standard Copying Methods.

An activity can comprise one or more actions. For example, you might run a mass processing job that executes several macros at the same time. The sequence in which these actions are processed depends on the sequential numbers you define for them in the activity. The system performs all actions for the first characteristic value before processing the second characteristic value.

Characteristic value	Action
Sales organization NORTH	First macro
	Second macro
	Third macro
Sales organization SOUTH	First macro
	Second macro
	Third macro

Consequently, if you want the system to perform one action for all characteristic values before it starts the next action, you must define separate planning activities.

If you want to carry out several actions of different types, SAP recommends that you define a planning activity and a planning job for each action. This is particularly important because the quantities transferred to Demand Management are those that the system finds in the database. For example, if the key figure you want to transfer changes as the result of a macro, the results of this macro need to have been saved in the database first.

For the following four actions, you create four planning activities:

Forecast sales of materials
Copy this sales data into another information structure
Execute a macro on this data thereby generating production quantities
Transfer this production data to Demand Management