How to Setup Demand Planning in SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization

SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization, demand planning allows a business to perform forecasting of their materials while considering all the factors that affect the demand. Demand planning is periodic and contains multi-step processes such as data gathering, statistical analysis, reviewing market intelligence reports, and performing adjustments against budgeted forecast to drive material requirements planning. SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization, demand planning is designed as a platform so it must be tailored to an organization’s product types and nature of their business with various key figures, characteristics, data aggregations or disaggregation factors, planning object structures, planning areas, planning books, macros and data views to execute the process.

This article will provide steps for implementing the solution, along with reasoning behind the configurations, prerequisites, navigation with transactions codes, relevant SAP notes, and tips and tricks for troubleshooting issues during implementation.

In this article you will learn:

- The essential steps of SAP demand planning configurations including time series, planning books, statistical forecasting, background job set up, and demand plan release to ECC;
- Explanation of each configuration step involved with navigation path, transaction codes, and tables; and
- Tips and tricks on configurations, performance optimization, and error resolutions.