Leverage SAP S/4HANA – PPDS Block Planning Functionality to Optimize Production Schedule Considering High Priority Customer Anticipated Demand

As supply chains evolve in complexity, manufacturing processes are becoming more complex as well. Evolving customer demands, proliferating SKU portfolios, increasing product design complexities, and the need to reduce manufacturing cycle time, are all adding to the complexities in the manufacturing world. A typical plant today manufactures a wide gamut of products, sometimes leveraging the same production line, for a large portfolio of customers. The manufacturing planning hence becomes an optimizing act that incorporates both operational planning (like manufacturing capacity planning) as well as tactical planning (like setup time optimization, route flows etc.). So inherently, the complexities of manufacturing end up spilling into complexities of manufacturing planning as well. And with that comes the need to leverage tools and functionalities that can help manage these complexities better.

Block planning is one such feature in SAP production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS), that can help manage manufacturing planning complexity better. While SAP S/4HANA PPDS can help build an optimized schedule based on setup optimization, lead time, and other factors like alternate work center consideration, tool availability, planned machine shutdowns, etc., Block Planning functionality helps in the pre-assignment of resource capacity to produce a group of products with similar characteristics. Block Planning functionality can thus help businesses serve their customers better by prioritizing high-priority customer demand and can improve production yield and efficiencies by reducing changeover time.

Read this article to be able to:
- Understand the building blocks to enable block planning functionality
- Know how to define the blocks and transfer the data to PPDS
- Learn to update PPDS – Optimizer profile to enable block planning functionality