Supply Chain Management 7.0. For more information, visit the Supply Chain Management homepage.
Summary
In the steel or paper industry resources are often planned with campaigns. In these campaigns particular products with special characteristics are produced. The campaigns span periods from a few hours two a few weeks. The article describes a way how to model and plan the campaigns in SAP APO Supply Network Planning with Optimization-Based Planning when you know exactly the periods for the campaigns in advance.
Author: Dr. Frank Horlacher
Company: SAP AG
Created on: 4 May 2010
Author Bio
Dr. Frank Horlacher is a Supply Chain Management Content Expert with 10 years experience in SAP APO development and solution management in supply chain management production planning, detailed scheduling, manufacturing execution and optimization system integration. His area of Expertise: SAP APO Modules: DP, SNP, PP/DS, ATP, CIF; Characteristic Dependent Planning SAP ERP Modules: SD, MM, PP, VC, FI-CO
Campaigns in steel production ...................................................................................................................... 3
Campaigns in SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO)............................................................ 4
How to implement and plan campaigns in Supply Network Planning with Optimization-Based Planning ......... 4
Master Data ............................................................................................................................................... 5
Production Data Structures (PDS) ............................................................................................................................... 8
Supply Network Planning Optimization Run ............................................................................................. 13
Conclusion and outlook ........................................................................................................................... 14
Related Content .......................................................................................................................................... 15
Campaigns are introduced to improve machine utilization and to take manufacturing constraints into account. When a steel producer also gives sales order promises based on campaigns in time deliveries will increase.
Figure 1 Overview of steel production flow lines
Let’s take a look at examples of campaigns in steel production
Rare steel grades on a hot rolling mill are only produced in predefined periods.
There can be campaigns for high tensile strength steels on the pickling line.
On a galvanizing line campaigns are run for hot rolled base material or very thick zinc layers > 350 g/m².
For long products campaigns for dimensions are set on the rolling mill.
Often campaigns are defined on days or hours where only a particular product is produced for that period. Outside of this period either a so called normal program is run where all other products can be produced or the complete time is filled with subsequent campaigns.
How to Plan Campaigns in SAP APO Supply Network Planning for a Steel Plant?
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Figure 2 Example of a rolling program from the website of Vizag Steel.
The campaigns are defined in the resource calendars.
Campaigns in SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO)
In SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO) there is also the term campaign but this has another meaning than in the steel industry. These campaigns in the APO where developed mainly for the chemical industry when you do not know the start and end time of the campaign.
In SAP APO the Block Planning functionality matches the requirements of the steel industry for campaigns. Block Planning is a feature of Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS).
The objective of this paper is to show how to plan campaigns in Supply Network Planning with Optimization-Based Planning to create a yearly master plan for a steel plant.
How to implement and plan campaigns in Supply Network Planning with Optimization-Based Planning
The purpose of the paper is to describe how to take campaigns into account during the creation of a master plan for a steel plant with the APO SNP Optimizer. The SNP Optimizer is a cost based optimizing algorithm which optimizes the product flow on resources in time buckets of days, weeks or even longer periods.
In order to run such an optimization a supply chain model has to be set up. The supply chain model contains the master data and the manufacturing constraints which resemble the real world steel plant.
Figure 3 Supply Chain Model in the Supply Chain Engineer (SCE).
Locations to define where the material is produced or stored.
o plants
o storage locations
Location products to define what is produced or stored in which location
Resources to define the capacity to produce, store, handle or transport.
Production Data Structures (PDS) to define the input and output production quantities and the capacity consumption on the resources.
Transportation Lanes to define which products can be moved from one location to another by which means of transport and how long it takes to move the products.
Our main interest with the focus on campaign planning lies on the resources and the Production Data Structures (PDS).
Resources
Resources hold the information of capacity for planning. The production resources are created as work centers in ERP and transferred to APO. To model campaigns we need dummy resources which hold the capacity for the particular campaigns. The capacity profile shows the availability of the resource capacity for the campaigns.
Example:
We have a hot rolling mill with regular capacity availability and some dedicated periods for a special steel grade. These dedicated periods are modeled with the dummy resource. During times when the campaigns are planned the dummy resource has all the capacity and the regular resource has no availability.
Figure 4 left: regular hot rolling mill with capacity available during times of the normal program. Right: dummy resource with capacity availability during times of campaigns.
You can see that you are able to define the capacity within one day up to the accuracy of one second.
Let’s see how that looks in the SNP planning book.
Figure 5 Planning book with available capacity for campaign
The screen shot shows that the resource WFHY03_0001_001@Q2NCLNT050 which is the regular hot rolling mill has capacity availability on all days except on the 13 January 2011. On 12 January and 14 January 2011 the capacity is split between the regular resource and the dummy resource WFHY04_0001_001@Q2NCLNT050 for the campaigns. On 13 January the total available capacity is dedicated to the resource for the campaign.
Now that we created the capacity constraints for the campaigns on the resource we need to go on with defining how production consumes the right capacity for the right products.
Production Data Structures (PDS)
The PDS represent the Bill of Material (BOM) and the Routing from the ERP in one master data object in the APO. The PDSs are transferred from ERP to APO. They cannot be changed in APO. In the Integration Model you have to set the usage of the PDS to S for SNP because we need an SNP PDS for the SNP Optimizer.
We have separate products for the hot rolled coils according to the specification of the steel. In SNP we use planning products with no classification data.
Transaction: /SAPAPO/CURTO_SIMU - Production Data Structure (PDS) -> Display Production Data Structures
Figure 6 PDS for special steel grade product on dummy resource for campaigns
Product 100 is a hot rolled material for a special steel grade. This steel grade determines the campaign. Therefore this steel grade is planned on the dummy resource with the campaign dates.
How to Plan Campaigns in SAP APO Supply Network Planning for a Steel Plant?
SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com
Product 97 is also a hot rolled material but this material is planned on the regular hot rolling mill because this product does not require specific campaigns.
If we look at the SNP Planning book, we can see which product can be planned on the regular hot rolling mill and the products which require campaign planning. In reality all products are rolled on the one and only real hot rolling mill but for planning purposes we split the capacity of the hot rolling mill.
Figure 8 Planning book capacity view of the regular hot rolling mill for the normal program products.
How to Plan Campaigns in SAP APO Supply Network Planning for a Steel Plant?
SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com
In this example I select all products from the hot rolling mill upstream i.e. all hot rolled coil sales materials and the relevant slab materials as inputs to the hot rolling operation. The forecast is for the hot rolled coil sales materials. The stock on hand is for finished and semi-finished material.
Then I press the button to open the optimizer screen.
Figure 11 SNP Optimizer profile settings
The default optimizer settings can be used and the optimizer is started.
The result of the optimization run is the distribution of the production quantities to the daily buckets on the resources. The campaign relevant product # 100 is planned exactly during the periods where the campaign resource has the available capacity. During these times the regular product # 98 can only take the remainder of the available capacity. A split of the daily capacity resulting in a split of the production quantities is also possible as defined in the capacity profile for 12 and 14 January 2011.
Conclusion and outlook
The result shows that you can plan production in campaigns with the SNP Optimizer when you exactly know the start and end dates of your campaigns with additional resources and matching production data structures. There are cases where you don’t know the exact start and end time of your campaigns and you expect the start and end time of a campaign as an output from the optimization run. This is also possible with SAP SNP Optimizer Lot Size Planning, Cross-Period Lot Size Planning and Sequence-Dependent Lot-Size Planning.
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