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This blog highlights innovations shipped with the release of the SAP S/4HANA 2025 for SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling (PP/DS). Following a 2-year release cycle with major Feature Pack Stacks (FPS) in between we are building now on the S/4HANA 2023 FPS2 release shipped in October 2024 (release blog).
We continue to enhance end-to-end planning and execution capabilities with synchronized planning across time horizons and add important new capabilities to streamline the key figure integration concept. This allows us to better follow tactical planning decisions from SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) in operational production planning and scheduling with PP/DS and ensure that any disruption can be actioned fast and consistent.
To enhance the performance of production planners, our strategic investments in User Interface improvements continue to prioritize interactive planning capabilities. Specifically, we have refined the FIORI-based Advanced Scheduling Board (ASB) and expanded the use of more FIORI-native worklists. Complementing these UI enhancements, we have also developed additional analytical use cases, focusing on data extraction and visualization. These new features are integrated seamlessly into SAP SAC stories, providing deeper insights and more effective data presentation. Together, these advancements aim to streamline workflows, improve decision-making, and ultimately increase overall productivity for production planners.
In addition, we constantly improve generic and industry planning capabilities. Key features have been added to help customers gain even more value e.g. for Tank Planning and Multi-Level-Time-Buffer and Supply Creation Based Confirmation (SBC) with characteristics.
Flexible Constraints
Customers can now have more control along with the flexibility to enforce planning decisions for execution. The flexible constraint framework is an integration concept for tactical supply planning and operational production planning based on key figures. This provides the option to set tactical planning decisions in IBP e.g. target, minimum and maximum quantities per planning bucket for operational production planning and scheduling. These planning guard rails can now also be considered in the production planning optimizer engine (PPO). Visualization and Alerting is also enabled for flexible constraints to seamlessly support the planning process across time horizons.
Figure 1 – Flexible Constraint key figures in the product planning table
Moreover, time dependent safety stocks can now be leveraged for planning versions which also facilitates scenario-based inventory planning with IBP.
SAC based analytics
With multilevel time buffers planners can instantly evaluate a new planning situation much faster than in the past and thereby do better ad hoc plan adjustments. The multilevel time buffer (MLTB) KPI extraction helps evaluate the overall production plan and gives insights where bottlenecks and excess capacity exist which disturbs the overall plant performance. Moreover, also tank fill levels can be extracted and monitored with SAC stories now which helps to avoid overflows or shortages in production scheduling scenarios for process industry customers.
Figure 2 – SAC-story for Multilevel Time Buffer (MLTB key figure) analysis
In addition, the core MLTB calculation will bee enhanced with the next feature pack (planned for Q1 2026) to not only show the buffer to the originating demand element, but it now also provides the information of the limiting demand category and order number. This helps planners e.g. to instantly see if an order is pegged to a sales order even if the planner is working on lower levels of the BoM structure and is not only planning finished goods production. It helps to prioritize orders taking real time demand changes into account. Planners can instantly react on these changes to avoid creating unnecessary WIP or causing order delays. The MLTB key figures can be displayed in almost any planning UI of PP/DS.
Figure 3 – new MLTB overview with limiting order number and category
UI-Improvements
Providing an intuitive, at-a-glance overview of a production schedule requires the use of flexible colors within a Gantt chart for easier consumption. For the Advanced Scheduling Board individual color coding for shapes can now be configured on key-user level based on attributes of orders and operations. This new configuration framework for ASB will be complemented with extensibility features to be able to alter displayed information to the individual need of planners. Also, a new embedded tank fill level view has been added for the resource chart which allows the planner to much better oversee fill level violations when scheduling filling / draining operations (see picture figure 4).
Figure 4 – Flexible Constraint alerts in ASB, configurable coloring of shapes and new fill level display for storage resources
Further UI improvements include the continued shipment of FIORI-worklists for classic transactions to leverage FIORI capabilities such as filters and tile management for better structuring planning tasks. The FIORI-Worklists are also fully enabled for Joule based system interaction (navigational/transactional AI).
Figure 5 – Monitor Receipts FIORI-Worklist
Process Innovations
Further process innovations for tank planning include the option to make use of MRP-areas for storage tanks. With that customer can run replenishment scenarios also for tank / container resources. We also provide a new fill level adjustment FIORI app for tank planning which is typically required to create a balanced initial fill level for production planning. These adjustment orders can easily be cleaned up when the correct inventory figures for storage tanks are processed once from execution.
Supply creation-Based Confirmation (SBC) integrates aATP with PP/DS to confirm sales orders by triggering production when supply is insufficient, considering both finite capacity and component availability. The latest release also considers CDP characteristics during confirmation – crucial for mill industries that plan, and produce based on product attributes and rely on block planning over production resources.
Additional information on SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling including these new solution capabilities, planned roadmap items, and points of contact can be found here:
- Roadmap
- SAP Help
- On SAP.com
- Questions? Ask here
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