AATP oprions for manual allocation/re-allocation

[Kaiserferi]

New to SAP and need some advice from you. We have SAP S4/HANA 2023 version with AATP solution which I think is a powerful tool however since we are in the automotive business with highly fluctuating demands and urgent requests sometimes (basically on a weekly basis) we need to help out customers with some extra in order to avoid production line stoppages. I fully understand AATP (BOP, PAL etc.. possibilities) Our lead times are high ~16 weeks since we are distributing parts also next to our own production. My simple question is that is there any possibility that the quantites that ATP allocated to a sales order re-allocating somehow to an other SO/customer?

[DequanXu]

Hello,

In SAP S/4HANA, Advanced Available-to-Promise (AATP) provides several features that can help you manage and optimize the allocation of quantities to different sales orders. Given your situation in the automotive industry with fluctuating demands and urgent requests, AATP can be a highly beneficial tool for managing these challenges.

To address your specific question regarding reallocating ATP quantities from one sales order to another, SAP AATP has functionalities like Backorder Processing (BOP) and Product Allocation (PAL) which can be very useful:

1. **Backorder Processing (BOP):** This feature allows you to re-evaluate and reschedule existing sales orders based on current priorities and business rules. With BOP, you can reprioritize sales orders and reallocate available quantities to higher-priority orders. This means that if a more urgent order comes in, you can adjust your existing allocations to ensure critical deliveries are met.

2. **Product Allocation (PAL):** PAL is used to manage and control the distribution of limited product quantities to various customers or regions. It can help you prioritize certain customers or orders based on predefined criteria, ensuring that critical demands are met first.

Both BOP and PAL enable you to dynamically adjust to changing demands and reallocate resources efficiently. Given your high lead times and the need to prevent production line stoppages, these tools can be essential for ensuring that ATP allocations align with business priorities.

Best regards,

Dequan Xu

[Kaiserferi]

Dear Dequan Xu,

Thanks so much for your answer regarding BOP and PAL functionalities.

The issue we are facing in the distribution is not that simple and need really fast reaction from our side.  My concern is that we have around 200 customers and majority of them collecting their goods once a week. 90% of our customers are in the same priority level and can happen that this week customer A asking some xtra qty to avoid line stop on the other week customer B and C asking the same. On top of this these are common items using both customer A,B and C. Also we obliged to supply them the requested quantity on the LT so in case we are helping one customer,  can happen that we cannot keep our contractual obligations towards the other customers. 

I know well that safety stock keeping is one option here but learnt that in case the safety is set,  handling of allocation is also depending on AATP so there is no manual intervention possible... Our original idea was to keep some safety and not allow ATP to calculate with , but we will allocate form this safety manually during delivery creation to that customers who have troubles. However turned out that this is not possible since we cannot put more to the delivery than ATP confirmed previously so not possible to allocate more manually from the safety stock.

I know it is not an easy business but we are still looking for a solution that in case our confirmation is not acceptable to our customer(s) we somehow allocate or re-allocate the available stock between them. PAL is a solution, yes for a limited number of parts but unfortunately we are talking about 1-2thousands of parts with huge fluctuations from one week to the other. I also understand the features of BOP, however changing priority on a daily or weekly basis is not optimal at all.

We are well befor the go live but this is a very unconfortable situation that such basic options are missing or cannot find optimal solution for it.