Combination of two planning processes @different granularities in one planning area

[peter_casper]

Hi community,

we would like to combine a strategic sales forecasting process w/ an operational one. The strategic planning output is actually the guideline for the operational forecasting process. Both processes differ related to their planning level and time horizon.

Strategic sales forecasting
Planning level: YEAR + Product Group
Horizon: +5 years rolling

Operational sales forecasting (already live)
Setup similar to planning area SAP6
Planning level: LOCPRODCUSTWEEKLY
Horizon: +2 years rolling

Misc
The output of the stragetic planning will be the guideline for the operational planning on an aggregated Product group + YEAR basis.

The idea now is to perform planning for both entities w/in the same planning area in order to avoid regular maintenance for multiple planning areas. But we also do not want to initialize the entire time horizon on a weekly basis due to performance and storage reasons.

Therefore we would first extend the end date of the assigned time profile in order to accomodate for the longer horizon becoming necessary for the strategic planning part.
The relevant key figures for the strategic process would be assigned to an aggregated base planning level only which is at "Product Group + Year" level.
The initialization of time periods on a weekly level would be done once a week based on an application job w/ a dedicated time range selection which isn't longer than +2 years in order to avoid unnecessary granular time buckets.

Would you recommend such a setup or would you rather split both processes by planning area?
Did I overlook something in regards to avoiding the creation of unnecessary weekly time buckets beyond the 2 years horizon?

Thanks for your input / sharing your experience.
Cheers, Peter

[AyanBishnu]

Hello peter.casper

Yes the approach that you have outlined will work. Below are few suggestions from my end which you can consider if your scope permits so.

1. Using 1 PA you need to have your TP horizon for 5 yrs in the future. If possible split the strategic and operational planning in 2 separate versions.
2. Assuming that you select version SIM for stratergic planning, create all KFs for strategic planning only for SIM version at year and product group level.
3. The output KFs of stratergic planning ( the KF which will be used as input for operational planning) should exist in both versions but at year level. you can use the version copy opertator to copy the values into the operational PA.
4. In the version where you intend to run operational planning use advanced copy oprator to dissagg values from year to week ( by using period weight at the target KF) and using dissagg expression to split values from product group to PRDID level.
5. Make sure that all copy operators, forecast model or any other operator use predefined from and to in the operational planning version.

Hope this helps.