IBP: planning considering shelf-life

[VittorioCotroni]

Dear SAP IBP gurus,

we have a customer requesting to perform their planning in IBP keeping into consideration shelf-life. This requirement is quite common in the pharma, chemical and food & beverage industry, and I was wondering if any of you has already found himself with the challenge to implement such a requirement.

Making the requirement short: the customer wants to be able to identify when a certain stock will expire or will have a shelf-life lower than a certain threshold, as in this cases, the product could be not sellable (or sellable only in specific markets), bringing to a depreciation of its value. Products are produced and packed in batches in Production plants, moved to distribution centers and from there delivered to the customers.

Do you have any suggestion on how to implement the above requirement?

Many thanks for your support,

Vittorio Cotroni

[lingaiahvanam · Accepted solution]

Hi Vittorio,

As per Harshil, Self life planning is not yet available in SAP IBP and it is in Road map.

But you can achieve this trough custom logic (L Code) with the help of SAP IBP team.

Step 1: Maintain the shelf life attribute as a key figure in master data.

Step 2: Write the logic consider the existing inventory and shelf life expiration date.

Step 3: Write the logic maintain the threshold value considering the shelf life expiration date.

If you could not build this logic, create OSS message to SAP explaining the scenario in detailed.

Best Regards,

Lingaiah

[former_member424493]

Hi Vittorio,

We know that SAP published shelf life in 1711 patch update but we could not find any help documents related to this.Could you please share any documents on this or any update.You can send any published documents or information to the below mail ID.

timir.jash@tcs.com

Thanks

Timir Jash

Tata consultancy Services

[Former Member]

Hi Vittorio,

At my last client we implemented something similar to shelf life optimization using IBP supply. If your requirement is to just identify or alert the batches that are expiring soon, SAP came up with an LCODE in the recent release, you might want to look into that.

But if you want to do, some form of optimization, like making sure that batches or raw materials that are expiring soon need to packed, shipped and sold sooner than other batches, that can be done by creating a planning SKU per batch characteristics and prioritizing costs relative to the expiration date.

[lingaiahvanam]

Hi Vittorio,

Your understanding is right. If SAP introduces batch managed supply planning that would help to achieve your requirement.

I did not see this item in SAP IBP road map.

Best Regards,

Lingaiah

[VittorioCotroni]

Hi Lingaiah,

for my client the Shelf life starts at the Good Receipt of the production order at the producing plant.

I think the L-Code with the use of an attribute could support as far as the product remains in the same location, but if you have 1 or 2 layers in your distribution network, I think you will end up losing the information about the expiration date.

I mean that if you move the product from the the plant to a distribution center (where you could potentially have stored different batches) you will not be able any more to identify that one batch is expiring (e.g. in 2 months time) while another is not.

I think the best option could be to have the batches in the Supply module. This could help,.. but my understanding is that this is also not supported at the moment,.. Am I wrong?

Thanks a lot,

Vittorio

[Former Member]

Hi Vittorio,

As i understand, Shelf-life planning is not available in IBP. You may want to connect with IBP product management team to get some help on this.

regards,

Harshil Desai