DEMAND CAPTURING MECHANISM IN SAP

MRP planning process usually starts with the inputs from the sales and marketing department. Input is a demand for saleable finished materials for each quarter in excel sheet through email inbox on a monthly basis. Planning department consolidates all those requirements and arrives a plant wise agreeable daily delivery plan by considering various manufacturing capacity constraints through manual mode. The entire process from order capturing to Production plan, involves lot of manual intervention like a discussion with all stake holders. Difficult to track the changes made in the finished materials planning and the process took more executive hours to freeze the manufacturing plan against domestic and international requirements. To get them into the SAP (Systems Applications and Products) system, each market requires its preparation and transfer process. The one thing they have in common is obscurity, and there is no chance to get a right idea of total order quantity, modifications in order, to particularize, or order fulfillment, to avoid excess production. Furthermore, manual entry of order data into SAP consumes too much time and may lead to errors. This project attempts to address the issues of MRP nervousness due to demand capturing in SAP software which handles the above scenario in two different ways - make to stock and make to order with limitations. The objective of this project is to address the manufacturing problems faced due to current demand capturing issues of SAP system by developing a customized demand capturing mechanism with built-in capacity constraints table in SAP. In SAP, marketing will capture their demand into the customized demand capturing basket with in the planning horizon fixed by the management. Marketing demands are then transferred into planning module for MRP run. In principle, proposed new mechanism under development in SAP drive the marketing people in a user-friendly way to capture customer orders and forecast orders. It will eliminate the non-value added activities of all stake holders. It reduces the demand fluctuation and improves the stability of vendor schedules for the dependent demand.