S/4 HANA: New consumption mode for Planned Independent Requirements

When we research about production planning in S/4 HANA, we can find a lot of documentation about the cool new S/4 HANA features, such as MRP Live and Embedded PP/DS, and also about all the simplified scenarios, like Simplified Sourcing and MRP areas planning.

However, there is a minor functionality that was already asked several times in SCN and that is now available in S/4 HANA, which is the ability to restrict the planned independent requirements consumption and reduction within a specific period.

Consumption mode in the ERP

In the ERP, we have the following consumption modes available:

In all the cases, the consumption is restricted by the backward and forward consumption period, and those values are maintained in workdays. It means that, if you define a period of 30 days, you may end up consuming the independent requirement that is on the next or previous month, which may not be desirable.

In order to restrict the PIR consumption within a month, an implementation of BAdI MD_PIR_FLEX_CONS was necessary, and a BAdI implementation always consumes time, money, and must be carefully tested after each upgrade.

Consumption mode in S/4 HANA

In S/4 HANA, there is a new consumption mode called Period-based consumption, which allows us to restrict the consumption within a specific number of periods.

For example, considering that we are using PIRs in monthly buckets, and we define period-based consumption with a forward and backward consumption period of 1, the PIR consumption will be restricted within the month.

Be careful when using this new consumption mode with mixed periodicity (e.g. weeks and months), since the consumption will be restricted within the consumption period according to the planned independent requirements period.

Now we don’t need to implement a BAdI to restrict consumption, which means that we have cheaper solution which can be very easily implemented and supported in S/4 HANA.