Delivery Cycle MRP Time-Phased Planning

If you have to deal with more complex situations, you can define a delivery cycle in the material master record in addition to the planning cycle. In so doing, you determine the days on which the vendor delivers his goods. The delivery cycle is entered in the material master record as a planning calendar in the Planning calendar field.

You enter a delivery cycle if the delivery date (or the goods receipt date) depends on the day on which you order the goods. For example, you carry out the planning run and place your orders on Mondays and Tuesdays. If you place the order on Monday, the delivery is made on Wednesday, if you wait until Tuesday to place the order, the delivery is not made until Friday.

If you use the SAP Merchandise Management System, the system proposes the delivery cycle from the vendor sub-range when you create a material master record. The vendor sub-range contains all the goods of a particular vendor that, from a logistical view, can be planned similarly.

What Happens in the Planning Run?

Once you start the planning run, the system uses the MRP date recorded in the planning file to check which materials are actually to be planned. The specification of a delivery cycle has no effect on the requirements calculation: the system uses the interval between the MRP date and the availability date for the next MRP date as a basis for calculating the requirements quantity. It also takes for granted that the vendor requires at least the planned delivery time before he can deliver his goods. This means the following (if no goods receipt processing time has been maintained):

• If the MRP date is a Monday, the interval used for the calculation is from Monday to Friday, as the Friday is the goods receipt date of the next MRP date (Tuesday).

• If the MRP date is a Tuesday, the interval used for the calculation is from Tuesday to the Wednesday of the following week, as the Wednesday is the goods receipt date of the next MRP date (Monday).

The material’s stocks (stock plus firmed receipts in the interval) must cover this interval. If a material shortage occurs, the system creates a new order proposal.

The system interprets the planned delivery time as the ‘minimum delivery time’. That is, it takes at least this number of days for the goods to be delivered from the time that the order was placed. Thus, the system recognizes in the example above that if the planning run is carried out on Tuesday, the material will not be delivered until Friday and not on Wednesday. (The processing time required for the purchasing department is taken into account: the planned delivery time plus the purchasing processing time must be smaller than the period between the date of the next planning run and the corresponding goods receipt date.)