Inventory planning in SEM

Question

Hi Gurus,
I am currently working on Merchanidse and Assortment Planning(MAP), used in Retail industry. I am using NW2004s-BI( BI7) and ECC6. I am doing planning for inventory.
As quite a few of you may be aware, Non-cummulative key figures like stock (e.g. key figure 0CPTOTSTOBU) cannot be used in transactional cubes ( or Real-time info-providers). There is a specific functionality developed to read actual stock ( which is a non-cumulative key figure) from basic info-cube into planning info-cube. This is done using a planning function of type EXIT and uses function modules UPARA_EXIT_COPY_ACTUALS and UPARA_EXIT_INIT_COPY_ACTUALS.
Has anyone done inventory planning in Merchanidse and Assortment Planning (MAP) or SEM-BPS or BW-BPS? Have you seen any how to...document around this?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Atul

Answer 1

Hi Raj,
We consider line item detail level planning, the ability to plan at a granular/detailed level for the same set of keys and the addition of a text field 'Detail' greater than 60 characters. See the following example for details.
What planners have today: (SEM-BPS high level planning)
Company code, Cost Center, Cost Element, Version, FY, Period, Amount
ABC, 1000, 3999, XYZ, 2006, 003, $10,000
What planners would like to have: (Line item detail level planning)
Company code, Cost Center, Cost Element, Version, FY, Period, Amount, Detail
ABC, 1000, 3999, XYZ, 2006, 003, $2,000, Materials for house on the beach
ABC, 1000, 3999, XYZ, 2006, 003, $3,000, Direct labour for the next 06 months
ABC, 1000, 3999, XYZ, 2006, 003, $5,000, Interest and payments in lieu of taxes
The business requirement sees line item detail level planning incorporated to SEM-BPS. As I said, I do not intend to break the barriers between OLTP and OLAP systems, but would like to learn more about how others dealt with this requirement.
Thanks and regards,
Cassio Bastos