Rolling schedules for steel options between SNP and PPDS

Question

We are trying to set up something within the APO SNP/PPDS tool to
plan rolling schedules for steel.
eg multiple resources, most of which are 100 percent rolling schedules,
with many different "blocks", and common rolls may occur say every 4 weeks, or
every 14 weeks.
And so each roll we need to plan "Quantity required before the next roll" - eg
a 14 week quantity.
We have set up PPDS Blocks using CDP settings with characteristics in our
test system.
Seperate to that we have an SNP model where we plan across multiple plants,
for a 12-24 month period, and we have multiple level BOMS where there may
be 2 semi-finished products between the Finished and Raw material. Eg heat
treated and non-heat treated.
Sometimes one of the interim semi-finished products is the bottleneck, so we
need to use capacity leveling to reduce quantities at all levels of the BOM.
Our main issue is that the SNP quantities that we plan, we are not able to feed into
the PPDS blocks, as SNP does not deal with characteristics.
So in our test, all we can do is use the SNP quantities for higher level plans.
Then delete the SNP orders, and re-run a new PPDS plan to get quantities in our blocks,
but we then have lost all the capacity levelling information from SNP.
Does anyone have any method to deal with this scenario? ie how to model rolling schedules
by utilising the strengths of the SNP mult-plant and capacity leveling data, and then
somehow also taking into account "blocks", or "rolling schedules"?

Answer 1

In our testing. With CDP setting, we create a fcst element with a characteristic on the material. eg RED/BLUE/GREEN, and in PPDS, I can then create a PPDS order with the characterstic linked and visible in the PPDS order, and linked to the BLOCK on the resource (Blocks of RED GREEN for example)
But SNP orders do not work with these characteristics.
This is backed up by various documentation from SAP.
eg
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_scm50/helpdata/en/b0/3c2463c7cbb54bacfb75c789100ad4/content.htm
SNP cannot plan with characteristics. However, the characteristic assignments remain and can be evaluated in PP/DS.
CDP in SNP
CDP cannot be used in SNP as the SNP does __not support__ characteristics.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=KjvOY_4P8JEC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=CDPSNPcharacteristics&source=bl&ots=tG9-FGeIo9&sig=CzW-hktRFP2DrlOaied2QMY7gNE&hl=en#v=onepage&q=CDP%20SNP%20characteristics&f=false
(In this book - a list of which APO areas do and do not work with Characteristics. SNP does not)