Setting up MRP in multiple plant scenario

Question

Hi,
We are planning to implement MRP in our system. I understand that MRP is normally carried out at a plant level. However, since we have multiple plants (from which we ship our products), we want to be able to run MRP across multiple plants. To elaborate, we want to have one forecast figure for all the plants (basically forecast at material level, NOT by plant), consider inventory across all the plants, and then based on that, we want to be able to generate PRs/POs. It would be ok to create POs with one default plant and if needed, change later the receving plant on the POs manually based on the inventory situation in each plant. Of course, we need to tie in the demand situation (customer orders) in each plant in the MRP process.
Is there a way to do this using standard SAP or with some amount of customization?
Any insight/ideas would be greatly appreciated and help us move in the right direction.
Thanks,
Prayarna

Answer 1

<b>Total Planning</b>
<b>Use</b>
<b>Total planning covers the planning of all the materials that are relevant for requirements planning and includes the BOM explosion for materials with a bill of material.</b>
You can use total planning for a single plant or you can use the scope of planning to control whether the total planning run is executed on a multi-plant level
for several plants
for one MRP area
for several MRP areas
for a combination of plants and MRP areas.
Prerequisites
Only for multi-plant planning with scope of planning:
You have grouped together the plants or alternatively the MRP areas, which are to be planned together, in Customizing for MRP in the IMG activity Define scope of planning for total planning.
In Customizing for MRP, you have made the necessary settings for Parallel processing in the IMG activity Define parallel processing in MRP.
Features
Defining the Scope of Planning
You can define different scope of planning groups in Customizing.
You specify the sequence of the individual MRP units (plants or MRP areas) for each scope of planning by entering a counter. This counter defines the sequence in which the MRP units are to be planned.
You can enter as many plants as you like in the scope of planning.
If you have activated material requirements planning with MRP areas, the entry of a plant thus includes all the MRP areas of this plant. During the planning run, the MRP areas of a plant are always planned in the following sequence: plant MRP area, storage location MRP area, subcontractor MRP area.
You can, however, also enter one or several MRP areas in the scope of planning and thus restrict the total planning run to these MRP areas.