Special MTO Scenario - Costing Issues

Question

Hi,
Not sure if I should post it here or in the FI / CO forum, but here it is ...
I'm in the process of implementing APO in a Aerospace company in Montréal, Canada and we're stuck on an Account Assignment Planning, and Product Costing issue.
Today, all demand / production / movements / costing is done by creating a Project Network.
Here are the current settings:
- Create a project with activities for each major "line section" for major components.
- Each activity has a component allocated to it
- Each activity has a different WBS element assigned to it.
- All production orders/purchase orders/goods movements are created/posted against the WBS elements.
- All stock for MTO parts are assigned to the WBS element
In order to provide better integration with APO and bring more flexibility in the Planning and Simulation processes, we were hoping to stop using Project Networks as the trigger for demand / planning / execution. The idea was to use Sales Orders (or Customer Independent Requirements - CIR) to generate the demand and run APO and MRP planning from it. The special stock segment now becomes linked to the sales order (or CIR) which changes alot of thing in the accounting documents and costs elements in the whole planning and execution processes.
Here is what we were hoping to achieve in order to limit impacts on finance :
- we are implementing APO and would like planning to be performed without using project networks.
- we would like to have planned orders for the top level for long term and be able to trigger the purchasing of long lead time items.
- we would like all goods movements (PO reception, GI to production order etc, ) to be posted to WBS elements
- we would like all production orders to settle to WBS elements
We tried different scenarios with different account assignments categories, but could not find one that fits the bill :
1) we tried using account assignment category "D" which allows assignment to sales order and WBS element. We created CIR as demand.
The problem is the stock is non-valuated which resulted in having no accounting documents for goods issue to production order.
2) we tried account assignment category "Q" with using CIR as demand. We had one WBS element assignment in the CIR. When we changed the WBS value in planned orders to represent each "line section" we ended up with duplicate demand in the original segment and the new segment.
So, is there a scenario with valuated stock that would allow us to do a make-to-order process that would post all costs to WBS?
Thanks,
Marc

Answer 1

Hi, sorry for the title confusion ... I cannot change it anymore.
I'm not sure I understand what you are proposing.
In our case, the problem is not really linked to the CIFing to APO but more on the Account Assignment Category in ECC and the Customer / Project Stock Segment in MRP.
Since we have a multiple level BOM and that the intermediate levels need to be associate with different WBS element according to major parts of the aircraft.
Here is an example :
Aicraft -- Has its own BOM with major parts as sub assemblies,
Major Parts -- Each Major Parts needs to be linked to a different WBS for costing purpose.
Minor Sub Assemblies -- All cost of producing the Minor Sub Assemblies should be tracked inside the Major Parts WBS.
Components -- All components costs and accounting documents should be tracked inside the Major Parts WBS.
We know that by using a project Network for the Aircraft Level we could create activities for each Major Parts with different WBS, but since we want to do planning in APO, we were hoping to not use PS has a scheduling basis. The integration of PS in APO is still not used a lot and the flexibility of Projects in planning processes is not great.
In resume, we are trying to create the demand from a Sales Order or CIR, but manage costs and accounting documents within WBS for all level in order to limit impacts on the Finance Department.