Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) in SAP S/4HANA is a powerful feature designed to enhance the order fulfillment process.
Here are some key aspects of aATP:
Real-Time Inventory Information: aATP provides real-time visibility into inventory levels, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information for order confirmations
Flexible Order Confirmation Rules: Businesses can define flexible rules for order confirmations, allowing for increased automation and efficiency.
Backorder Processing: aATP includes sophisticated backorder and product allocation checks, helping businesses manage stockouts more effectively
High-Performance Mass ATP Checks: The system can handle high-volume ATP checks, making it suitable for large-scale operations.
Unified Data: All data is unified within one system, simplifying data management and improving accuracy.
aATP
The latest generation of ATP, aATP builds on GATP's core features and uses advanced algorithms and dynamic simulations to offer real-time availability checks. aATP can also suggest alternative plants or production schedules if needed.
Here are some other differences between ATP and aATP:
Product Availability Check (PAC)
You can use the Product Availability Check (PAC) in SAP S/4HANA to determine on which date and in which quantity a particular requirement (for example, a sales order item) can be fulfilled. The result of the product availability check is a confirmation.
Characteristics of the Product Availability Check (PAC) in aATP:
- Time-phased check of availability of a desired product for the required quantity at the requested location
- Mass-enabled check
- Check against all kinds of supply elements
- Checks for sales orders (SOs) and stock transport orders (STOs)
- Support for special stocks and support for batches
For documents containing large volumes of data (for example, sales orders containing many items), you can use the advanced product availability check (PAC) since it is optimized for mass processing.
Product allocation check: aATP offers a use-case-driven product allocation check.
Being able to deliver the required quantity of a material to the customer at the requested time demands precise planning and control mechanisms. Unpredictable problems, such as breakdowns in production or increased demand, can lead to critical situations in order processing and must be avoided wherever possible. In advanced ATP in SAP S/4HANA, product allocations enable you to avoid critical situations in demand and procurement by allocating materials in short supply to, for example, specific regions and customers for a specific time period. This can help avoid the situation whereby, for example, the entire available quantity of a material in short supply is allocated to a single customer and makes it impossible for you to confirm subsequent sales orders for the same material from other customers.
Backorder processing: aATP offers intuitive requirement classification for backorder processing.
In advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP), you can use Backorder Processing (BOP) to check material availability when the demand or supply situation in your order fulfillment process has changed and you want to check if previously calculated confirmations for sales orders or stock transport orders are still realistic. For example:
- A sales order is canceled, thereby freeing up stock quantities.
- An important customer increases the requested quantity for a material and you would therefore like to reallocate stock which is currently used to confirm other sales orders.
- A production order providing planned supply is running late.
Not reacting to the changed availability situation can result in confirmed quantities exceeding available quantities. This can result in all kinds of unwanted situations.
Confirmation: aATP offers an intelligent and automated selection of the best confirmation considering alternative plants and substitutable materials.
ABC uses different kinds of logical rules to determine the confirmation result (plant and/or material substitution).
- FULL_CONFIRMATION: An alternative plant, which has the complete requested stock quantity available, is used to confirm the order on the required delivery date.
- MAX_ON_TIME_CONFIRMATION: This logic aims to confirm as much requested quantity as possible on the requested delivery date in the sales order.
Apps used to set-up ABC include: Configure Substitution Strategy and Configure Alternative Control.
Release for Delivery (RefDy)
Advanced ATP also offers features which you can use to manually prioritize due order documents for materials with limited availability. This is known as the Release for Delivery (RefDy) scenario.
Characteristics of using the Release for Delivery (RefDy) scenario in aATP:
- SAP Fiori-based interactive changes to sales order confirmations before releasing the orders to delivery processing
- You can use the Release for Delivery app to prioritize due sales orders containing materials with limited availability. The app allows users to view the material availability situation of materials for which they are responsible (as defined in the Configure Order Fulfillment Responsibilities app) as well as assess the potential financial impact of being unable to fulfill certain sales orders.
- Direct navigation to a sales order
This scenario can help users decide how to distribute material quantities between sales orders, before releasing these sales orders for subsequent logistics processes (for example, picking or packing). The manual processing presented here, prevents expensive cancellation and rollback activities that may occur if last-minute, high-priority sales orders are received, causing conflicts for materials for which available quantities are limited.
P.S Source from SAP
Traditional ATP vs aATP
