We have published previous blogs about SAP Business One 9.1 – let’s take a more detailed look at the resource planning and production capacity planning module – new in SAP Business One 9.1

A key requirement of most manufacturing organisations is the ability to plan production – looking at demand and supply of finished goods and raw materials and considering capacity constraints – labour, machine and resource availability. Planning production runs requires an assessment of labour, machine time and other resource bottle necks for optimized production scheduling.

The good news is that SAP Business One 9.1 includes enhancements to the production module to include resource planning. Resource planning in SAP Business One 9.1 has the ability to manage capacity for labour, machinery and “other” capacity constraints.

Let’s take a quick look at how this works in SAP Business One 9.1. We will start by configuring the capacity for resources.

Go to the Resources module and click on the Resource Master Data menu item.

SAP Business One 9.1 Resource Production Planning Menu:

This will open up the SAP Business One 9.1 Resource Master Data screen. In this screen we can capture master data associated with our machines and labour or “other” capacity constrained items for manufacture. Information required will be general information – machine code and name, issue method and resource allocation. Resource allocation is worth a special mention as the different resource allocation methods will determine the timing of the resource allocation to the production schedule. The user can select from “Automatic” or “on due date”. The automatic schedule will try and schedule the production order on available timeslots (available resource) prior to the required date whereas if “on due date” is selected the system will try and schedule the production order on the due date.

Other information to be completed on the resource master data screen in SAP Business One 9.1 includes:

• Capacity data by warehouse
• Planning data – daily capacity for machines, labour and other equipment. In the example below the capacity that has been configured for a packaging machine based on uptime available for the machine Monday through Friday (2 shifts on Monday through Thursday) with some downtime on Friday for machine maintenance.
• Properties, attachments and remarks can be added to the resource master data.

SAP Business One 9.1 Resource Master data:

To review resource capacity (which is essentially a rough cut capacity plan) go to the resource capacity menu item (under the Resources menu item). Choose your capacity type and capacity period that you want to review. You can also narrow down your capacity constraints by warehouse, resource code, resource group and resource type. Click the refresh button and the resource capacity planning screen will appear with the resource and dates together with available resource, internal resource, committed and consumed resource. This planning tool will allow you to review the factory capacity constraints.

You can see from the example below the capacity constraint for a container labeling machine.

 SAP Business One – Resource Capacity Planning:

If we do a brief analysis of the data above we can see that there is a capacity constraint issue for the packaging machine on the 3^rd of February. We have 16 hours of machine time available and 19 hours committed. This leaves the factory with -3 hours available on the 2^nd February. Our production planner now has a clear view of the fact that there is a capacity constraint on the packaging machine and can start to plan accordingly. By clicking on the “Committed – 19 hours” section of the report SAP Business One 9.1 will drill down to the production order/s which are committed. The production manager can then re-schedule this production or can increase the capacity on that day (increased machine hours and overtime).

As you can see the new SAP Business One 9.1 resources module gives manufacturing planning users the information they require to schedule and plan production more efficiently.

SAP Business One 9.1 Resource planning for production demo: