What Features Does aATP Offer?
SAP aATP offers a host of features that can be integrated and jointly used:
Product Availability Check (PAC):
This calculates the quantities that can be supplied and the date on which a requirement can be fulfilled in the sales or production order, and confirms material availability.
Product Allocation (PAL):
This allows materials to be assigned directly to specific customers for a certain period of time, for example. In the event of bottlenecks, for example, critical situations on the demand and procurement side can be avoided, while at the same time ensuring product availability for these customers.
Backorder Processing (BOP):
This allows material availability to be checked again if the demand or procurement situation has changed.
Supply Assignment (ARun):
This is a check method for backorder processing, which, in the event of a supply shortage, allocates the most suitable stock to the order requirements.
Alternative-Based Confirmation (ABC):
This allows alternatives to be determined in the event that the requested date or quantity cannot be fulfilled by the originally selected plant.
Delivery Release (RefDy):
This is performed based on the product availability check.
Who Has Access to aATP?
The higher the S/4HANA release level, the more aATP features are available.
- S/4HANA 2019 (on premise): PAC, PAL and BOP only
- S/4HANA 2021 (on premise): All aATP features
- S/4HANA Public Cloud: All aATP features
What Are the Benefits of SAP aATP?
The following two examples show how aATP can specifically support a company in responding to order fulfilment requests.
Backorder Processing (BOP)
A company has 1,000 materials available in stock. A customer orders 800 of these products and receives a confirmation. If a strategically very important customer then orders 500 units, only 200 units will be confirmed, which will annoy the customer and, in the worst case, prompt them to look for another supplier.
This is a typical case that can be solved with BOP – whether the product availability check is done manually on demand or automatically on a regular basis. One option is to perform a new availability check with delivery priorities assigned to the different customers.
As a result, all 500 units ordered by the strategically important customer will be fully confirmed. The remaining 500 available units will be distributed among the other customers. The aATP monitoring app in SAP Fiori offers complete transparency over the changed availabilities at all times.
Product Allocation (PAL)
Another way to circumvent the aforementioned delivery problem is through early product allocation. If a company produces 1,500 materials per month, 1,000 can be reserved for a specific customer or customer group, for example. This allocation can also be triggered on a time-dependent basis only in the event of production bottlenecks.
