As your demand for capacity grows, one production facility may not be enough, which means it may be time to start considering a multi-plant operation. This does mean an increased production capacity, but this also means driving your operation headlong into the more challenging component of multi-plant planning and scheduling.
Multi-plant planning through SAP ERP system utilizes material requirements planning (MRP) for various production facilities. This model is a decision-making system that schedules production among various locations that manufacture the same or interdependent production items. It relieves the headache of dealing with the ordering of materials throughout multiple operations and allows for materials to flow smoothly through different production facilities.
Other advantages of SAP to multi-plant operations include:
These perks, with the proper data presented, can easily allow an operation to come closer to overall production efficiency. Although this system offers many benefits, it is not necessarily a fix all. Many production facilities are taking the next step in manufacturing through integration of ERP and APS systems.
Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems can be readily be integrated with ERP systems such as SAP. To get more out of SAP All In One and SAP Business One, APS integrations have long been the chosen add-on that extends the planning, scheduling and simulation capabilities for SAP ERP and production tools.
Along with an ease of APS integration with SAP, benefits of APS also include:
Easily reschedule production orders, visualize and resolve bottlenecks, analyze “what-if” situations, and eliminate the need for manual input data. APS systems are becoming a popular choice for manufacturing and production operations. APS is the logical next step toward the goal of minimizing all forms of waste and compressing lost time.
See how PlanetTogether APS extends SAP from single-plant MRP to true multi-plant scheduling. In this Multi-Plant 101 video, you’ll see how PlanetTogether connects to SAP to coordinate production across multiple facilities, balance capacity, and manage sequencing and transfers between plants. Instead of relying only on SAP’s MRP logic, planners can use APS to visualize constraints, reschedule quickly, and run what-if scenarios across the entire network. This is an ideal next step if you’re using SAP for multi-plant planning and want more advanced capacity planning, scheduling, and analytics without replacing your ERP.
In this article, you’ve seen how SAP multi-plant planning uses MRP to coordinate materials and orders across multiple facilities—and how powerful that can be for procurement, inventory visibility, and high-level planning. But you’ve also seen the limits: as you add more plants, products, and interdependencies, the sequencing and scheduling challenges grow exponentially, and MRP alone can’t fully handle capacity, constraints, and what-if analysis.
That’s where Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) comes in. By tightly integrating APS with SAP, manufacturers can easily reschedule production orders, visualize and resolve bottlenecks, test what-if scenarios while running live production, and reduce manual input.
Our white paper, “Why ERP Alone Is Not the Answer,” explains exactly where ERP systems like SAP excel—and where you need APS to go further. It shows how adding APS on top of SAP gives you the multi-plant capacity planning and scheduling capabilities required to minimize waste, compress lead times, and boost profitability.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to:
If you’re relying on SAP for multi-plant planning and starting to feel the limits of MRP-only scheduling, this white paper is your next step.