What Is It?
Stangely this has no definition of PDS in the SAP Help, which is pretty unusual for a terms as important as the PDS in SCM.
The book Sales and Inventory Planning with Marc Hoppe describes this object.
It differs from PPM in that it provides more flexible options for combining and reusing individual routings and bills of material. The information already given on SNP PPM also applies to SNP-PDS. – Marc Hoppe
However, this is only part of the reason for the development of this object, and in fact it is probably only a minor reason for using the PDS. This is especially the case when one figures out that SAP has no good solution for PLM (even though they have a lot of marketing literature). See this post for details.
http://spplan.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/is-sap-plm-for-real/
The real reason for the development of the PDS is due to the performance problems with the PPM (the object it replaced) and the fact that the PPM has a number of issues related to the conversion of the object between PP/DS and SNP. PDSs are the same between PP/DS and SNP except for detailed scheduling information which is resident in the PP/DS PDS, but not the SNP PP/DS. SAP changed the design of the PDS and wrote the object in C+ in order to improve performance – and allows the single object to be addressable by either PP/DS or SNP without conversion. However, the downside of not being able to maintain the PDS in SCM has significantly reduced its adoption. However, the real reason to use the PDS is not discussed by SAP, because they do not want to admit to the performance issues with regards to PPM. Thus they simply push customers towards it by focusing on the benefits of PDS, and dropping “support” for the PPM, which they did way back in SCM 4.0.
This is addressed further by Marc Hoppe as he goes on to write..
You can either create the Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE) data in a connected Discrete Industries/Mill Products (DIMP) systern and transfer it to an SAP SCM system via the CIF, or create it directly in the SAP SCM system. You should note that for SNP you must use an SNP routing in the iPPE data. Then create a product version for the iPPE data and, from that, generate an SNP PDS. In the production versions, specify the validity period of the routing data for a product and a location, as in a PPM or an SAP ERP production version. You can also define costs and co-products here. In the production version, you can also specify a PP/DS production version, which is then factored by PP/DS when SNP is implemented in PP/DS orders. – Marc Hoppe
The other method is to go and create the necessary precursor objects in SAP ERP.
To use this option, generate the SNP PDS in the SAP ERP system directly from the routing, bill of material, and production version data. In our example, to do this, you have to select “SNP” or “SNP subcontracting” as the PDS type in the CIF integration model. The corresponding SAP ERP : ata is then transferred to the SAP SCM system, and an SNP PDS is automatically created from that data in the SAP SCM system, f you select “SNP subcontracting,” the product master data (for components too) is automatically created in the subcontractor location. Also, the transportation lane is automatically created between plant and subcontractor (although this is not possible if you are using an SNP PPM). - Mark Hoppe
Screen Shots of the PDS
You then have to select the Variant for this PDS.
PDS and Quota Arrangements
PDSs can be used in conjunction with quota arrangements. It uses this transaction: /SAPAPO/SCC_TQ1 – Quota Arrangement. See this link for more details:
https://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?threadID=628521
Costs and PDS
Costs are uploaded using this BAdi: /SAPAPO/CURTO_SNP
See this link for more details:
https://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1036983
References
Some of the detail for this post were provided by Ranga Chellappan and Suman Bhattacharyaa of IBM Global Services
