What Are the Differences?
We were recently asked what are the differences between the deployment optimizer in SNP and inventory balancing in SPP. Before going into to much detail its important to read up on each of these areas of SCM if you are not familiar with them.
Inventory Balancing
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/04/23/inventory-balancing-in-spp/
Deployment Optimizer
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/07/30/deployment-explained/
Transportation Lanes
Something which is critical to both is transportation lanes, and their maintenance, for which we have a post on this topic in terms of mass maintenance here.
This makes the deployment optimizer and inventory balancing usable, because they can setup a large number of transportation lanes quickly with mass maintenance. However, they must be changed and adjusted as locations are added or deleted.
Differences
- SPP Inventory Balancing has more fields that control the redistribution of materials. For instance, the warranty start date and the recall start date as well as the production end date. These are critical for service parts, but much less so for finished goods.
- SPP inventory balancing can be run from the Planning Service Manager. This is an easy way to schedule services in SPP (but also in other SCM modules).
- Through the use of the inventory area, SPP can treat multiple locations as a single location.
- SPP has more ability to set warehouse space savings per location.
- The deployment optimizer takes into account (capacities such as handling, transportation, storage, capacity) as well a prioritization related to costs and prioritization.
- Deployment works off of
Open Question
One open question we have is how powerful is inventory balancing compared to the deployment optimizer? Aside from more fields is it more powerful in terms of its ability to see many different locations?
