In SOP, you can plan future sales volumes based on historical data, as well as market intelligence and anticipated

trends and changes at your company. You can also perform aggregate sales planning. With SOP, you can keep sales plans consistent at all levels of your organization In purchasing, you can use SOP to plan quotas for multiple sources of supply or to track purchasing budgets

USE OF COPY MANAGEMENT IN PLANNING You use Copy Management as a tool for managing data in information structures. In Sales Operations Planning, you can use it to copy actual data from a standard information structure to the information structure you want to use for planning. You can therefore carry out comparisons of planned and actual data. Using Copy Management to populate your planned information structures with actual data has performance advantages. The primary benefit is the reduction in the operating system load that results from the decrease in the number of info structures the system must update. (You can also supply planned information structures with actual data through LIS updating.) Another possible use of Copy Management would be to copy data you have planned in one information structure to information structure S140, where you then plan product allocations. You access Copy Management in Customizing for the Logistics Data Warehouse.

You cannot define more than one planning method for any information structure. However, you can always create a new information structure with another planning method and copy the original data using Copy Management.

Before working with flexible planning, you must first make a number of settings in Customizing. For example, you must define the planning method of each information structure. You can use only one planning method to plan an information structure. To plan an information structure with a second planning method, create a second information structure based on the first one and then copy the actual data using Copy Management. Then define the planning method of this new information structure. You must define the planning units of each information structure: currency unit period unit (storage periodicity) unit of measure It may happen in either consistent planning or level-by-level planning that the base unit of a material is different than the base unit of the information structure. In this case, you maintain the base unit of the information structure as an alternative unit in the material master record, together with a conversion factor.

A planning type is a customized view on the planning table; for example, you might have one view for the sales planner and another view for the production planner. A planning type defines the content and layout of the lines in the planning table, as well as the mathematical operations, in the form of macros, which the system can perform on these lines. A planning type is based on any information structure of your choice (either a standard information structure or a self-defined information structure). You therefore have almost unlimited possibilities with regard to the information you can plan. The actions you perform to create a planning type are: Creating planning type info Assigning a key figure to a line Creating lines in the planning table Defining line attributes Defining macros Using special operators to define macros for stock balance, production, days' supply, and historical totals
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Translating planning type, freely defined line, and macro texts