how to use the apo alert monitor for reporting

SAPtips © 2004 Klee Associates, Inc.

Editor's Note: One of the mostcompelling parts of the newSAP® market is seeing usersbegin to take advantage of the"hidden" features within (now)robust solutions such as APO. Inthis excellent "how to" article,APO expert Shaun Snapp tellsreaders how to take advantage ofthe APO Alert Monitor—specifi-cally the lesser-known "data-base alerts"—for improvedreporting and analysis. Proper-ly used, these reporting tools canbe used to identify and compareareas of "overcoverage," leadingto better inventory control andless overstocking. This is thekind of bottom-line benefit thatis allowing savvy users to yieldsome tangible benefits by "dig-ging deeper" into functionalitythey have already paid for, butmay not be fully utilizing.

APO Alerts for ReportingMany APO users are familiar

with using APO Alerts forautomating feedback after plan-ning runs. In this way, the moni-tor provides advanced warning ofproblems with the plan related to"material, capacity, transporta-tion, and storage constraints"1

and provides the intelligence nec-essary to allow users to takeaction. This is why the Alert Mon-itor was originally created andindeed is the focus of the SAP®

online help section on how to usethe Alert Monitor. However, theAlert Monitor is equally effectivein providing a snapshot picture ofthe plan results. You can look at

every alert as a pre-written reportthat you can use to perform anoverall diagnosis of the APO plan-ning results. This is critical tocatching both systematic planningproblems and inconsistencies—both pre-go-live, and to a some-what lesser degree, during thesupport phase of an APO project.

There are two kinds of APOAlerts: Dynamic Alerts and Data-base Alerts. Some SAP customersfind it difficult to distinguish thetwo, so the following definitionsfrom help.sap.com may be helpful:

"Dynamic alerts mirror thecurrent planning situation but arenot stored in the database. In con-trast to the SNP alerts in APO

Release 2.0, alerts are now macro-dependent and thus can reflectthe actual data in liveCache. Thisalert type is NOT suitable fordealing with large volumes ofalerts because large numbers slowdown performance."

"Database alerts show theplanning situation as it was dur-ing the planning run, or last exe-cuted macro. When dealing withlarge data volumes, it is best toperform a batch-planning runusing the appropriate databasemacro. The results of the planningrun show the situation as it was atthe time of the run, in otherwords, with database alerts yousee a snapshot of the plan duringrun time."2

Alerts in APO have beendesigned to provide a strongreporting functionality that movesthe Alert Monitor away frombeing merely an interactive tooland into an analytical tool. Sincemost SAP customers are familiarwith using the Alert Monitor forits dynamic capabilities, thispaper will explain how to use thelesser-used, but extremely useful,database alerts. We will cover thebasic setup for running databasealerts in the Alert Monitor. Then areal life project problem will beillustrated and addressed.

Configuring Alerts Our first step is to review what

alerts are available to us in theAlert Monitor. We do this by find-ing the Alert Monitor under SupplyChain Monitoring. (See Figure 1.)

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How to Use the APO Alert Monitor for Reporting By Shaun Snapp, Supply Chain Consulting

Since most SAP

customers are

familiar with using the

Alert Monitor for its

dynamic capabilities,

this paper will

explain how to use

the lesser-used, but

extremely useful,

database alerts.

1 Definition from help.sap.comhttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_apo31ca/helpdata/en/35/2cd77bd7705394e10000009b387c12/frameset.htm

2 Definition from help.sap.com

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After double clicking on theAlert Monitor, we are taken tothe screen in Figure 2.

As you can see from Figure2, the screen we are taken tois not very instructive. How-ever, once you have a simpletranslation of the buttonsthat are listed in Figure 2,you will be able to navigatethis easily.

• The "Settings" buttonactually means "Whereyou go to select and acti-vate an Alert Profile."

• The "Maintain profile"button means "CreateNew Profiles."

• The "Refresh alerts" but-ton means "Run theAlert Profile."

Let’s start with the Main-tain profile (Create New Pro-files). By clicking on thisbutton, we are taken to thescreen in Figure 3.

On the left-hand side of Fig-ure 3, we have the categoriesthat the various alerts arelumped into, and on the right,we have a selection box (attop) for previously savedalerts, and below that, the spe-cific alerts to be configured.Creating and saving a singlealert is called creating an alertprofile. The alert profiles arecategorized by APO module:

• ATP• Forecast• SDP• (TLB) Transportation

Load Builder• PP/DS• VS (Vehicle Scheduling)F

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Figure 2: Display Alerts – Initial Screen

Figure 1: APO Menu – Supply Chain Monitoring


The categorization isimportant because thetypes of alerts that can beselected change per mod-ule. For instance, theTransportation LoadBuilder alerts listed in Fig-ure 4 would be nonsensicalif applied to ATP and viceversa. Each module has itsown set of mostly mutuallyexclusive alerts (or KPIs, ifyou like) that are germaneto its area of APO.

A quick perusal betweenthe various alert categoriesdemonstrates that the moni-tor is capable of a wide vari-ety of alerts. APO Version3.1 has 42 different alertsjust for the PP/DS module.However, like most things,you will find that just a fewrepresent the majority ofthe alert profiles that youwill create. Our case studywill be using two of thesealerts within the PP/DSmodule to address somecommon project issues.

The Planning Question

The question that allgood APO planners musttackle is whether the sys-tem is planning in a waythat maximizes the use ofproduction and trans-portation resources whilekeeping inventory as lowas possible and meetingdemand in a timely man-ner. Because the maininterface for users lookingfor inventory, production,and movement history isthe Product View transac-tion, one can receive a misim-pression of how APO is actuallyplanning the entire network. Fig-

ure 5 shows an example of theProduct view, transaction/n/SAPAPO/RRP3.

The product view is the natu-ral transaction for looking at anindividual factory and provides

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Figure 3: Alert Change (and Create) Screen

Figure 4: TLB Alert Alternatives in the Alert Profile Change Screen


the capability of drilling downin order to see the pegging struc-ture (the relationship betweendemands and pegged orassigned inventory). The AlertMonitor’s strengths are theopposite of the product view.The Alert Monitor culls theentire network (if you configureit that way) to find problems.This is like casting out a net insearch of fish instead of polefishing. Therefore the AlertMonitor and product view3 workin conjunction, one telling youwhere the problem is and theother providing a detailed viewof the problem to figure outwhat went wrong. This is wherereports like the Database AlertMonitor come into play.

Creating Custom AlertsNow that we have set the back-

ground of our two tools (the AlertMonitor and the product view),it’s time to get into our case studyand create an alert profile. In thisexample, planners have been con-cerned because they have seenindividual examples (in the prod-uct view) of what they deem asunnecessary excess production.Therefore, we want to determineif we have system-wide excessstock and/or production at thefactory and warehouse overages.That is, we want to know if thesystem is habitually making theerror of planning overages. Wecan determine if APO currentlyhas these two overages with twodifferent Alert Monitor reports.

Excess ProductionThe first step is to select the

correct category of alerts to con-figure our report. Since we areconcerned with stock and pro-duction, we will select the

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Figure 6: PP/DS Alert Change (Create) Profile

3 Some may argue that the planning book, rather than the product view, can be better for detailed analysis. It really depends what you are checking. The planning bookdefinitely has extra segmentation of stock; however, for the overall stock/inventory position and particularly the movement history between locations, the product view iswhat to use.

Figure 5: The Product View for One Factory


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PP/DS category by selecting itfrom the Change profile screen onthe left-hand side of the screen.(See Figure 6.)

When scrolling through the var-ious alerts, the first thing you maynotice is the large number of dif-ferent reports within APO. Youcan combine reports to get veryspecific responses. You can alsocreate a complex combined reportthat looks for multiple issues inone alert profile.

By scrolling down the Alertscreen of the PP/DS category, wecan find "order creates overcover-age." We will select this category.Because we only want overageswhen they are substantial, we willwant the variance to be higherthan 5%. Next we need to set thelimit of our Alert report. To do this,we move towards the Selectionarea below the alert listing box. In

essence, we are creating a variantto control for what we intend torun the alerts. For the Product,Locations, Production planner,and ATP categories, I recom-mend selecting the selection but-tons to the right of the inputboxes in Figure 6). The dialogbox that appears as a response isshown in Figure 7.

Since we want a global view, wewill place an "*" in the internalcharacter value field, meaning thatwe want to look at all products.

Once you attempt to save yourselection, you will receive thedialog box in Figure 8. Withinthe screen that asks for a "Selec-tion ID and an ExplanatoryText," we enter descriptive val-ues to properly name ourparameter. We will then save theselection as ALL PRODUCTS.Figure 7: The Selection Variant

Figure 8: Selection ID and Explanatory Text Dialog Box

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We will go through thesame process for theLocations parameter.This will leave us with analert that searches onlyWarehouses and Factoriescalled ALL WAREHOUS-ES + FACT. We will thenselect the ATP categoriesthat represent productionand stock and call thisselection PRODUCTION+ STOCK. We leave theparameters of Prodparameter empty becausewe do not want to restrictthe search on thoseparameters. By savingthis variant, as shown inFigure 9, we are nowready to run our AlertMonitor Profile.

The alert profile hasbeen saved. We can nowexecute the new profile by"green arrowing" out ofthe Change Profile screen,which will take us back tothe Display Alerts Screenlisted in Figure 10.

From here, we select theRefresh Alerts button,which takes us to Figure 11.

The Display Alertsscreen is the main screenfor running our saved alertprofiles. From here, weselect the PP/DS Alert Pro-file that we have just cre-ated called PROD +STOCK. We then select theappropriate planning ver-sion and set the time hori-zon for which we wantalerts. In our scenario, ourCTM run looks out 18months, so we will wantalerts for that period, asshown in Figure 12.

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Figure 9: Product Selection with a New Saved Profile Called PROD + STOCK

Figure 10: Display Alerts Screen


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The report view that we see inFigure 12 is not immediately veryhelpful. To get a better view, wewill need to double click "Locationproduct view" in the upper left-hand corner, which will display allproducts. We then click the headerto the "all product" list, which willbring up the full report viewed inFigure 13.

Here all the alerts now appear.This report is quite flexible, withall the sorting and filtering capa-bilities of similar APO row andcolumn views. In most cases, youwill want to use the summationfeature in order to get a total"global" value for the (overstockin this case) Key Figure4 that youare reporting on. To do this, high-

light the columns you intend tosum and select the green summa-tion sign button, which is theheader of the spreadsheet as listedin Figure 14.

Any of the columns can be fil-tered by right-mouse clicking onthe column heading. It’s often goodto have some values handy such asyearly sales, sales by weight, etc.,in order to have the ability to com-pare the results against a meaning-ful business number.

In order to answer our questionof whether overcoverages arehabitually being created, a morepowerful analysis of individualoptimization, CTM runs, PP/DSruns, etc., can be performed bysumming the actual quantitiesand placing it as the denominatorover a figure such as gross sales.Currently, there is no facility inthe SAP Alert Monitor to performthis analysis, but the Alert results

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4 Key Figure or quantities, such as sales revenue, fixed costs, sales quantity, or number of employees. In addition to the key figures saved on the database, you have the option of defining derived (calculated) key figures in the query definition in the Business Explorer. Suchkey figures are calculated using a formula from the key figures of the InfoCube. Examples of derived key figures are "sales revenue per employee" (sales revenue divided by number of employees), "variance as a percentage", or "contribution margin". –Source: SAP Help

Figure 14: Summed Values for Quantities Screen

Figure 13: Display Alerts Screen with All Products Selected


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can be easily copied into Excel forthese purposes. This requires run-ning successive database alertsand copying and pasting theresults into Excel with the resultslisted in Figure 15.

From this analysis, we were ableto compare the overcoverage cre-ated by different CTM runs(thereby determining when theengine tended to create moreovercoverage, and also comparingthe overall system wide overagesto historical averages and to theclient’s yearly sales. Our conclu-sion was that the APO system wasnot habitually overproducing.Once we determined we did nothave a system-wide problem, wewere able to use the PROD +STOCK profile to direct us to theright product and location combi-nations where overcoverages wereoccurring. The final analysisdirected us to re-evaluate ourminimum lot sizes that were caus-ing the individual instances ofovercoverage.

ConclusionThe Alert Monitor is both a tool

for on-line alerts as well as a keytool for reporting on APO plan-ning results. Using the alert reporttool serves as an analytical coun-terbalance to the often-used Prod-uct View (which focuses on a nar-row slice of the plan.) The alertreport can be run for many differ-ent products, locations, and othercharacteristics.

Using the Database Alert Moni-tor, SAP has provided a broadrange of alerts to develop reportsaround. What has been demon-strated in this paper is just how toset up the alerts and use them foranalysis. These alerts are catego-rized by APO submodule, and arespecific to the needs and function-

ality of those modules. In order tobest leverage the Alert Monitor,one needs to spend some timelooking through the many optionsoffered in the profile view. Havingdone this, one can present theexact alert reports that meet theuser’s current needs, or, in somecases, present targeted positionreports that the user had not evenconsidered.

Shaun Snapp, Supply Chain Con-sulting. Shaun has worked in sys-tems consulting since 1997. Havingworked on large advanced planningprojects for 6 years, Shaun hasfocused on SAP's Advanced Plan-ner and Optimizer (APO) since2001. Shaun can be reached [email protected]. �

Using the Database

Alert Monitor,

SAP has provided a

broad range of

alerts to develop

reports around.

Figure 15: Example of Comparative Excel Spreadsheet That Displays Overstock Alerts

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how to use the apo alert monitor for reporting

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