Make-to-Order

Supports customer-order-specific planning and production and is industry-specific. Supports assembly processes for (non-) configurable products in a repetitive manufacturing environment or the production of (non-) configured products with production orders. For both processes, the visibility of the customer order is key. This is achieved by using dynamic alerts and order pegging structures during planning and execution.

Repetitive Manufacturing

Is a rate-based, lean production control system. Based on production and assembly lines, the takt times are used for scheduling. An optimizer and heuristics are available for model mix planning and line balancing. Continuous input and output are considered during scheduling. The production runs without any orders for run schedule quantities and production versions. Backflush of labor and material at reporting points support the lean execution process.

Flow Manufacturing

The customer demand will be pulled through the production process. The key elements of the solution are line design and line balancing, demand management, line sequencing/model-mix planning, lean execution, backflush, and Kanban management.

Shop Floor Manufacturing

Tracks production orders and controls production. Real-time integration among sales, production planning, and execution improves the quality and speed of processes. The confirmation of labor and material activities takes place at the operation level. Milestones, backflushing, and automatic goods receipt can reduce the number of business transactions, and multilevel production processes can be controlled. The seamless integration to quality management enables quality inspections during production. Other characteristics are the control of rework, batch tracking, and serial number management.

Lean Manufacturing

Includes the key components of continuous improvement and elimination of waste across the organization.

The key concepts in lean manufacturing are:

• Continuous Flow: Material flows continuously from raw material through to finished product without "waiting" for large batches to be run. Lean manufacturing addresses the issue of wasting setup time by minimizing setup times, rather than minimizing the number of setups.
• Value Stream: Encompasses all the actions required to bring a physical product through the main manufacturing and business processes from acceptance of raw materials or components to the delivery of the completed item. The lean enterprise coordinates all supply lines (internal and external) and links all parts of the value stream so that they converge at the appropriate points in time. The value stream is mapped out to analyze all steps from start to finish and to redesign them to ensure that they add value to the final product.
• Value-Added Activities: Activities in the value stream are identified as value-added (VA) or non-value-added (NVA). NVA activities are eliminated as much as possible. Some NVA activities are unavoidable; these are sometimes referred to as essential NVA activities. Once mapped, the value stream activities are identified as VA or NVA.
• Pull Production: Production and purchasing activities are based on signals from the follow-on process. That is, materials are supplied when needed, avoiding unnecessary WIP and speeding the flow of materials through the system. This ensures that work is performed only when required.

The key elements for lean manufacturing are:

• Kanban: Lean manufacturing  provides full electronic integration, allowing electronic Kanban signals to be triggered via handheld devices and transmitted for internal production, or even transmitted directly to suppliers without the traditional Kanban card.
• Direct Production: The production orders for a product are networked together to form a "collective order". This ensures that the hierarchy of production orders can be managed as a whole, and this enables companies to simply pass interim products or components to the next work center for the following production order, instead of moving them into stock. It also allows lean production execution while backflushing labor and material. 

Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE): The integration of engineering design activities with those of manufacturing engineering avoids unnecessary iterations across functional boundaries and accelerates product development and time-to-market. SAP supports this process by providing a set of master data that is consistent across the design and manufacturing application areas. iPPE also allows for designing and balancing production lines.

Process Manufacturing

Supports the plant as a multi-process facility. Resource and recipe management forms the basis for planning and sequencing batches or production lots. The solver schedules the process order sequence to avoid costs such as cleanout or changeover. This can be achieved with production campaigns, block planning, or detailed scheduling with a focus on critical resources. Process orders are used for scheduling, execution, and costing. Process management coordinates the data exchange between the SAP execution system and connected process control systems. These processes can be documented and evaluated. The seamless integration with the quality management ensures process control and stability.

Batch Management

Batch management fulfills the requirements of the pharmaceutical and chemical industry for managing and tracking batches or production lots across the whole production process. 

In various industry sectors, particularly the process industry, you have to work with homogeneous partial quantities of a material or product throughout the entire quantity and value chain. In the SAP system, a batch is the quantity or partial quantity of a particular material or product that is manufactured according to the same recipe.

There are various reasons for this:

1. Legal requirements, for example, guidelines on good manufacturing practice (GMP), or regulations on hazardous materials.
2. Defect tracing, recall activities, and recourse requirement.
3. The requirement for differentiated quantity-based and value-based inventory management, for example, through heterogeneous yield/result quantities or unequal constituents in production.
4. Usability differences and the monitoring thereof in materials planning, sales and distribution, and production.
5. Production or technical requirements, for example, material quantity calculations on the basis of different batch specifications.