APO DP Authorisations

APO planning books are by far a very robust tool to restrict access to data that we want to display to various types of users in an organization. This is one feature of APO which sells itself in very good manner.

This read is putting light only on the ways to restrict access to planning book functions; however, this does not cover the details on the restriction that can be placed on Info Object level.

 

Restrictions at planning book and data view level:

The very first level of restriction that can be placed is at data view level. This restriction can be conceptualized in the design phase. For example the quantitative market intelligence figure can be put, in addition to figures put by demand planning team, by a team sitting at in headquarters to arrive at a final forecast. This can be achieved by opening the “market Intelligence” key figure in a separate view and giving access of this view to central team.

We can restrict the access to the planning book using the Authorization object C_APO_PB while giving values as required to following fields: ACTVT -  Activity  APO_DVIEW – Name of the data view APO_PLBK2 – Name of the planning book.

This way is a very top level access restriction which is found very commonly in several projects. There are other kinds of requirements that are found in APO implementation few of which are detailed below.

General requirements in Demand planning:

1.       Do not want a KF to be open for change but only for display except for few users : There are many ways to achieve this, few are discussed below

a.       We can design different the planning book and data views and restrict the KF input/output.  We can then restrict the access to these planning books.

b.      You can restrict the access to only display for a KF by using the authorization object C_APO_IOBJ and fields are :ACTVT APO_IOBJNM APO_PAREA.

 

2.       Do not want all users to load data on a Brand level, only few can do it and fewer can edit is at brand level. However, the demand planning authorization object do not support the authorizations to be based on the values of the characteristic. There are two ways to handle it:

a.       Planning based on selection : You do not allow user to load shuffler and select object automatically. Instead you assign them selection user can only load selections assigned to him.In order to have above solution we need to restrict shuffler ac cess and restrict access for planner to choose selections. You can gray out the selection button by removing the object C_SELCTION from role. And by removing the C_SELORG you can restrict user to call the selection organizer. This simply means that user can only work with selections assigned to him.

b.       Another way to restrict the user from loading the planning objects based on the values of the characteristics is to user a custom enhancement. You can user method SELECTION_CHECK of BAdI /SAPAPO/SDP_SELECTOR to implement the restrictions

 In demand planning, the data can be displayed at any level of aggregation allowed by planning book characteristics. However, one may wish to restrict the access to only display at all levels. You can always set the planning book mode to display by using user parameter /SAPAPO/SDP94_D_MODE – to A after this the pencil icon will not be visible in the planning book even after loading the data into planning book.