Idea and Value

In TM a lot of planning actions are controlled by the so-called planning profile. While you can select your planning profile in the transportation cockpit there are determination and fallback logics which planning profile to use if you work on single document UIs (e.g. using the planning profile from document type, predecessor document). Anyways it might happen that no profile can be determined at all. If that’s the case the system will take hard coded default values for the planning profile parameters. Same holds true if you have a planning profile defined but some of the settings (sub-profiles, e.g. scheduling settings, optimizer settings…) are not defined. In such cases the system needs to get the data somewhere which are some hardcoded values.

This is where the default planning profile comes into play. With S4/HANA 2020 TM introduced this one special profile which is defining the default values – but not in a hard-coded way anymore but as one of your planning profiles you can change. You will get indicated that you look at the default profile (or a sub-profile of it) with the new indicator “Default Profile”.

Default Profile Indicator

This might help you in specific planning profile setups as well as changing the behavior for those places where no profile can get determined. Furthermore, the values of the default profile will get copied automatically if you create a new profile to make sure you always start on the systems default values.

Specifics

As the default planning profile is a special profile there are some rules applying for this profile which are different for other “normal” profiles:

• The default profile cannot be deleted. Basically, there are checks to not delete the default profile as the system would need to stick to the hard-coded defaults again. Anyways if you find a way to delete it – don’t worry to much (and read futher)
• None of the Settings maintained in the default profile can be deleted (same reason as before)
• All Settings need to have a setting maintained
• Selection Profiles cannot be maintained (we basically decided that this profile should define planning behavior but should not really be used in planning)

How is it created?

This is one of my favorites. When running an upgrade to 2020 the default profile is created via conversion report making sure that the same defaults are applied as before the upgrade. But in a fresh installation of TM no upgrade conversion can run? So, do I need to copy customizing or run some report? The answer is no. Basically the system will detect that the default profile is missing when e.g. starting the transportation cockpit with empty planning profile or trying to create a new profile and will create the default profile automatically.

With this each system should always have a default profile and uses its values if no profile can get detected but the technic has one more advantage for SAP:

The possibility of changing default value recommendations

Due to the automatic creation SAP can change their default values from release to release without harming customers with a running installation. This might happen because we find out some values are better for performance or if a new setting improves the process, but activation might disturb running processes. You can always find the latest values in class /SCMTMS/CL_PROF_DEFAULT_DATA.

I hope you will like the idea of having a default profile as much as I do.