All Videos

Warehouse Management

WM

MM02; LP21; LP22; LP24

The best way to learn is by doing so welcome to the video service that reveals and unlocks the hidden value in your SAP system. Martin here, and in this video, we're going to focus on fixed bin replenishment options within the warehouse. Replenishment is a big part of the supply chain and can take form in many ways, such as replenishing specific plants, storage locations, and in this case, we will touch on how it occurs in the warehouse. So Steve, what are the different transactions you can use to replenish storage bins within the warehouse? Yes, Martin, there are a few different ways, and replenishment is one of my favorite topics within WM. It's one of my favorite topics because replens in my warehouse were critical in our environment to be proactive in keeping our storage bins full and healthy in our fast paced, high volume bins that maximize efficiency. What I wish I knew before was the different options and scenarios, what transactions to use based on what scenario I want replenishment to occur. So let's jump into SAP where I'll demonstrate how replenishments work. Which transactions to use. And what material master settings to utilize for your specific situation. In this video, we will cover the replenishment options that you get with fixed bins. In our previous video, we touched a little on just assigning a fixed bin and some strategies of when you would want to utilize fixed bins. In this will jump into how the replens work with fixed bin. So we'll first go straight into the Material Master, MM02. This material was our fixed bin material that we used last time. So we'll go with it on 100-600. I'm going to only select the WM1 and WM2 tabs. Really our replen data lives in that WM2 tab, but it's good practice just to populate both when dealing with WM data. Now, at the very minimum, you need your plant and warehouse number. Now, if you know your storage type for fixed bins, you have to enter that here. So I know it's 005 and now I'll go ahead and select it. It'll default to WM1 tab because we selected both. But again, that data lives on the WM2 tab. If we did not select that storage type, you would not get this additional tab of the fixed bin data in there. So from our previous video, all we did is we entered that storage bin for it, which is A02, now we could talk a little bit more about the quantities and the replen quantities behind there. So, I went ahead and put a maximum bin quantity of 100 there. So obviously that bin will not exceed 100. Put in a minimum quantity of 5. So anytime it drops below 5, it will then be eligible for a replenish, which there's a multitude of reports, which we'll get into here shortly. There's one additional tab here that we'll talk about right now is the replen quantity tab. So here you could enter data here and what that'll do is it'll replen in quantities or increments of this quantity, so in this case 5. You'll do this really, it's a good strategy if you know the case quantities, or if you don't want to break pack. So if I were to enter 5 there and it dropped below 5, it will then replen in increments of 5 to our max quantity. So it really takes that replen quantity and multiplies it until it reaches that max. You do not need to use this replen quantity though. If you just kept that as a blank, well now it'll take your current stock situation in the bin, so let's say that there was 10 in there, and it'll just fill it up to 100. So it create a TR and TO for 90 to fill the maximum quantity of a 100. So that's how the replens work with the replen quantity, your min, your max. The final thing I'll touch on is the control quantity. So control quantity is simply a plus or minus. So if I put a 50 control quantity in there, what this will do is if there's a open pick for this particular material in this bin for 49, it will pick it from this bin because it's below this control quantity threshold. If it's 50 and above, it will then go to a overstock bin to not deplete this fixed bin for a pick. So that's how control quantity comes into factor as well. So again, that's the replen quantity and and information that you get and options with fixed bin. So we'll jump into now the reports of how to generate some of these replens. So the first one that we'll touch on is going to be LP21. And LP21 is probably one of the most flexible ones because you get your storage bins, you can enter a range of bins and or materials and what's nice is this considers your open picks and put away. So it takes into consideration, if you have like a 916 or it registers those interims that are going to be put or picked from that bin, and then it will execute those replans. It'll create TRs first, and then obviously your TOs. It's nice to do this again in the foreground before, because you have that option of seeing those bins and then you could see all that information before you actually execute. So that's LP21. LP22 really takes into consideration planning and deliveries. So you can see here, you get some additional information, really that integration from SD. You can enter shipping points, and the biggest thing here is going to be your picking and GI dates. So it takes into consideration your future deliveries or picks, if you know your picking date and goods issue date range, and it'll replen those bins based on that as well. The final case here, two little bubbles are on your control quantity. So we just touched on control quantities, that plus or minus. So if you include this bubble on control quantity, it will take the consideration of those deliveries and that control quantity and then make the replenishment recommendation based on those two factors. If there's a pick there in the future and a replen. If you hit ignore, it will actually ignore that delivery and control quantity if it is there. So really LP22 is a good report to run proactively and really you want to do this probably after you're picking or,overnight before those deliveries or the picking begins, because then it's taking into consideration those bins, the transfer requirements are then created, and you want to execute those replens before that picking actually starts for this delivery. So that's LP22. And the final one that we'll touch on is going to be LP24. LP 24, is really good if you are using auto TO, it creates replens straight to the TOs. LP24 does not actually consider picking or put away. So it doesn't touch those interim storage types. It's just going simply off of your data in that WM2 tab, your min, your max in your current stock situation. So that's LP24. Covered a lot here in short round on replen options, they're LP21, 22, and 24. Depending on your current situation, will determine the best replen situation and report to run for you. Welcome back. In this demo, we've covered all things replenishment within a warehouse. I hope this video clarifies a lot of questions that may be out there. With and when to use which transactions. What master data to populate. And how to maximize the use of replenishments. Thanks Steve, it certainly did for me. And I can now see how these critical replenishments are within the four walls of a warehouse. So folks, if you want to learn more about this video and other videos, please feel free to check out our video catalog. And if you have a particular suggestion or something you'd like to know more about, please submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

MM02; LX04; LS09

[00:00:00] Hey folks, Martin here, and we know the best way to learn is by doing so welcome to the video service that reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Today, we're going to focus on a fixed bin stock removal strategy within the warehouse. Steve, I know that this is one of the many stock removal and picking strategies. I'm sure there are many benefits that come with the fixed bins. Please share. There certainly is, Martin. Fixed bin strategy also can come with a lot of maintenance, such as minimum quantities, maximum quantities, and replenishment quantities. These additional features to fixed bins are an extra layer of goodness. And if used correctly, can dramatically increase the efficiency in your warehouse. So let's get into SAP, where I'll demonstrate how these additional layers work with fixed bins. The first thing we'll do with fixed bins is identify the storage types where it allows fixed bins. From previous videos, you'll find out LX04 is where we want to start. [00:01:00] LX04 is titled the capacity used per storage type, but we're going to use it for something a little different. So I'm going to use my default warehouse as 001. Just go ahead and execute that, and you can see it just gives you the breakdown of all the storage types, the names, the percentages, kind of how many bins are within each storage type. But the real reason we're here is to find the rules behind there. You can see here, 005, just from the description, is fixed bin storage. But to find the rules behind that, just to verify, you'd select it here, hit storage type details, and then you can start to see the actual rules behind that storage type. So in this case, it does have a F or fixed bin put away strategy, and then a actual fixed bin removal strategy here. So, it's fixed to a material, it's going to allow a specific material to be assigned to a bin for picking and for stock removal. So [00:02:00] what we see here is we have 6 total bins, 4 are empty, 2 are occupied, and we know it's storage type 005. So let's find the materials that are in there, we're going to go ahead and hit the back arrow, back arrow, and we're going to go into LS09. LS09 can be used in a few different ways. If you have a material number and you just are curious if it has a fixed bin or not, you can go ahead and enter that there. It defaulted to my warehouse, we just found out storage type 005 is our fixed bin, so we'll just go ahead and populate that there. And then we just have our warehouse number, storage type, and let's execute this. What this does is shows you, in my warehouse 001, here's my materials that I have there. They are assigned to that fixed bin storage type, so they are allowed to be signed in that fixed bin storage type. They're all right here, 005, and if they have an actual bin specified here, [00:03:00] that means that is the fixed bin for that. There's additional data, which we'll touch on in the next couple screens here. You'll see you have your max, your min, and replenishment quantities. That is not populated, but if it was and we wanted to use that for replenishment purposes or really to kind of enhance our fixed bins, you would see that data there. So, let's just go ahead and pick this material, we know it's now assigned to this particular bin, A-02. I'm going to select that material, let's do a CTRL Y to bring up the plus, and now we have our material selected I hit CTRL C and then, just to view, this is going to be very critical for fixed bins, we'll go into the material master. In this case, I'll just go into the change view of MM02. We have our material populated there, 100-600. Then, the only relevant information that we really want [00:04:00] is the WM tabs, the Warehouse Management 1 and 2. So, go ahead and select both of those. we have our plants , warehouse number. The most critical part of a material master for fixed bins is, I'll show you very quickly, if you just enter, so we have our material here, we have our plant and warehouse defaulted, if I just hit this without selecting the storage type, it drills in on the WM1 tab, you see your information here, the stock removal, bulk, bulk. Warehouse Management 2, you only get this amount of data there. So, it's kind of taking a default, view of just a material in a warehouse view. So go back in there hit both, and now you'll populate your warehouse number, and we know storage type 005 Because this is what you'll want to do when setting or doing any information with fixed bins. [00:05:00] So, 005, now it brings up a different set of criteria. See this little box down here that did not exist before? Well, there's our fixed bin assignment. So, for any bin that you want, you would assign right there. If you wanted to assign a maximum quantity to it to say, hey, I can only fit 200, pieces in there, you would set that. A minimum quantity we'll talk about in a few replenishment videos coming up here. Rounding quantity, you get all these additional fields that you can enter that, that enhance your fixed bins. If you just want to leave them blank that is completely fine. The stock placement and stock removal strategy will still drive it to this bin but without this additional information, you won't enhance or really get those replens, all these additional levers work in conjunction with other fixed bin storage types or rules and or replenishment quantity. So that is fixed bins, [00:06:00] they're specific and really used for high velocity materials because you really want to be specific with where you actually place them because again, you are, you're picking the singular bin for that stock placement and stock removal. They're also used many times in the manufacturing realm for close to a production supply area or near like a work center where you want to keep that close, keep all those components close, that's another way fixed bins are typically used. Welcome back, in this demo. We've covered not only fixed bin strategy. But a lot of the additional features that come along with it. Especially the replenishment strategies. Yep. Thank you, Steve. Much appreciated. This was, of course, very informative, and I love learning about the additional layers of fixed bins and how they can drastically improve the warehouse efficiency. So, folks, if you want to learn more about warehouse management videos and SAP, please check out our other videos, but just general features and functions that [00:07:00] exist. And if you have any specific questions, please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD04; MM02; MD02

Howdie Reveal TVers? It's Martin here? Today we're having a chat about transitioning from one component to the next. Now, this rarely goes smoothly and it's a common complaint within the SAP community, but here's the good news. We have a cool tool in the toolkit that can help manage this process. It's called follow up material, and we've got Kelly here to tell us more about it today. So Kelly, what can you tell us about follow-up material? Well, Martin. I love to square things away when I'm thinking about them, and follow up materials allows the planner or buyer to do just that. This key piece of functionality helps us to effectively manage transitions by specifying the material we're transitioning to and the timing of the transition. This allows MRP to send dependent requirements to the new material so we can issue orders for replenishment just in time to meet the effect of outdate. Let's get into SAP and take a look. Here we are in the stock requirements list for a component. I just found out it's being discontinued. Let's walk through how SAP can help with this. Today I'm going to focus on our options in the material master, but there are fancier choices when we work directly in the bill of material. That will be an opportunity for another day. Let's look at our planning situation. We can see here that we still have some inventory in stock. Lots of planned demand across time and plenty of purchase requisitions. So let's tell MRP that we need to transition this material. The setting for this are in the material master and on the MRP 4 tab with the other production related master data. You'll see three fields here. First is the discontinuation indicator. We need to make a selection here to start the discontinuation process. Next is the effective outdate. We populate this date if we're planning the discontinuation out in the future. And last but not least is the follow-up material. This is the material that MRP should be moving the dependent demand to once the inventory has been exhausted and after the effective outdate. This is the material that MRP should be moving the dependent demand to once the inventory has been exhausted and after the effective outdate. Now a very important side note. This is a subcontracting item. MRP will not automatically reassign to the new material, but will instead give you an exception message alerting you to misalignment. For now, I'm going to skip the date. Let's save and run MRP. It's going to ask us if we're sure. Yes, yes, we're sure. And we can see the results screen and some changes have occurred. Let's go back to the stock requirements list so we can see what happened in the planning. Okay, now, before we refresh, note the uncovered dependent requirements that go out into the future. See here. Now let's refresh. We can observe a few things. First, we are using up the material we have, if we flip to the replacement material, we can see that the dependent demand has moved over to the new part. Second, we can see that only the dependent demand moved. We intentionally had a mixed demand stream on this part that included order reservations for production orders in the flight and planned independent requirements to anticipation of customer orders or stock transfers. This demand has to be moved over manually. Here's why this makes sense. In order, in flight for production, has already read all its master data and been through material availability checking. We should have the inventory in stock or on its way. A forecast should rarely be on a component, but it can happen and we would manage the transition independently since we can't assume customer acceptance. Before we wrap, I do want to show you an example of an exception message. See this dependent requirement, you'll see a note that it has been partly replaced. There are several exception messages to help us manage different situations that pop up in the discontinuation process. Thanks for taking the tour with me. I like the easy maintenance that we walked through today. By putting simple rules in place, we can put MRP to work for us and get our demand routed to the new component. I love that. I don't have to remember, MRP will help me take the right actions. And the best part is that the plan will be monitored. If we're not meeting the timing or demand and supplier out of balance, we're going to get those exception messages. This sure does make things a lot easier. So this is one of those features that if you know, you know, but if you don't, man, you're missing out. No one wants to scramble for material, and all of us want to use up as much of the old as we can. This is a small feature that can have a significant impact. So again, Kelly, thank you for walking us through this. Hey folks, we actually have quite a few of these little tips and tricks out there. If you can find the one you're looking for, use the AI chatbot. But if you want to ask us a specific questions, feel free to submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM03

Hey, welcome to the ultimate guide to maximize your SAP system. I'm Martin and today's video will help you unlock functionality you didn't even know existed. Okay, so shall we? Okay, in this video, Patrick is going to be our guide as we dig into another one of our forecast consumption modes. Today it's going to be backwards consumption only. I'm excited to hear more about this, when this particular consumption mode should be used, and how we should think about setting the horizon. Patrick, what do you have for us today? Outstanding question. Our forecast is never perfect, and while we should always be working on improving accuracy, we need to accept that we are likely to be wrong in either timing or quantity. The forecast consumption strategies that help us with demand management are a great way to help deal with this challenge. Today, we're going to explore. The consumption mode, backwards only. We'll discuss how to think through the number of days back we might want to allow. And for this consumption mode, we would want to think about materials where we have a tendency to under forecast, and we do not want to allow future periods to be consumed. A picture is worth a thousand words, so let's go in and explore together. So today we are talking about backwards consumption mode. Let me show you how to get there so I can explain it in greater detail. And if you ever worked with me, you know that I start virtually all of my SAP conversations from the MD04 screen. So let's get a quick overview of the current state on this material number before we start making changes. This specific material number has planned independent requirements loaded to represent the forecast. It also has some sales orders loaded. But let's switch our view to summarize the data in weekly periods. So here we can see in weekly periods that we've got a forecast of 22, 23 per week. It spans weeks 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, so every week's got a small forecast of 22 or 23. But then in week number 18, we have a requirement of 100. That's from our customer order that we saw on the previous screen. And so MRP is actually going to add that customer order to the planned independent requirements that are loaded and when MRP runs, it's going to try to bring in enough inventory to cover 123 pieces for both the forecast and the customer order. And in many cases, we don't actually want that to happen. So something we can do is we can actually go get into that consumption mode field and define how our forecast should be decremented when we get orders. So, let's get right to it. The first thing I want to do is I'm going to go click on the material number and move over to the MRP 3 tab, which is maybe not used as much as some of the other ones, so here's an opportunity for us to see what's here. The consumption mode that I've been talking about is actually populated down here and it controls the direction on the time axis in which the system consumes the forecast, and by that I mean it can look back and consume forecast, it can look forward and consume forecast, it can do both. So actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the options. You have backward consumption only, and that's obviously a very good option, we're going to review that one today. You have the opportunity to do backward and forward, there's actually another video out there if you want to read and hear more about that. We can do forward consumption, which will consume demand in the future and you can do forward and backwards. So combining these fields in the right way for your business is obviously something you're going to want to evaluate. But for today's session, we're going to focus on backward consumption only. So, along with consumption mode, we want to make sure that we properly populate the consumption periods. So if we're using a backward consumption period, we want to make sure that our backward consumption period is, populated and the number that you put in there is critical to how the system works, obviously. But one main thing to be thinking about is that it is defined in work days. So when you define something in work days, you actually have to think about how your business runs. So if you run 5 days a week, if you put 5 days in there, your forecast will be consumed in the past for a week. If you put 10 days in there, your forecast will be consumed in the past for two weeks. So it's something to really carefully consider before you decide what number to put in there and honestly, your business practices and how things work will determine the right number. I've been with companies that use one week, two weeks, or even a month. In this case, you have to do what's best for you. So, let's actually go see what happens when we populate the backward consumption period for this material number. So, I'm going to navigate to the MM02 screen, change mode, then we're going to go to the MRP 3 tab, and we're going to go to the plant that we were just looking at, and we're going to go define the backwards consumption period. So let's start with one week or 5 days, let's save that and check through and once I've saved it, I want to go run MRP, which is again, just the best practice for me, I tend to run MRP after I make master data changes, and once that's done, we'll go right back to the MD04 screen. So here we are, MDO4, let's refresh the screen and look at that summarized weekly view again. So what we can see now is before, right, week 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, all had some planned independent requirements. Well, now week 18, because we just put in that consumption mode backwards and a week backwards, it's actually decremented the planned independent requirements for that week because the forecast can be decremented for a week because we have requirements of 100 or a sales order. Let's make one more change just to show you how this worked, and now let's go change it from 1 week to 2 weeks. And same exact process, go right back here, we're going to go into our backward consumption periods and we'll change that to 10, so now we're looking back 2 weeks. Once it's done, we'll go run MD02, MRP again, just changing our settings, execute, execute, and now back to MD04. When we're finally back on MD04, let's take a look at that summarized view for weekly buckets, and what we see now is weeks 14, 15, 16 still have a forecast, week 17 is gone, that has been consumed by the order of 100 pieces, as has week 18. So as you can see, when we decremented 1 week, we took 23 pieces out of the forecast. When we decremented back 2 weeks, we decremented 46 pieces. If we wanted to go back 3 weeks and 4 weeks, the system would decrement the demand from planned independent requirements up to the quantity for the sales order. And so now that we've made those changes, MRP is not planning those sales orders on top of forecast, they're planning those sales orders in conjunction with the planned independent requirements that we just set. So one more thing that I want to discuss before we wrap it up is forecast bias, you've probably heard of it. So a forecast bias is the tendency to over forecast or under forecast. If a material is typically over forecast because sales is too optimistic, you might want to look at forward consumption periods and weighting them pretty heavily. But in this case, when we're talking about backwards consumption, I would probably, for materials that were typically under forecasted, I would want to weigh my backward consumption period heavily enough to leave future demand in the system so they can keep driving in material to support sales that will inevitably exceed the forecast. So the consumption mode will allow for a little flexibility in how orders come in, but it can truly help ensure that future periods will remain intact. So hopefully you found that helpful. I encourage you to go out there and try to use that consumption mode yourself. Hopefully you'll find that picking the right number of working days in conjunction with the right consumption mode will get you what you need and if not, we are here to help. That was a peek into how backwards consumption can be used to help manage volatility and variability in demand. We know we might be right for quantity over a period of time, but we might have trouble being exactly right in a particular period. This key feature helps us to manage risk that allows for roughly versus precisely right. Timing is everything, so it's important to think about your consumption periods in relation to your forecast split and the timing of your decisions around rolling forward or dropping forecast. And last but not least, we learned that this consumption mode is meant to allow for some slip in time, but vigilantly protects the next period's forecast. Hey Patrick, thank you. When you talk about this, I can hear the legacy of living it in your voice. It's nice to learn from someone who has been there and done that. I suppose the only question is whether you also bought the t shirt. Managing variability and volatility in the demand signal is a challenge for most organizations. However, when we look, we often find consumption is more predictable than not. Isn't that interesting? Okay, Patrick, thanks again for doing that. Okay, folks, if you want to learn more about this particular forecast consumption mode, there are quite a few videos on that, please check out our catalog. And, of course, if you have a specific question, feel free to use our chatbot.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM

MD04; MM03

Hey, everyone, Martin here. If you're all about maximizing the ROI in your SAP system, you've come to the right place. In this video, we're going to delve into the forecast consumption. And in this case, specifically backward and forward consumption. So often we hear from clients, well, if we could only get the forecast fixed, everything will be just fine. The truth is forecast is all about knowing the risk in the forecast and being prepared to manage it. Today, Patrick is going to take us and introduce us to one of the key features that can help us with this. Okay, please, Patrick, tell us more about what the forecast consumption mode of backwards and forwards offers us. You bet, Martin. I know from personal experience just how tricky demand management can be. Even with a decent quality forecast, it can be challenging if you don't have the right settings in place to help you deal with variance in either time, quantity, or both. So, let's [00:01:00] dive in and take a look. Today, we're going to touch on where we find the consumption mode and how to select it. Discuss how to set the number of days, in this case working days, to deal with that variability. And how to think about choosing the consumption mode based on the demonstrated bias. Let's go in and take a look. Today we are going to talk about some forecast consumption parameters. These fields are often misunderstood and they can make a significant impact on your supply chain if used incorrectly. First, I want to show you where to find the consumption mode so I can explain it in greater detail. I almost always start on the MD04 screen when evaluating planning parameters. So let's start there and do a quick overview of the data before we jump into the material master. We can see that this material number has a planned independent requirement loaded to represent the forecast. It looks like the forecast is roughly 23 pieces per week, April 1st, April 8th, April 15th, and so on and we can also [00:02:00] see a sales order for 100 pieces on May 2nd.Now, let's switch our view to summarize this data in weekly periods. We want to do this because we're going to make some changes to the system down the road, and this will give us an idea of what it looked like before we made those changes. So, here we have the planned independent requirements at a rate of 23 or so per week. We have requirements of 100 pieces on week 18 for that sales order that we looked at. And as MRP does its math, it says you need 23 this week, 23 this week, 23 this week, 22 this week, and then all of a sudden we need 23 pieces for planned independent requirements and 100 pieces to cover that sales order. So a total of 123 pieces there in week 18. So MRP is actually adding the customer demand to the forecast. Are we sure we want to do that? Let's leverage some built in functionality by letting the system [00:03:00] know how we want our forecast to be decremented when we get orders. Finally, we are ready to talk about consumption mode. So, the consumption mode controls the direction on the time axis in which the system consumes the forecast. Let me show you what I mean and then you can start using it as you see fit. So, from the MD04 screen, we're going to double click on the material number and then, we're actually going to navigate to the MRP3 tab. Maybe a tab that you don't use too often. So, in this case, we want to scroll and look into the planning section and there it is, consumption mode. So, before we start changing numbers, let's look and see what consumption mode does and we're just going to click into the field and look at some of the standard options. So, here we are, let's click, and let's see what the system is telling us. So, today's topic is actually going to focus on one of my personal [00:04:00] favorites, option 2, backward forward consumption. But before we can get to that one, I've used SAP in many industries, and it's always hard to predict when the orders are going to come in. If you have a steady flow of orders throughout the week, or if you have a month end push or a quarter end rush to hit sales quotas, these options can be extremely valuable tools and the reason that I said backward forward consumption is one of my favorites is it actually gives us some flexibility. So, let's start with a quick overview of backward consumption. With backward consumption, sales orders consume forecasted quantities that lie before the requirement state. And with forward consumption, sales orders consume forecasted quantities that lie after the requirement state. So naturally, with backward forward consumption, sales orders consume forecasted quantities that lie before the requirement state. And if the actual demand is not satisfied, the sales orders [00:05:00] then consume forecasted quantities that lie after the requirement state in order to satisfy the remaining demand. Too confusing? Let's try it out. So, the idea here is to start with backward forward consumption and then see how it changes that view that we looked at on our MD04 screen. So, let's quickly go over to MM02 and go into change mode and go to that MRP3 tab and then go to our plant and from here we're going to actually go in and we're going to update our consumption mode. Again, I'll show you the examples, backward forward consumption is the one that we want to use. But, this doesn't work by itself. Just defining the mode doesn't work by itself, you actually have to go in and tell the system how many periods backwards, how many periods forwards, you need to populate so that those orders can be [00:06:00] consumed. So, before we jump in there, we take a quick look at backward consumption periods and just show you all that this is populated in work days. So, when we populate our consumption periods, backwards and forwards, we want to make sure that we populate it in work days. So if your company works five days a week and you want to consume a week of forecast, you should populate five. Whereas in some other SAP date fields, we use seven calendar days to represent a week. So it's always best to double check before you load the data. Now, let's go take a look at those numbers, backward consumption, forward consumption and look at what happens when we actually populate them. So again, these are in work days. So we'll start with 10 work days backwards. So when a sales order comes in, it's going to look back two weeks to see if there's forecast. We'll do 10 work days forward, [00:07:00] so if it sees demand 10 work days in the past, it will delete that, and then it will look forward if it hasn't consumed all of the independent requirements, it'll look forward 10 more days, two more weeks to decrement the forecast. So I'm going to save this, I'm going to execute MRP , we will run the MRP , and then go back to our MD04 screen, and double click on our material number again, enter, and I'm going to go just refresh the screen. And take a look at that summarized view to show our weekly demand. Now, what you'll see here, is you have that forecast, 23 in week 14, 23 in week 15, 23 in week 16. Now there's nothing in week 17. There's nothing planned in week 18. There's nothing planned in week 19. And there's nothing planned in week 20. Because this 100 piece [00:08:00] order, when it came in, SAP said, Oh, we have a 100 piece order? Let's go back two weeks and remove the forecast, but the forecast there wasn't sufficient, so it deleted roughly 46 pieces and then it said, okay, well, I deleted 46 pieces in the past backward. Then it looked forward and said, let me go delete whatever demand I have in the next two weeks. And it deleted more so that weeks 17, 18, 19 and 20 were all zeroed out. And now, instead of planning for 123 pieces in week 18, the backward and forward consumption has allowed us to not overplan. Because we have this 100 piece order, while we were expecting to get orders at a rate of 23 per week, we can't always tell when those orders are going to come in. So, thankfully, by changing those parameters, MRP will now, again, replan for us, and we're not [00:09:00] expecting orders in week 17, 18, 19 and 20 because we just got this one order for 100. And it actually looks pretty good to me, right? I don't want to bring in my forecast and sales orders inventory. I want to just aggregate the whole plan and figure out how to proceed. So, one more thing that I think we should talk about is forecast bias. I'm not sure if you've experienced it, but generally speaking, forecast bias can be described as a tendency to either over forecast or under forecast, leading to a forecasting error. If a material is typically over forecast because the sales team is overly optimistic, I would probably weight my forward consumption periods more heavily. We don't know if those sales will materialize, so let's start reducing the future forecast as those orders come in. However, if a material is typically under forecasted, I would do the opposite and weight my backward consumption periods more heavily. Let me come back into MRP3 and just remind you where we're talking [00:10:00] about. So, when we see that, you want the system to keep driving in material to support those sales that will inevitably exceed the forecast because of that bias. So, I'm actually pretty confident that knowing how to properly leverage these fields will help you to smooth variability when you don't know exactly what day or week your orders will come in. And it gives you an opportunity to leverage standard SAP functionality in the best way possible for your specific business patterns. Whew! Okay. Welcome back. In today's chat, we covered a lot. We discussed the options for forecast consumption, and as a reminder, if backwards forwards consumption, the demand will be matched with the current period. Then work backwards. And lastly, work forward. We discussed how this helps to smooth the variability in timing and quantity. And, before I leave you, I just want to note the importance of thinking about consumption and maintenance, or the reorganization of the forecast. Both as key parts of [00:11:00] facilitating your demand management program. This is a great topic, and all that was just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, Patrick, thank you so much for taking this robust topic and really breaking it down for us in actionable steps. This is such a good start, guys. Go forward, be curious, and explore. Speaking of exploring, feel free to go check out our video catalog of all the different videos that exist. And of course, if you have a specific question, feel free to submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; WM

MIGO; MMBE

Hey folks, welcome back, Martin here. Today we're introducing a topic that falls into the category of seems like a good idea, but also a lot of work. It's worth it. Today we're introducing the concept of vendor consignment. This is a great opportunity to work with your strategic partners to share in the responsibility for carrying inventory. Organizations who do this well are able to negotiate terms with their suppliers that are fair, equitable, and reasonable to manage. I'm going to hand it over to Dave, who will give us a high level orientation to vendor consignment and provide some insights into how we might get started with this program. So Dave, take us away. No time like the present, Martin. In today's dive into SAP, I'm going to take the time to provide a simple definition of vendor consignment. I will introduce you to one of the key concepts that help us identify consignment materials in the form of special stock. And I'll briefly outline what the typical consignment process might look like. All of this to be further explored in later videos. Today is just the start. Let's go in and let SAP assist with bringing this introductory orientation to life . Processing the MIGO goods receipt MIGO 101 goods receipt for the document I just created quantity I'm going to receive the full quantity in, this is going to be put into my consignment warehouse, check the item is OK, and, document is OK Item is posted. Now, I can check my inventory level to see where this item is, it's been receipted into my vendor consignment inventory, you can see it's sitting in unrestricted, but it's in vendor consignment, so at this point, it is unvaluated. Now I am at the point where I want to use up this material, I am ready to consume the material in my warehouse or my operation, I'll execute a transfer posting. The transfer posting does a 411 movement type, K. The material again, FG13, I can change the destination, what material is going to be posted to, or I can leave it the same, I can indicate what location I want to move it to, all in one transaction, so 1710. You go from location 71A, I'm going to keep it in the same location to keep this simple presentation. And I'm going to indicate who was my supplier. So at this point, I need to just insert the quantities that I'm going to consume, I don't have to consume the full quantity, but I'm going to consume it. And once I have completed the 411k, I can check my movements, and as you can see, the vendor consignment has now been moved into my own stock in location 171A. There are some significant benefits to a vendor consignment program when properly designed and qualified. It helps us to share in the burden of inventory risk and holding and brings our suppliers into deeper strategic partnerships. However, we need to carefully consider the materials we select and the terms we agree to. Consignment programs require diligent care and feeding to ensure that we've been great stewards of both our suppliers and our own investment. We need to make sure we're all on the same page for how much risk we're willing to take in terms of inventory stocking position, expected turns and associated terms of ownership and payment. Spending the time up front to focus on preparation sets the program up for success and eases the burden and anxiety of starting something new or expanding a fledging program that has yet to find its wings. That's awesome Dave, thank you. The importance of getting this right is often undervalued and it's a big missed opportunity for a lot of organizations. I'd wager most folks listening to this could uncover a hidden opportunity in their organization simply by reviewing some of the highlights from this video in their own business. Can't wait to hear about some of these outcomes. If you want to learn more about this particular topic or other videos about how to exploit your SAP system, please check out our catalog, and if you have a specific question, feel free to suggest it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

MM

MD04; MD3

The best way to learn is by doing, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here, and in this video we're going to focus on one of SAP's biggest and major rules, planning strategies. We've talked about the different categories of planning strategies in other videos, but today we want to talk about the differences between gross and net requirements planning. This adds a whole new dimension to the planner's arsenal. So Kristie, tell us a little bit more about this whole gross versus net requirements planning in SAP. Absolutely, I've been looking forward to this one. We know about the different planning strategy categories around make to stock, make to order, and assemble to order, and we've spoken about the fact that there are many options for how we can plan in each of those categories. One concept that we're going to explain today is around another key decision. Do we want a plan that considers the inventory we have on hand, which is classic and common in how we might plan? Or do we have a specific need to plan for specific volumes regardless of our current inventory levels? When used correctly, the introduction of these concepts to our planning can be a real advantage. So, to the system we go, and I will be walking through three key things. First, the difference between gross and net requirements planning. Second, the use case for both. And third, how MRP will react to these rules. Okay, gross versus net requirements planning. Super important and used for two distinctly different purposes. So the first example I'm going to show you is right here on the screen. You'll see I'm in MD04, this is my stock requirements list where all planners and buyers spend the majority of their lives. Okay, at least their days when they're planning and buying and you'll see here for this particular material, I have VSFs, or independent requirements. Now, your requirement type, where it says VSF, could be a variety of different requirement types. In this case, this is classic net requirements planning, this is your typical make to stock or procure to stock strategy and what I'm doing here is I have a forecast, and I've got sales orders coming in and they're consuming that forecast and ultimately what's happening is I'm checking against any existing inventory before determining how much it is that I need to make or buy. This is checking against inventory, it's checking against what is coming inbound to us, what I have out there for planned production, all of those good things in order to be able to come up with my plan. Now, that's net requirements planning, it's netting out the available inventory. The other thing that's happening here is that you can see my overall plan that I have in place, I've got my forecast and I have my orders and I can come in here and I can actually see how my forecast is performing versus orders. I'm going to go to environment and total requirements display and you'll see here in the 25th week of the month I have a forecast of 15 and then I have these sales orders of 8. So that 15 is allowing those sales orders to peg against it, and so there are 7 pieces remaining to be sold and then I have 5 for each of the remaining weeks. We had a big event this first one, and so that's why the demand is a little bit higher. If I go back here, you will see there's that 7 pieces, okay? Now, I'm going to make a change here, and when I do, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to change our requirements type so that you can get an idea of how the system is going to react and respond to that. So in this case, if I had inventory, it would be playing against that inventory and then figuring out how much additional inventory needed to be made or procured. The next one, I'm just going to give you an example here, what would end up happening is that it's going to actually say, okay, that forecast is going to be what we're going to make. So let's say you had a constraint, the maximum that you could produce for that particular item was 20 per week. Then you would use the forecast to control that, it's not going to see how much inventory you have on hand, if you're sending a signal for 20 units per week, that is indeed what it is going to produce, and so you control this with a combination of the planning strategy and the way that the sales orders are receiving that information onto the sales order. So anytime you change your planning strategy, like I just did here, you have to go in and actually adjust your sales orders to be able to pick up that new master data, if you would like to invoke that rule as of that particular sales order. But what the system is going to do in gross requirements planning is it's going to go, okay, you told me how much I need to produce regardless of what my inventory position is, I am actually going to go and produce or procure that, and so it's a very different way to look at your planning, and you really would want to use this in situations where you have a very specific constraint and where that constraint is much lower than what your market demand or your usage is going to be either demonstrated or planned for the future. Okay, so this is much less commonly used, but it allows you to set a master production schedule in place and use that to be the kind of the heartbeat of your supply plan and so you're constraining saying no matter what my inventory position is, which means if my forecast is wrong and customer pulls are different from what I was expecting, so that consumption is different, I am going to produce this amount regardless. And so there's a lot more risk inherent in a gross requirements planning strategy than there is in the net, which is allowing you to constantly react and respond and plan to that demand. But it is a good way to handle constraints, and so as you're thinking through all of your different planning strategy options, just bear in mind you have a bunch of different ways that you can react to the demand plan and service it through either manufacturing or procurement. So make sure that as you're thinking through your planning strategies, particularly for manufacturing, you're considering the use of both of these different options. A lot of times we only think about it in terms of make to stock, make to order, assemble to order, but within each of those categories there are a variety of additional options and this is a good example of the difference if you think about gross versus net requirements planning. So in summary we have covered how applying a planning strategy that reflects gross versus net requirements planning. Will allow you to manage through a maximum replenishment in specific use cases. Further refine your plan for every part. Or support the way in which we want to plan manufacturing to respond to our demand and position us for success in our go to market strategy. Thanks Kristie, that was interesting. It's so important that we think through our product portfolio and apply the best rule to suit the strategy for each part. It's amazing how many options SAP offers to enable our vision if we just know where to look. So folks if you want to learn more about what you can do to get the most out of your SAP system please check out our other video library and also, of course, if you have a question please submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LX06; LX07; LX24

Hey folks, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we're going to focus on hazardous materials managed in the warehouse. Knowing that there are many dangerous chemicals and substances out there in the world, or just some that I know should not be stored next to each other, I can only imagine how imperative this may be to get it right. Steve, I know that this is a real issue in SAP, and how can SAP automatically segregate and identify these materials in the warehouse? Please share that with us. Why yes, Martin. It absolutely can. In the beginning stages of my career, one of the duties I had in the warehouse was safety captain for the building, which I took very seriously. The warehouse I worked in had many categories of hazardous materials, and many separate rooms, drop down doors, that were made specifically for storing these hazmat materials. In addition, we had up to a certain amount of hazmat materials stored in the general warehouse. So, segregating these materials in the general population was key and that first took a lot of daily monitoring, until I leveraged the capability of SAP. To help automatically segregate and identify these materials. This is critical, not only for the importance of health and safety of the employees. But also for government regulators such as OSHA. So let's get into SAP where I'll demonstrate how to use the features of hazardous materials management within the warehouse. If your warehouse has hazardous materials, it's important to know the information in SAP of what they are and where some of these hazardous materials are located in your warehouse. So one of the first transactions we'll go through is LX24 and what this does, it gives you an overview of the actual hazardous materials that you're storing. If you know that hazmat number, which is associated to exactly what it is, you could enter that there, or in this case, we'll just go to a regional specific code there. All the U S warehouses, it would list the hazmat of which we have there. So you could see if I had multiple warehouses, multiple hazmat numbers in there, it will list them all out there and then obviously by the storage class. So storage class is what it is. So in this case, it is an explosive material, but you could see the list of everything, gases, flammables, oxidizers, so on and so forth there. And then you would have a material number associated to that in the material master. But this is again, a list of all the hazmat materials that you would have within your region. Let's jump into some more of the granular per warehouse transactions. So these are very important if a fire chief inspector, someone from OSHA, someone that's regulating you wants to see where some of your materials are located. So LX06 will be the next one that we go into, and you can see it's the fire department inventory list. What I recommend based on how you have this configured, you designate storage classes and fire containment sections by storage types. So we'll go ahead and just click this list by storage type, and I'll show you why as we go through there, and then we'll go to our warehouse 001. And what you see here at first, as we know, quants kind of roll up. So if I hit list per storage type, that view will change a little bit. Now you can see quants are essentially the amount of pallets in there or locations that have a hazardous material in there. So it rolls up the quants and the weight, which is very important for the fire department. They want to go by weights. They want to know where it is. So at this point we just know that in storage type 001 and in our receiving doc we have some pallets there, we have some locations there with X amount of weight. There's no class there because it's not configured to these storage types in there but nonetheless, this report is actually just showing us that, hey, it's not configured, but you have some hazardous materials and weights in those storage types. Okay, so LX06, again, it's going to be used, fire department, someone rolls in there and they just want to see your hazardous materials and weights by storage types. And the final report that we'll go into, it's going to be LX07 and this will show you kind of those rules, are you storing them in the correct manner or not? And then it simply shows, okay, all my storage types per warehouse 001, and I have 9 incorrect. Oh no, you want some further information or details, so click on the bins, and you can get that information as to why. So simply what it shows is, I have all of my bins in there, my materials that are hazmat, or in this case, they're related to the hazmat material 11, the explosive materials we first showed and then it gives you the reason that they are incorrect is because at the bins, we didn't designate this storage type, having a specific storage class as to, at least in this case, store explosive materials. If I simply populated what storage class was okay to be stored in this storage type, we wouldn't get these errors. So you can see here, material stored in incorrects, it's stated number 2 across all those and you can see number 2 is simply storage class is not maintained for storage type. So again, a great report to show you, am I storing them correctly? Is my system set up correctly? Do the rules apply to the behavior? In this case, we got some hazmats in there not designated by a storage type. So there's a lot of good information on hazmat. There's a whole suite there. These are just some of the most important reports that you may want to know in case you get regulated or audited. And welcome back. In this demo, we've covered quite a lot on hazardous materials and how. SAP could do much of the heavy lifting from segregating and identifying these materials. Not only can this save a tremendous amount of time. But the most important thing is it can actually save lives. Well, Steve, yep, I completely understand how serious this topic is. And I love the features you showed and the real life success story you told on how to leverage SAP, not only to make your life easier, but also to deal with this hazmat materials. But most importantly, you made others around you safe, so thank you. So folks, if you want to learn more about this video, other safety features, or even functions and features in SAP that can help on the warehouse side, please check out our video catalog or put your recommendation suggestion below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD04; MD05

Martin here and welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. So we know the best way to learn is by doing so, in this case, in this video in particular, we're going to explore the touchstone transaction for planners and buyers. It's called the stock requirements list. This transaction is so powerful because it's jumping off point for all planning, procurement and other related activities and it's all to date as of the moment you entered it and hit the refresh button. So we know it's real time, it's telling us what's going on in our supply chain. So Kristie, how about you share a little bit more about these specific details on the stock requirements list? Kristie: Hi, Martin, yes I think we should. There are so many great tools to make a planner or buyer's life easier that exist embedded in the workspace that's offered in MD04. I can't wait to walk you through a few of them. We're going to explore some of the options for how to set up your workspace. We'll hit on some of the places you can easily get to right from the stock requirements list, and I'll [00:01:00] highlight the periodic totals. We'll also talk about how those can be useful and we'll go into some of the options to dig deeper into the planning situation for discussion and decision making. Today will be the highlights and then we will have videos that will dive deeper into some of these features in detail. Let's get into it! Let's dig into some of these hidden gems in the stock requirements list. So you can see here, I am in MD04 and I've just pulled up a stock situation for this elephant phone holder in the color blue, and I'm just looking to see here what's happening with this material. And what I wanted to do today is point out some of the things that ~um,~ you may or may not be aware of in terms of how to set up your stock requirements list to meet your needs. The first is this overview tree. So as we're going through and we're navigating from material to material, this actually will build out the work list for us, it's like the breadcrumbs of where we have been. And if you've done something like gone through and searched for MRP elements or [00:02:00] exception messages from your exception monitor, you see your entire work list here. But if you're paying attention as you go through and you navigate from one plant to another or from one material to another, you'll actually see this continue to build out. And one of the things that's important to know is that there's actually additional information here that's just kind of sitting in the back in terms of descriptions and things. So you can actually control how much real estate this is taking up and where you would like this to sit. And where this becomes more important is if you're doing something like using the pegging report or the order report. So the order report tells you whether you have the necessary components to take this into production. The pegging report, as we've seen in other videos, actually shows what that supply element is meant to supply, so like a purchase requisition all the way through to the finished good. And you can see if it's pegging against your forecast or if it's pegging against a customer order or even a delivery. And there are a lot of different options up here in [00:03:00] terms of how you can choose to display your fields and your sequence. So you can actually come in here and decide what fields you would like to have show and then what sequence you would like to have them appear on, so that's really nice. And if you come up to settings at the top and then go to settings, this is where we actually can control the way that we would like this to display. So if you see down here, overview, tree for materials, and the order report, we can control whether this is going to be positioned at the left, which is what we're most used to seeing, or at the top, and then also what percentage of our screen it is allowed to take up, and then whether the overview tree is going to be displayed automatically or not. So those are some really good options in terms of customizing exactly how you would like your MD04 or MD05 screen to look. And one of the things I will say is that when you're doing something like using the order report, you have a lot more information, so you may want to have that up on the [00:04:00] top so that it's actually stacked on top of your stock requirements list. So as you're trying to work with these different features, this is a good place to come, again, under settings, to see ~What is, uh,~ what is happening there? And then also, as you're going through, you'll see that there are different settings that will control the way that you will see ~um,~ groupings set, if you're going to see some aggregation or non aggregation, if you have the cross plant view in place, if you want to see stock transfers there or not. And then also in your periodic total, so you've got individual line displays, but you can also control periodic totals displays in weeks, months, or even based on a planning calendar. So lots of good stuff there that you can play with. In terms of dates, you can choose your default on whether it's going to show the availability date, so when that is meant to be available on shelf for use, versus your goods receipt date, which is the date it is meant to arrive to you, and that is ignoring the additional goods receipt processing time that needs to happen before it's available. And it's very helpful to be able [00:05:00] to toggle back and forth, so this actually will help you to be able to quickly make decisions on the fly ~so Um,~ if you're able to evaluate whether your supplier is past due or manufacturing is past due based on toggling back and forth between availability date and goods received date. Same thing down here for safety time, so if you have a temporary situation that's causing you to bring in material early, so your supplier lead time or your manufacturing lead time is X number of days, but you're actually offsetting the requirements, so it comes in a bit early. You can choose whether you're seeing when that safety time is coming into play or if you want to see when it actually is going to ~um,~ align ~with this,~ with this demand plan. Okay, and then also you can insert the line that will show the end of the total replenishment lead time , which is also very helpful, so your stated lead time, and this actually is super helpful for customer service or anyone who is supporting on the demand side of the house, so that you have an idea of what the stated lead time is. And then lastly here, I'm going to flip over to the general settings, and this is also very important, this is where you assign things like your [00:06:00] order report profile, the checking rule you're going to be using as you're going through and you're evaluating the availability, and then also your navigation profile. And we have another video on this where we go through and we explain all the different options for navigation profiles, but that's what gives you these hot keys or the buttons at the top that allow you to navigate. So lots of really good stuff here in terms of being able to customize the way that this is going to look and feel. The other thing is you have, of course, your period totals, and by clicking on this you can actually get out of the weeds a little bit and look to see what your plans look like at ~you know,~ maybe a week or monthly level. So you can go, okay, so for week 10 we still have 4 units remaining to sell and no requirements currently pegged in that week. The following week we have 5 units remaining to sell and we have 20 requirements already in hand. ~So, and ~That could be a combination ~um,~ between order reservations and sales orders or stock transfer orders, anything that falls in the category of firm demand that's part of your demand program. Then if you have receipts coming in, you'll see those here, [00:07:00] and sometimes it's really helpful to get in here and look at this at a periodic total so you can get an idea quickly if someone asks you, you know, when's the next time you can take an order or what's your next recovery period, you can get a good idea of how you're looking in terms of coverage and what's available to you. The other thing to highlight is that because this is a cockpit transaction, you have so many options of where you can navigate from here. So, if you come in here, you can go under Goto, and you'll see that you can navigate to things like MMBE for stock statistics, or you can go into the sales statistics to look at ~um,~ what orders you have out there and open, you could evaluate your capacity situation and many, many other options. You can also come in here and go into your ATP Quantities or your Total Requirements Display to see how that demand plan is stacking up and it's pegging against materials. You can also come in here and go directly into the material master and of course you can get there also by double clicking on the material. So lots and lots of good information. And lastly, I think most folks are aware of this, but let me just highlight it for you. If you click on the header details, we can actually go in and [00:08:00] see much of the master data that's sitting in the material master, well organized in a way that makes sense. We can quickly go through and evaluate and make some decisions ~um,~ based on the information that's here. It gives us a lot of really good stats and information for what is happening with this particular material. We're able to organize this data in a way that makes sense and actually save ~um,~ that information. And the same goes here for ~in~ your ~actual, um,~ stock requirements list. You can actually control the order in which you'd like to see these columns and save that as well as control things like the width. Also, some of your columns may be hidden, so you have your opening date, your start or your release date, very, very important ~for, um,~ when you need to get orders out, and then of course your rescheduling date so if you have an exception message, it's going to do the math and tell you how many you need and by when you need them, so that date will appear here as well. If these columns don't show for you, what you'll see is that you'll have a little double line arrow, and if I close this you'll be able to see it, let me do that for you, and then what you have to do is actually [00:09:00] see the double line and then you can expand it out so that you're able to reveal that hidden column and start making use of that in your day to day, and then you use this over here to actually go through and save those settings. ~So,~ So many good little hidden gems and nuggets that are available to us right from the stock requirements list, and this was just a quick tour about the tip of the iceberg, but so many good things here to help us make sure that we have a good customized environment that is providing for exactly what we need without hiding anything and allowing us to be able to organize our workspace in a way that makes sense. Whew! That has been the whirlwind tour of some of the hidden gems or underutilized features that are embedded in or associated with the stock requirements list. We saw options for shaping how our workspace is oriented. Some of the more interesting tools to support our discussions and problem solving in the room or in meetings. And we saw loads of places that we can get to from [00:10:00] navigating right from that home base, the stock requirements list. Now, it is important to note that most of these features are also available from the MRP list as well, and we've chosen to focus on this from the perspective of the stock requirements list today because of its dynamic nature and availability for all materials. There is so much more here to explore. Over to you, Martin. Martin: I like these little tours, Kristie. Man this is powerful stuff. I look forward to exploring some of these features in other videos, and I hope that it generates a lot of curiosity and discussion for MRP controllers, planners, etc. These nuggets are just perfect for what we need to be doing here in this particular video series. So, once again, if you have particular questions, please submit them below , and please go and explore all the other videos we have in our catalog.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD02; MD03; MD06; MD07; MD05; MD04

Greetings supply chain enthusiasts. Martin here, and today we're on a mission to uncover the hidden value in your SAP system. So buckle up and let's get started. In this video, we're going to broach a hot topic and it became quite controversial, frankly. It's around the critical question, how often should I run MRP? I think I know the answer, but let's ask someone who's in the field being asked this exact question by the organizations all the time. Jason, I can't tell you how much I hear this question over and over. You deal with this every day. You know the answer. Take us away. No joke, Martin. This has become a question I'm asked to weigh in on regularly. I suppose we could take the easy way out and say it depends. I love that answer. And to a certain extent it does. But there's some good guidelines, some important questions an organization should ask themselves. So today, we're going to dive into the system and highlight a few things you can do to prepare for a world with MRP Live or even classic MRP run more frequently than overnight. I'm going to focus on two really important things and the first measures the second. The processing indicator for those of us still on ECC or running classic MRP. And the second is around the importance of daily habits so you can get to a place where you can run and review MRP more frequently. So let's go in and take a look. So our going in position is always to run MRP once per day, as close to the start of business as possible. And unless you have a robust daily cadence of exception monitoring already in place, anything more runs the risk of playing exception whack a mole and while that's a fun arcade game, it's really no way to run a supply chain. Just think about it. The picture can be changing constantly. New orders are coming in all the time, potentially from all over the world. At all hours of the day, an inventory is constantly moving. Trying to manage exceptions in real time, in that type of environment, is daunting, even for the most mature organization. So we want to reduce the noise and churn, establish consistent daily habits in order to create a stable planning environment to work with. Okay, so we've established our once daily MRP run. Now what? First off, cadence keeps the chaos away. I think we're going to copyright that phrase, we use it so often. It all starts with consistent daily habits. When you come into the office, step one is check and address your exceptions. Maybe you can flip on the coffee pot first, but in the world of single serve coffee, who even does that anymore? So start your day with exceptions. Let's jump into SAP and take a look. I've displayed ZMD06, which shows the exceptions as of the last MRP run. We'll have many videos around how to perform exception monitoring, so I'm not going to get into great detail here, but a couple of things I want to point out. First, I can get a quick feel for the current picture by using the binocular button to find exceptions. I always want to update the statistics when I do this. So you've got some tabs up here, you can look at MRP elements with dates, you can find specific materials, red lights, exception groups. But for me, I'm going to go in here. I'm going to grab the 720s because that's SAP telling me that I have some supply coming that I don't actually need. And as much as I love to mess with the warehouse guys, it's probably best for us all if we avoid buying stuff we don't need. You can see that SAP was nice enough to highlight the materials with this exception, and I can use selected MRP list button to bring these up. So now I'm into the first material, I can click through these using the arrows up at the top to get a quick feel for some of this. So this guy's got some other exceptions. I'm going to bounce around a little bit, lots of cancelled stuff, so something has definitely gone haywire here with our MRP run. Big shift in demand, it appears. Let me come back to this first one here. It looks like something has changed and these last two POs are no longer needed. So I guess I'm going to have to have a chat with the supplier to see if it's too late to cancel them. And I'm a bit forgetful about these things, so I'm going to go in and add a note. This will also help if someone else happens to come look at this. Reaching out to supplier to see about canceling. All right, we don't really care that that's probably not spelled right, but I'm going to save my text. I'm going to back out and now you'll see that it's noted here that I added text. So now if someone else comes into this to view this item, they'll see that I'm already working on it. Now it may take some time for the supplier to get back with me, and in the meantime, I don't want to have to look at this exception every day. So I'm going to check the processing indicator. That guy's now on, as you can see by the message down here. Processing indicator, you say, what is that? Checking this tells SAP you've reviewed the item and that you don't want to see it again unless something changes with the planning situation. I'm going to run the list again to show that this material is no longer displayed and let's remember we were looking at this DPC1102. So I'm going to back out, yes, I want to exit, and I'm going to rerun it real quick. And now if I scroll through this list, it's all alphabetical. You'll see that that item is no longer in the list. So once we start using the processing indicator, there's one thing to keep in mind. Going back to the selection screen, down here we have this guy that says only with new exceptions. So if I check that, what's going to happen is if something changes with that particular item that I marked the indicator for, it's going to display that message. So let's say that demand shifted and MRP runs and it generates a new supply requirement. Well even though I've checked that processing indicator, that item is now going to pop up because the picture has changed due to this new MRP run. And that could happen, MRP could run 25 times before that picture changes. But when it does it's going to grab that particular item and show it to me. Now, if for whatever reason, I'm curious as to which items I have set the indicator on, I can go here to all processed MRP lists, run that, and you'll see, here's our DPC1102 with the indicator turned on. It's not a bad idea to check this periodically just to make sure something hasn't gotten stranded. This is a great way to reduce the noise in your daily exception monitoring. But also quickly get back to review these items so they don't fall through the cracks and you can process them and always you can take this off, so let's just say I'm in here, I want to turn that off, I'm going to exit, I'm going to go back in and we will see, got to change my indicator, don't forget SAP remembers. So I'm going to go all MRP lists. I'm going to run it, and you will see now that our friend DPC1102 is back in the list with the indicator turned off. So that's a little bit around MRP list, around the cadence of running MRP and it's super important as we move forward to establish these great daily cadence of exception monitoring. Eventually when you get to S/4 you have the option of running MRP Live, which essentially means this MRP list view is real time. You won't have that processing indicator because everything will be in real time. And if you've got great daily cadence already established it's going to make your life a lot easier when you get to MRP Live. Otherwise again, it's whack a mole and again, nobody wants that. So that's MD06, that's MRP run strategy. Again, we'll have a lot of other videos around how to really dig in deep on exception monitoring. We all want to get to a place where we can see and process information in real time. And for that, we have our stock requirements list. But to realign our plans and propagate demand through the supply chain at a rate that's faster than we can consume can create a lot of churn and instability in the process. We don't want to do the wrong things faster. The way we get there from here is in getting our daily habits humming. Ensure we have excellent quality of master data and a solid plan for every part. That's the ticket to being able to take advantage of all that SAP has to offer, including running MRP more frequently or taking advantage of MRP Live. Thanks Jason, and thanks for not saying "it depends". I much appreciate that. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I know we can get there and we can all appreciate the importance of getting it right, where we are today, and then progressing from there. So folks, if you want to know more about MRP and when to run it and how frequently, like we discussed here with Jason, please check out our video catalog, and of course, if you have some specific questions, feel free to submit them below.

SAP Optimization

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MC49

Hey there, Martin here. Welcome to the only video series where you unlock the secrets and reveal the magic behind your SAP system. Stick around, this is a good one. In this video, we'll be exploring one of the great efficiency builders, choosing and creating a variant. Knowing the ins and outs of a variant creation can make things a lot easier. This video introduces the concept of variants, and we've got a great person to provide the introduction. Rutul, thanks once again for being here. Share with us today how we can be using variants to create productivity improvements. Thanks for the introduction. In today's video. I would like to explain what a variant is. How to choose from existing variants. And how to create and save your own. Now, before we get started, I have two callouts that are very important. First of all, when you create your own variant, It is very important that you do not save over an existing variant that is not your own. And second, it's very important to watch your exclusions. You want to make sure that you do not miss data that is important to your process. We'll learn a little bit today and then we'll keep building in future videos. Let's go in and take a look. I'm in one of our favorite transactions MC49 which shows you the average stock value. You can see the transaction code right here. And we are going to look at how you can create and save your own variant for these transactions. As you can see there is lots of input values that you can do your sales organization's plan, date ranges, materials, MRP controller. Instead of having to enter all of this information every time you come in to this transaction, to look up your stock value, for example, your own MRP controller, you can input the values, save a variant, and that way you don't have to keep coming back and remember what the input values that you need to do. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to put the plant. One of these is required, so I'm going to put the plant as 3000. I'm going to leave the date range as is. I'm going to let's say select, material marked for deletion because I want to, even though the materials are marked for deletion at plant level, I still want to be included in the report so that I can see what the average stock value is. And then I'm going to put my own MRP controller here. For example, for me, let's say 001. And I only want to look at my MRP controller's results for that. These are my input values. And then, I'm going to click save here. Any report you'll see selection criteria, this save button is actually the button that allows you to save the selection parameters as a variant. So I'm going to go ahead and click save. And then I'm going to give it a name, make sure you provide the name as something that's meaningful to you, so there's something you can remember. So for me, I'm going to put the variant as plant and then underscore 001. That tells me, this is the plant and my MRP controller. In addition, I can also add more information with the description, so I can say Plant 3000 / MRPC 001. You can see that there's lots of ways to do these things here. And one of the things that you can also do is to protect this variant. Click on this checkbox right here. Now, we talked about making sure that you do not overwrite someone else's variant. This is a way to do that so that only you as a user who created this variant can change this. Then I'm going to just click save again to say, okay, this is the value and you'll see the message at the bottom that says variant 3000_001 saved easy enough, right. Then you can go ahead and click execute and you can see that it's there. Now, when you are coming in the transaction the first time, how you can get it. Let's look at that a little bit. I'm going to go into this transaction again MC49 and there's multiple ways you can get to the variant. If a report has a variant saved already, you'll see this little icon here, and when you hover over it, it will tell you get variant, and then when you click on it, it will show you all the variants that are available to you. Even before I mentioned that protecting the variant, even though you can protect the variant so that the changes are only made by you, only you can change or delete that variant, but you can still have access to the other variants that other people and everybody else have created and you can still run that. But for now, I am going to just say, okay, I'm coming in 3001, and you'll see that as soon as I double click on it, information is prefilled. I have my plant, I have my date range, I have my MRP controller. Now, this is the simplest way to save the common or the consistent input values that you want to remember and don't want to keep entering to do this. The other variation we have here is that date range. Now, if you come in today and you run this report for, the last 90 days by default, okay, great. But you want to have this happen every time you come in, meaning, you come into the transaction tomorrow, day after tomorrow, you want this dates to be calculated dynamically. Okay. So there's another little trick that we can do. So again, I'm going to click save here, and because I created this varient, I should be able to save it. Okay. Now you'll see for the date range, you have date from and date to, two parameters, and you can dynamically select the date ranges. So, what I mean by that is, it automatically, based on the system date, the parameter values automatically change. What we're going to do is, under the selection variable, we're going to say, do a pull down, see what the options are. What we are going to select is the system date, X, dynamic date calculation and then we're going to come in here and say name of the input value. When you click on that, F4 on that, you have options on how the dynamic calculation should happen. So for now, for this example, let's say we want to look at the start date is, 10 days ago versus today. So I'm going to do that, we typically do that 90 days, but for now I'm going to do this so that I can show you the difference. All right, so you can double click on the current date, plus or minus days, and if you want to go back the date, then you would put minus, and I'm going to say, let's say 20 days, okay. And then, similarly, I'm going to do it for day 2. I'm going to say, system date and I'm going to say, current date only. I want to know average inventory from last 20 days. Okay, I'm going to click save, and it will ask you to say, do you want to overwrite? This is another clue from the system that tells you, hey, you are overwriting a variant. Even if you pick somebody else's variant and then you hit save, when you're trying to save a variant, if you get this message, that's when you want to think about do I really want to overwrite? And am I overriding my own variant or somebody else's variant? I'm going to say click yes. Okay. Alright, so this impact doesn't automatically happen, so I'm going to click variant again. And I'm going to click this. You'll notice that it automatically changed the date. It was January before, now it's actually March 22nd till April 11th. You can see how this is so useful when you don't even have to remember the date ranges. It will automatically calculate the date ranges for you and save the varient so that you don't even have to remember the date ranges. So in today's video, we walked through a basic introduction to choosing, creating, and saving variants. Let's take a moment to talk about the good stuff. First, variants lend themselves to consistency and not having to repeat the same task over and over by populating the selection criteria manually. Second, variants are highly adaptable and we can create variations on the selection criteria to support grouping and prioritization. And lastly, they are easy to adjust and can even be set to dynamically adjust for things like dates. This is some of the goodness we have to, we have to look forward to. Thanks Rutul. That was an awesome walkthrough introducing us to how we choose and create variants. A very powerful tool, thank you. Hey folks, please feel free to check out our video catalog. There's many tips and tricks like that one in our videos. And of course, if you use the chatbot, it will recommend some videos for you to watch.

SAP Optimization

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VA06

Welcome back, everyone, Martin here. And today, we're all about revealing the untold capabilities of your SAP system. We're going to unlock some real value. So let's get started. In this video, we're going to be discussing one of the best usability tools in SAP called layouts. Now, you'll commonly see two different ways to interact with layouts. Today, Jason is going to take us and provide us with one of those options. The most common one, actually, as a matter of fact. When you are in some of these reporting tools, you'll see a different format for managing layouts, which we'll review in another video. But today, Jason, tell us more about this successful layout technique. Martin, layouts can make life so much easier. In today's walkthrough, I'm going to highlight a few key things. First, we're going to review how to get your data into an ALV grid display, where available. Then I'm going to demonstrate how to add, remove, and reorder columns. Lastly, we'll work with some sorts, totals, and subtotals functionality that can really add value. So let's jump in the system and take a look. Okay. So here I am in VA06, this is an ECC only transaction. It was too good for S/4 so SAP took it out in favor of Fiori apps. But don't worry, in this particular video it's not about the specific transaction, but more about how we can work with ALV controls and these are good just about anywhere in SAP that ALV exists. ALV stands for ABAP List Viewer for those of you interested at home. So let's start with something simple. Let's assume someone was nice enough to set up some layouts for you ahead of time. I'm going to click over here on this button that says Choose Layout and we'll try this reveal header for now. And so you'll see that it changed the layout of the screen a little bit. This particular transaction is really cool because it has a split screen and so we can actually manipulate both of these views individually. The controls are exactly the same but there's certain things that in this case it's header at the top and item at the bottom. So you might want to see things differently. But for now, we're just going to manipulate the top, so we can do some basic things here, so for example, let's say that I would like to see the document date in a different place. So I'm just going to move that over here and I can click and drag it, much like you would in Excel. I can also expand and collapse columns, so I can't really see this customer thing very well so I'm going to pull it out, so click and drag, or I can just use the old double click and it expands it to the max width. So now let's look at some other options for how we can rearrange the columns to our liking. I'm going to go up here again to this button, but on the little arrow and I'm going to say change layout and the first thing I'm going to do, there's a lot of fields over here you can see that are available to be displayed, but they're kind of random. So I'm going to click up here on column name and it's going to sort them alphabetically. So now if I know exactly what I'm looking for, it's pretty easy to find it in the list based on the alphabet sort. But I'm going to try created by. I'd like to see that and I'm going to pop it over. Now you can see here that it popped it in the list right here , I don't really like that, I want to move it, so I'm actually going to just drag it down one level, and I'm going to put it here. So I've got my document date, my created by, and customer. Similar to what we've seen in other places we can manipulate that just based on where we put it. So let's say I'd rather see it back up there, I can slide it in the list there. Again, here I can, click and drag things, if I double click, it'll take it out. So you can see that took distribution channel out by double clicking but I didn't mean to do that. So I'm going to put it back in. Alright, so we've manipulated our columns, we've added our field right here, and everything's set. So let's talk about some numbers now, because everybody likes numbers. In this particular transaction, we can do sorts, we can do subtotals, we can do totals. So we'll start here. I'm going to highlight the net value field and I'm going to hit total and you can see now, and I'll expand my field, you can see that it is totaled, this net value field at the bottom. Let's add some sorts. So, I would like to sort this by customer. So, I'm going to highlight my customer field and then you'll see you have sort in ascending or sort in descending order. So, I'm going to do sort in ascending. And it's now grouped these orders and sorted based on the customer. Now that's cool if I just want a quick sort, but what if I want to use multiple sort criteria? So in that case, I'm going to go back in here to my layout and I'm going to change the layout and you'll see here there's a tab that says sort order. So much like manipulating the layout in general, I can also add fields over here to the sort and make it multi level. So I'm going to do my sort alphabetically and let's see, I've got customer, so that's great. I would like to have my date. I'm struggling to find the field that I want, so there's a cool little feature here, you can see the binoculars. So I'm going to do a find, and I'm going to say document, because I know that's in the name, but I can't seem to find it and it shows me a hit. Oh, there it is. It's sales document, not document number. So I've now found what I want. I'm going to drop it over here and sort. Now you'll see that I've got my sort on customer, I've got my sort on document date, and then the order numbers are sorted top to bottom. That actually looks pretty good, but I want to see some subtotals. So let's go back in there and in the field here, you see we've got these selection indicators for subtotals, so let's just add those, this should be fun. All right, so we've added our subtotals. This is looking pretty cluttered to me, so I think I'm going to tweak this a little bit and so you see over here, we've got the subtotals button. I'm going to grab on this. I'm going to grab this. I really don't care if I'm subtotaled by a document and date. So I'm going to just subtotal by the customer. I'll change it, take those check boxes off and there you see now we've got a better view. So I've got my customer, my dates, and if I scroll down I've got my net value subtotaled by customer. So that's sorting and subtotaling. One last thing that I want to show is the find function here. So I am great about remembering where my customer is for some reason, but I can never remember their name. So I'm going to do a quick find on a city, we'll pick San Antonio , hit enter, and it found Oh, yeah, that's right. It's Holden Associates, that's the one I was trying to think of. So again, find, you can do that with just about anything on here if you're having trouble finding things.And one last little trick that's fun, we're going to look at filtering. So I would like to know how many sales orders I have in this list. So I'm going to click on this field and I'm going to click this little filter button, if you've ever put oil in your car, that might look familiar and then I'm going to do a search on this field, and what you'll see here is, look, 104 entries. So now I know I've got 104 entries in that list. It's a little trick I like to use if I'm just trying to get a sense of the volume. But you can also set those filters within the layout. So if I go back into the layout, I've got a filter tab, and let's say that I want to filter on a customer I can do that by popping that over here and then clicking this filter button and then I can enter my customer here and then save that as part of the layout. Now you want to be careful about that because sometimes when you set a filter in the layout, you might forget it's there and then you'll start looking at the data and you'll not see what you think you should see and then at some point the light bulb will go on, oh that's right I have a filter on. So always be mindful of that if you have a filter, it's going to manipulate the view. So last thing, I don't want to forget to save this. I'm going to go in here to save and I'm going to change this to, we'll call it Jason 2. We'll call it Jason's view and I'm going to click user specific, which means that this is my view, and no one else is going to see it. Now, sometimes you will see down here a button or a checkbox that says default. You probably don't want to check that if you see it because what that does is change the layout for everybody. So when they launch the transaction, they're going to get the layout that you created and that can create chaos. I remember doing that accidentally one day and it generated much volume into the IT help desk and they were a little bit angry with me. So be aware of that, always check user specific when you're in here and you'll save yourself some headaches. So that's it. That's manipulating an ALV layout in this particular case in VA06, but this will apply just about anywhere that you see these settings. So, COOIS and production planning, MB51 has this capability, you'll see this all over SAP and it's super powerful. So practice with it, get used to it, and you'll find it'll be one of your best friends in SAP. So often, Excel is a planner's favorite tool, but by working with layouts, we can organize our data effectively. This allows us to perform more of our work directly in SAP as a single source of truth. And be able to draw information and insights in real time. Being able to answer or sometimes just ask a great question real time in a meeting is priceless. Jason, that is really cool stuff. Especially the way that information is displayed on the screen and laid out for us. It's so easy to find quickly and different things and help us understand and derive value from seeing the information we're looking at. It's a great input. Okay folks, if you want to hear about part two of this video, please go check out our video catalog and of course for any kind of videos that you want to look for. And if you have a specific question, please submit it below.

SAP Optimization

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MC.9

Greetings from the SAP supply chain universe. My name is Martin and today I'm your guide in helping you unlock and reveal the hidden value in your SAP system. Curious? Let's dive right in. In this video, and this is part two, we're going to be looking and discussing at one of SAP's best usability tools in SAP, called Layouts. Now, there are two different ways, and as I mentioned, this is a Part 2 to a Part 1 that we already discussed. And Jason's going to talk to us about this one. It's a little less known and a little less frequently used, but a tool nonetheless. Jason, tell us more. Martin, layouts make life so much easier. In today's walkthrough, I'm going to highlight a few key things. First, we're going to review how to get your data into an ALV grid display where available. Then I'm going to demonstrate how to add, remove, and reorder columns. Lastly, we'll work with some sorts, totals, and subtotals functionality that can really add value. So let's jump into SAP and take a look. Today we're going to jump into MC.9, which is part of the Logistics Information System, or LIS family of transactions in SAP. If you're not familiar with that, it's sort of like a mini data warehouse inside of SAP that allows you to quickly analyze large volumes of data. If you don't know about MC.9, this is an extremely powerful analytical tool that will change your life when you understand how to use it. Today though, we're going to focus on the basics of how to manipulate the layout, a technique that will work in most of the LIS reports in SAP. Here's the default layout that you'll likely see if you've never run the transaction before. It has inventory quantity and value and consignment stock quantity. Now I'm not sure why those were chosen as the defaults. If you didn't know how to find the other available fields, you'd probably be severely underwhelmed at first glance. All the goodness is buried, but fortunately we have a shovel. So I'm going to click on this choose key figures button. If you're used to ALV controls, you're going to take a little bit of time to get used to this because this is a little bit different, but once you play with it a little bit, you'll find it's not that difficult. So the first thing I'm going to do is get rid of consignment stock because we don't do that here and I really don't care about it. Next thing I'm going to do is we'll explore some of these key figures that are available. You can see they're a bit cryptic, so maybe play a little trial and error to get what you're really looking for. But for me, I'm going to grab a few that I know I like to look at. So I'm going to start with average total usage, then I am going to pop that over here using the arrow and then I'll grab a few more. All right, so we're going to grab average value added stock coverage , we're going to grab mean valuated stock value, which really just means average, I don't know why sometimes they say mean and sometimes they say average, but it's SAP, so we're going to forgive, and then we're going to grab the number of evaluated stock issues. That's pretty good, I'm going to save that and move on. So now you can see the field, the screen looks a lot different than it did before. So let's explore a little bit, we've got totals at the top, so all the dollars sum up at the top, we've got some averages. One thing you want to be careful of here is that the unit of measures are mixed, and so this total on the stock quantity is a little bit misleading. Just keep that in mind if you have mixed unit of measure. You'll see in a minute, it really doesn't impact the value of the tool , but a couple other things we can do. So sort, I would like to see which items have the most number of goods issues within this time frame that I ran. So I'm going to just click on this field and I'm going to use the sort largest to smallest , and we quickly see that this MAT1 material has 19 issues within the period of time that I have analyzed. Now, a couple other things. I'm a little bit annoyed right now because I can see the material number, but I have no idea what they stand for, and as luck would have it, there's an easy fix for that. So I'm going to go up here to settings , and characteristic display, and I'm just going to change this to key and description. Now, notice nothing changed here, it's because my field's not wide enough. So I'm going to change my characteristic field to, we'll call it 50 characters, and now I can see both the material number and the description. Alright, maybe I want to see things a little bit different. So I'm going to go up here and I'm going to reorganize some of these columns. Now this is a little bit clunky, but let's say I want to move the number of issues, I'm going to move it up to here. So I highlight the fields and then I can just do a little switcheroo and so now you can see that my valuated stock issues have moved up in the screen. So there's a few other ways you can manipulate this I can move fields out. One quick way, if you want to put it in where you want it. So you can highlight over here and instead of putting it down here at the bottom, it slides it right in the list where you want it. So that's a cool thing if you're moving things in and out and you don't want to have to use this button to move things around. So just play with it a little bit, there's a ton of really good information in here. We'll do other demos on MC.9 specifically that'll go into a lot more detail around which of these fields are most valuable and how to use some of the other cool features here. But for now, we're going to call that good. One thing that you won't see here are things like subtotals. So we've got totals up here, but there's no way to do subtotals on this screen. But what MC.9 does have, and most of the LIS transactions do that, are things we call switch drill down or drill down by. I'll quickly show that there's going to be a full video just on those functions. So, switch drill down is going to adjust this entire list based on some other characteristics. So, let's say I want to look at MRP controller. I'm going to select that and it's going to reorganize. So now it's lumped all those materials that we saw before into just grouped by MRP controller. Now if I still wanted to see the materials, I can use drill down by, which is this button up here. And so I want to see what materials are in MRP controller 002, so I'm going to drill down by, I'm going to say material, and now I have all the materials within that MRP controller. So switch drill down and drill down by really are your subtotals and your way to slice and dice the data inside of MC.9. But again, there's going to be a whole video on that, so I'm not going to go into any more detail. All right, so as luck would have it, I skipped a step and now I've got to go back in. I forgot to save my layout. So if you see I go back in and I have this beautiful layout that we started with. Uh oh. Alright, so let me quickly reset it. I won't grab everything, I'm just going to grab a few fields here and pull them over here. So, in order to not frustrate yourself, after you've set everything the way you want it, I'm going to change this back, and I'm going to change the column width to 50 again. Alright, we're back to where we were. We have to remember to go in here and save it. So I'm going to save settings. I'm going to save the key figures, the characteristic display, and the column width. This drill down I'm not going to save because I didn't really do any of that, but the key thing here is I want the fields in the sequence that I have them and I want the display settings in the, field width. So I'm saving that and now if I go out and come back in, it saved everything. So I'm a happy camper now. So often Excel is a planner's favorite tool. But by working with layouts, we can organize our data effectively. This allows us to perform more of our work directly in SAP as a single source of truth and be able to draw information and insights in real time. Being able to answer or sometimes even just ask a great question real time in a meeting is priceless. Thank you, Jason. Just another way to look at our data and really understand what we're looking at. Divide the information into something that we can actually make of it, and make some good decisions. A good layout can make all the difference. I know what you've shown today is probably a little less familiar to most, so I hope this will spark a curiosity and exploration. So folks, if you want to learn more about this one, and remember there was a part one to this video, please check out our catalog, and of course if you have a burning suggestion or comment, please list it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

OTC; DM; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM02

Hey, supply chain friends, Martin here. And in today's video, we're not just scratching the surface we're going to dive deep and unlock the power of your SAP system. So let's get going. In this video, hold on. In this video, we're going to be discussing getting ready for the disco. What are we talking about, Sam? Well, I'm very curious about this. Somehow, I don't think my wardrobe is a match for today's topic. Sam, what do you think? Okay, guys, disco. I'm going to leave it to Sam to tell us what that is. I'd love to go to the disco. That would be so much fun. And while today's topic is fun, it's not that kind of fun. Today we're talking about discoing items. You know, discontinuing . It's one of the things we all do and most of us don't do very well. So today, we're going to try to fix that. I'm going to tell you how to get ready for the disco in three easy steps. Tidying up before putting the material away. Setting the material status to restrict activities, and promote visibility. And last but not least, setting the MRP type. No more exception message group 8's. Let's dive in and see how this works. So, how do you know if you're really ready to disco? Well, this is a great time for some OCD and perfectionism. We do not want to put a material in a fully discontinued status if it's not been cleaned up. It's like dirty dishes just hanging out and cluttering up the sink. That's no fun, and the gunk can really start to build up. This is an activity that a lot of organizations struggle with, and it's not because it's hard. It's really just that it doesn't seem particularly important in the moment. So, we see a lot of systems that have tons of exception message group 8's as a result. Not cleaning this up makes for murky waters in exception monitoring, in reporting, and in congestion in the system. We want a nice, tidy system to work with. There's no time to be chasing down inaccurate signals, only to find out this item should have been shut down a long time ago. The other reason this is critically important is that the process should be very specific in what activities are allowed and when. It helps keep us safe and reduce the risk to the business. No one wants a purchase order to go out the door on an item that has been discontinued. So, are you ready? Here are your three simple steps to get ready for the disco. Number one, we need to deal with any demand that is in excess of inventory. This item is discontinued. We're not going to replenish anymore. Be sure to check the entire supply network and make sure you're all set to sunset at the same time if that's part of the plan. This includes forecast, dependent requirements from production, and don't forget about follow on materials as an option to transition. Stock transfers and even sales orders that may need to close short or be redirected. Oh, and don't forget to remove the safety stock, safety time, and coverage profiles. Number two. Now we want to put MRP to work for us. Once the demand is cleaned up, we can now run MRP to deal with any additional proposals for replenishment that are out there. Who knows why we dealt with the demand first? Because zombies, for real. If you don't deal with demand first, those purchase requisitions or planned orders will just come back from the dead as MRP provides you with a proposed plan to satisfy the demand. If you don't clean up, they're just coming right back. Make sure you deal with closing out any firm proposals as well and clear them out. This is also important so that our reports have the correct information and can support inventory projections, projected buys, and other insights to the supply chain. Number three, last but not least, if our planning is now cleaned up, we need to reclass the material. First, make sure that the status is correct, either at the plant specific or cross plant level, as well as the sales status. Then, let's consider removing or updating the ABC indicator. And last but not least, make sure you update the MRP type to ND and the MRP controller number to move it to the right storage now that it's all clean and ready to be put away. See? It's not so hard to get ready for the disco. We just have to make it a regular habit and recognize that it matters and makes life easier for everyone. Thanks for taking a spin around the floor with me. Discontinuing materials is often challenging because in order to make it hassle free, a certain sequence of activity needs to occur. What we want is to put these materials away clearly and set the status so it's clear what's happening with them. If we do all the things we need to, this also gets these discoed items out of the way so that we can drive focus back to the active materials that need our time and attention. Hey Sam, that trip to the disco was pretty fun and informative. I think those are some great steps that we can all easily follow. Hey folks, if you want to know more about discontinued items, there are plenty of videos about it. And of course, if you have a burning question, feel free to submit it below or use the chatbot.

Procurement & MRP

P2P

MD04; MM03; ME33L; ME84

Hello fellow supply chain spelunkers, Martin here. Ready to dive in with you and get an introduction into just in time releases to facilitate replenishment from key suppliers. This is a feature of SAP that is more widely used in some industries than others, but has much broader applicability than people realize. It's an effective way to communicate needs to your suppliers and manage a forecast to plan versus a release to ship effectively. Now we've talked a bit about it in the past, about firm and trade off zones in scheduling agreements. We're going to try and take it to the next level today in more formal arrangements and a higher degree of control. Here to introduce us to this topic is Patrick. So Patrick, what do we need to know to make this feature work for us? Yep Martin, it's a good question. As you said, a lot of folks aren't familiar with this option. Once we get out of specific industries. Automotive, I'm looking at you. And that's unfortunate because it does have a high value proposition, which we'll explore together today. So, I'm going to cover a few things today to get the wheels turning. It should always start with the why, when we're talking about new to you functionality. So that's a thread we'll explore throughout. We'll also see an example and some of the setup required. This leads us to a few points around communication and making sure we're communicating effectively. Are we all receiving the right signals for success? Let's dive into SAP and explore. I'm eager to see what we can find. Okay, so here we are in SAP and you can see that I'm on the MD04 screen, obviously most of you are probably familiar with this. What I wanted to show here was some scheduling agreements, if you aren't familiar with them, they look like any other purchase order and they have exception message and reschedule dates. So we should probably be thinking about how we're going to address those. But for today, we want to actually get some more details on the just in time indicator. So I'm going to double click on this material number. And that's going to bring me into MM03, which is to display our material master. The section we want to go to is actually purchasing, and in the purchasing tab, if we scroll down into the other data slash manufacturer data section, we'll see the JIT scheduling indicator. And I'm going to click here just to show you guys what the options are. Here we have an option to do no JIT deliveries. We also have an option to automatically do those deliveries. So let's keep that in mind because when we go look at our scheduling agreement, this is going to be an important piece of information for you. So, let's actually go to that scheduling agreement, and let's go to ME33L. That brings us in to display our scheduling agreement. You can see that it's pre populated the scheduling agreement number here. Now, I'm displaying our scheduling agreement, and as stated, we're on the ME33L transaction. What we want to do is we actually want to go look at this little magnifying glass up here, which is to display additional data. So I'm going to click on that. I actually have to highlight the item first before I click on it, now that the item has been selected and we're in the additional data section, again, we're going to scroll down to the bottom to see some information about our JIT deliveries. So, you can see in the output controls section of this,additional detail, we have some information related to just in time indicator. And this is, again, the same one that we looked at on the material master, being populated on the scheduling agreement. It's best practice to set this on the material master so it can be automatically populated here. In addition, we can see a few other things here in the output control section. We can actually see the next forecast delivery schedule transmission date, which is September 3rd. This is when the next forecast delivery schedule is going to be transmitted to the vendor. We can also see the next just in time delivery schedule date and this is when the next JIT delivery schedule will be transmitted to the vendor and that's important to us. Our just in time delivery schedule involves releasing specific quantities at precise times according to a schedule line. So it's pretty important for us to make sure that this is accurate and you can see here, the next delivery is set for August 7th. Now, let's do one more thing before we wrap it up. Let's use the ME84 transaction, and we can use that to see the parameters that are used to create releases. So, here we are, we can see the parameters that are used to create releases. We have a lot of options here that specify the types of scheduling agreement releases that need to be created. In this case, we're going to create delivery schedules but you could do forecast, you could do, JIT, you could do forecast and JIT schedules. So, our default is set to forecast and JIT, so we're going to do that one. But there might be other options that you prefer for your particular business. And we have the ability to execute this as a test run, just so that we can see the results, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. So, down here, If I scroll down, I can see that we have test run selected, which means nothing's actually going to get transmitted when we run this. We're just going to see the results. So let's see what it tells us. Here we are. We have our test run and we have green lights, which is great. Obviously, yellow lights and red lights mean something different, but at the end of the day, we should remember that JIT releases help streamline shipping for our vendors and help them optimize their processes. So if we can help them streamline, it will benefit all of us. Diving into SAP really is the best way to learn by doing. Thanks for joining me today. Before we wrap, just a couple of key points and reminders to take with you as you contemplate the use of just in time delivery schedules for your organization. First, do you have a practical need that could be addressed? We talked through a couple of use cases today and there are certainly others. With this change, will you see value? Is the information now clearer for your suppliers? By providing a forecast and a firm delivery schedule, does it set up your suppliers for success and get you the deliveries you need when you need them? And last but not least, based on how you are able to send requests to your suppliers today, can they reliably receive and respond within a time frame that meets your expectations? This is a really nice tool, and I think it's underutilized. Hopefully this preview will spark a desire to learn more. Hey, thank you so much, Patrick. That was such a good summary of just in time releases and how we might think about them. I too hope people will be inspired and go and explore more. Thank you again. So folks, if you want to know more about this topic and some of the other topics that exist within this particular area, please check out our video catalog, and if you have a particular question, feel free to submit it below.

SAP Optimization

P2P; PTM; OTC; WM

SCAL; MD04; VA02

Hey there Reveal TV community, welcome back. Thank you for finding the time to join us today. We love sprinkling a little SAP goodness into your day. Every new thing we learn or confirm, we want to teach you and give you more confidence in the use of the tool. So this is our adventure with you. Every once in a while we pose what may seem a simple foundational learning objective that just offers tons of opportunity. Today is one of those days. In today's demo, we're going to explore none other than the factory calendar. Our sherpa is Tom. Now Tom lives this every day, and I know from his experience that he knows exactly how to make the most out of this mundane and uninteresting thing called the factory calendar. Is it truly that mundane? Tom, tell us more. I can see how you might think that, Martin. I mean, how often do we really interact with the factory calendar? You define some work days, extend it now and again, and off to the races as you go. And for most of us, this happens in the background. The only time we think of it is if it hasn't been extended, and when we get an error. But here's the thing, the factory calendar has tentacles into so many of our activities that support planning, procurement, logistics, and customer experience. It's well worth a conversation, and all the things it influences might surprise you. In today's demo, we're going to. Locate where we can display the factory calendar. I'll then show you a couple of key places where the planning calendar is referenced in our processes. And I'll close out with a couple of good examples of where the factory calendar is defaulted. But we have the option to either choose which calendar to use or to apply the more specific tactic like shifts and intervals to your process. Let's get into SAP and take a look. Now let's dive into SAP and take a look at our factory calendar. We can access the factory calendar by accessing Tcode SCAL. As we enter that transaction code, you'll see an option on the bottom for factory calendars and to view factory calendars. You're going to see as the initial list pulls up, we can have a factory calendar for every different location that's deemed a factory in SAP. In this example, we're going to narrow in on our factory calendar Z2. As we look at our factory calendar Z2, it'll pull up every year that this factory calendar has been in SAP. Right now we're going to focus on the current year, 2024. When we get into our factory calendar, we're legitimately going to see a calendar. What you're going to see on the right hand side is we have public holidays, which are deemed non working days in our factory calendar. We can also see that we have Saturdays and Sundays marked as non working days in our factory calendar. What this does is it blocks certain activities from happening on those days, whether it's production, sales orders, or possibly deliveries, receipts. It's telling us that these are non working days and those transactions or those functions can't happen on those days. We can also add extra days into our factory calendar if we know we're going to be shut down, have a special circumstance happening, or we're not going to be available to perform certain activities. We can mark those out as non working days in our factory calendar and SAP will avoid using those days for those chosen activities. Now, as we look deeper in our factory calendar, let's look to see what this connects to and how this affects our everyday planning life. For this example, I'm going to pull up transaction code MD04. I'm going to look at finished material P101 and plant 1000. We can see in this example, we have several sales orders and several production orders for this finished material. We're going to select one of our production orders, go into change mode, try to change our production finish date to a non calendar day in our factory calendar. We're going to change this to a non working day in our planning calendar. And a very simple non working day in our planning calendar, in most instances , will be Christmas Day. So as I switch this to Christmas Day, and try to schedule this production order to run on Christmas Day, you can clearly see I get a message that says 12/25/2024 is not a working day. The previous working day is 12/24, so this will not allow us to pick a non working day in our factory calendar for this production order. And in fact, the system will override it and push that out to 12/26. So here we can see the factory calendar has prohibited us from production on a non working day in our calendar. Let's go one step farther. If we take one of these sales orders that's also affected by the same material number, go in to change the sales order, take sales order number , 14710 and let's say the customer did want this sales order to deliver on Christmas Day. Again, very clear example of what typically is not a working day. So we're going to select December 25th to move this requested delivery date. As I enter through, you're going to see a typical message , no goods accepted on 12/25/2024. It's going to tell me my next possible day is the 27th of December. Again, this is another clear example of where our factory calendar is overriding what we would type in. And if I try to push my way through it, it will not allow me to save this on 12/25. So let's look at one more option of a factory calendar. Let's go in and look at a sales order in VA02. We're going to look at sales order 14710. As we enter this sales order, we're going to attempt to change the requested delivery date again to Christmas Day. As I select Christmas Day for my sales order and enter through, I receive the same message . No goods accepted on 12/25, the next possible day is 12/27. So this is yet another example of how our factory calendar will not allow us to change dates to a non working day. Now you might say there are times where we want to override the factory calendar. Let's say we're going to work a weekend in a certain work center and we want that weekend to become a working day and not abide by the rules of our factory calendar. We can change this or override it by looking at the work center level in SAP. As we enter the work center, in this example, we'll look at Work Center 1721. What we want to do is go to the capacities tab and we look at the capacity default, SAP, our capacity requirements are defined by our calendar, so when we get into SAP, it's going to say our available capacity is based on our factory calendar, meaning that's the amount of days we have available to produce. But in this instance where we want to work a weekend and we want that to be available to capacity, we have the options for shifts and intervals to override our factory calendar. Inside of shifts and intervals, you see we have a lot of different options in here for shifts and intervals, but on workdays, if we hit the drop down menu, you can see we have the choice, working days according to the factory calendar, which is what we have in there at a default, or we can override the factory calendar for non working days as well. So in this instance, in our shifts and intervals option inside of the work center, we can override the factory calendar and consider non working days to be work days for this particular work center. So there are opportunities, as we get deeper and deeper into SAP, and know exactly where we need to override our factory calendar, we have the ability to do that on a work center level. So as we've seen in this example, our factory calendar is something that's pushed out by IT. We often don't give it a lot of consideration, but it does have a major impact on the planning world, both production, shipping, receiving, and customer orders. Never could have imagined that there is so much to the factory calendar when I first heard about it. I thought, cool, that's our working hours, IT looks after it, and that's about how far I took it. Now I know how powerful it is, and how to put it to good use. I know that it can't just be an IT exercise to extend, but we need to think about when we're open for which activities, and set up the appropriate rules and review them regularly. We need to plan for deviations based on the activity we're executing and keep SAP informed of those deviations. Last but not least, SAP loves the most specific information. So knowing we are in control when we need to override for a particular situation is key. We have the power. Hey Tom, thanks very much. We just love your ability to put things into perspective and help us focus on what's important. I have a new appreciation for the power of the factory calendar, so thank you my friend. Hey folks, there's a lot of other topics like this one in particular, if it's hard to find, please use the chatbot and it'll actually recommend some videos for you to watch. But if you have a specific question, feel free to submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; SD

MD04; MD05; MD73

The best way to learn is by doing and so welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Martin here, and in this video, hold on, Kristie, are we serious? We think we can do this? You're telling me that we can actually get to see how our forecast is performing in SAP? Okay, if there ever was a topic that elicits the SAP salute, this and ATP are it. Yikes! Okay, deep breath, let's go. How are we going to do this? Show us the way Kristie. Well, Martin, I don't know if you know my history on this one, but I've always been on the supply side of the house and a manufacturing oriented person. Now, I've always had an appreciation for demand planning, but a few years back I decided to really get into it. I wanted to see what it felt like and oh man, is it a tough gig trying to predict the future. So please, give your demand planners a support, maybe a hug or a coffee, and take what we're about to share with you to help them and not to penalize them. SAP is constantly telling us about the quality of our forecast, and it does so in a bunch of different ways. There's also a variety of techniques that can help to mitigate and manage or capitalize on our forecast performance, and the more we understand about how our forecast is performing, the more effective we're able to be. Today we're going to focus on one such tool and we're going to go in and look at some of the exception monitoring that is really very specific to how the customer demand is lining up with the forecast. We'll also highlight consumption as a concept, but much more to come on this as a topic all of its own. Now what's really different about today is that we're going to go in and look at how our forecast is performing in the now. This is different from what you're probably used to, which is looking at the forecast, maybe a three or four month lag, to see how accurate you were at the time that you started your replenishment cycle. This is all about the now and being able to triage what is happening today. So let's go in and see what SAP is telling us about how our forecast is performing. So oftentimes our demand plan is actually developed elsewhere. So while we can develop an MRP plan directly in our ERP environment, oftentimes we're doing that through an advanced planning solution or even sometimes it's done offline through Excel and then it gets loaded into SAP. So, first of all, if you are in the category of it's getting done in Excel and loaded into SAP, or your forecast isn't being shared with SAP at all, that's definitely an opportunity and we'll do some videos that specifically talk about how to manage getting that forecast into the system. But once it's in here, no matter where it's coming from, whether it's generated directly in the ERP environment, you're uploading from an offline file or you have an advanced planning solution that's interfacing that information over. One of the things that is really important is being able to see how that forecast is actually performing. And one of the mechanisms from a master data perspective to control that is in the forecast consumption. So let's go in quickly and take a look at that and then we'll actually go through and I'll show you a tool for being able to see how that forecast is performing directly from the MRP or stock requirements list. So I'm just going to go into display material and on our MRP3 view, this is where we have several important pieces of master data. So you have two things, you've got your strategy group which is your planning strategy. So how do I expect to react and respond to my overall demand plan? So what am I meant to do with it? Am I making or buying to stock? Am I making or buying to order? Am I doing some sort of making or buying to a particular level of the bill of material and then converting it once I actually get a sales order in hand. But then the other thing that happens is that we set our consumption mode and then our backward and forward consumption period. So this is how we consume the forecast, so as sales orders or stock transfers or other sales documents, deliveries, quotations, etc. are processing through are they eligible to consume the forecast? And if so, what are the rules for how we want to manage that consumption, so that we have a complete look at our demand plan? And we could have a much more robust conversation about this, but just to quickly give you an idea, consumption mode, so I can look backwards only, so if I tend to be pessimistic about my forecast, meaning I oftentimes will oversell, then I may want to restrict to backwards only. If I am overly optimistic, then I would want to control my backwards and forwards consumption, but consume backwards first and then consume forwards. And then in some rare cases, I might want to consider forward consumption only and forward to backward consumption, but those are going to be less, less often. And it's really thinking through your bias towards whether you're optimistic or overly optimistic or overly pessimistic and then you want to set your thresholds. And this is because the beauty of demand planning is that we get the opportunity to get it wrong both in terms of time and quantity. So one of the ways that we can protect the supply chain is by setting our consumption parameters appropriately. So again, determining what mode to use and what periods are good choices based on that information and the way that we consider bias. Definitely an opportunity for other videos, but for this one, I just want to show you how it's then affecting our ability to monitor that information. But in this case, you can see I'm allowed to consume up to 5 days in the future, and again, this is going to be based on our working days, and then the same thing going backwards. So how far back in time am I allowed to go and look at the forecast? Okay, so once those parameters in place, those are the rules for how we are able to go in and consume that forecast and I always get this image of Pac Man in my head and it's out there and it's gobbling up the little white balls and eating those power packs as it goes through and the sales orders are trickling in and consuming that forecast. So, to see this, Environment, Total Requirements Display. And what this is going to show us is the forecast that's out here. So, here's all the different weeks. Here is the planned quantity, and if we had withdrawals, so the sales orders are actually shipping out the door, you would see that information here, and then what has been assigned, so what is being consumed against that forecast. So we have a forecast of 8, we have consumed all 8, these are the sales orders and the quantities involved. Then we have a forecast of 15, we have sales orders for 9, so we have a remaining open balance of 6, these are the sales orders that are involved. And so based on those dates thresholds, the consumption mode and the amount of days is going to control how this is going to peg. And it's going to always peg as close to the date as possible, and then it will start looking backwards and then forwards in this case because it's a 2, so it's looking backwards first and then forwards. And then we're controlling how far back and how far forward with the number of days. So this is one view to see what is open and remaining to sell, and you can see how far out those sales orders are coming in and what that looks like. And then you get the sales order number, the item number, and the schedule line number. So this is also a good way to see what's happening here, if you're starting to see 2's and 3's and you know that you've got partial deliveries that are going out, you're breaking up that sales order, might be opportunity to do something a little bit different with that. So then the other thing that we can do is we can come in here and we can look at the customer view. So now it's going to go down to just the customer orders and the customer orders we have in hand, and it's going to let us know if we have anything that cannot be pegged against an open forecast. You're going to either see red, yellow, or green here. Green means that it is able to completely allocate the requirement. Yellow means it was able to partially allocate the requirement and red means that there was no forecast for it to peg against because there's not anything that is within that consumption threshold where it can see that there's a forecast. So it's in addition to whatever your current demand plan is. So if you were overselling the forecast you're going to start to see a lot of reds or if your housekeeping is not so great you're going to see a lot of reds because you're going to have sales orders maybe that are really past due the forecast maybe it's been cleaned up and brought to current, there's nothing for it to peg against. Yellows mean you've got partial assignments, there's definitely a conversation that should be happening with the demand planning team if you're seeing that and then if everything is green all the time then you may find yourself in a situation where you're actually forecasting a little bit too much compared to the pace of the sales orders that are coming in. In any case, this is a way to quickly get that view and then have those conversations with your demand planning counterparts. So here in this customer view, status light, the requirements date, what type of element it is, then the document information, the planned quantity, what was able to be assigned, and the requirement date. Okay? So this is very, very helpful information looking at it in both views so people have that conversation and quickly go through and decide if your forecast is performing well or not. Whether it's too high, too low, make the adjustments or true up your master data in terms of consumption rules. Look for another video soon on the consumption mode and the day's threshold in conjunction with your bias and we'll talk through how to best get those settings in place. Welcome back. So if there's one good thing that SAP is great at. It's sharing what it's seeing. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad or ugly. We're going to get all the information and it's up to us to figure out what to do with it. Today we looked at. How our forecast is performing from the perspective of now. This is not an accuracy metric. This is an, are we okay, and how do we mitigate what's happening today in our execution horizon. It's a very different perspective that complements the forecast accuracy work you may already have in play. And we also touched some on how the consumption and bias, which are both two very important tools, help us to right the ship when things do go wrong, or help us to tighten things up opportunistically when they are going really well. Once again, Kristie, enlightening. Thank you so much. I know we'd all like a best in class forecast accuracy, but the truth is that most of us just simply don't have it. So I really enjoy these topics that just take and make simple things out of things that we can control, review, and react in spite of those demand planning challenges. It's also really important that we stop blaming others and do the SAP salute and call out others as the problem if we often are in control of our own destiny. So we really want to take that forward. So thank you guys for listening and of course, if you want to know more about forecast, forecast accuracy, we're going to have series of videos on that so please check them out and if you have a particular question please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD04; MM03

The best way to learn is by doing so welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Martin here and in this video we're going to be discussing how MRP performs its calculations. Now I was told there would be no math, but I think we're all in trouble here. Good news is my co host today loves math. I'm almost afraid to turn her loose on this, but the good news is that MRP really operates at scale and not complexity. All the math is pretty straightforward here and is very helpful to understand. So, Kristie, take it away. Kristie: Oh, yes I am, I do love math, but one of the best things about MRP is that it does all of the math for us. However, there's nothing worse for a planner than not knowing what the planning engine is doing, it just breeds mistrust, so our diligent and skeptical minds. So let's dive in and I'll unpack and translate what MRP is actually doing. There's no great mysteries here, but it is very [00:01:00] helpful to understand. All right, let's look and see what MRP is doing for math here. So let's just start really simply up at the top. So this is our available quantity, in this case we have 87 units that are available for planning. And if we come down here, the first thing that's going to come off is our safety stock. Now in this case, MRP is viewing safety stock as a demand element, that's why it has a negative next to the number. And then the 78 pieces is 87 minus the 9 is 78. From there, it's going to start to pull through any other demand and supply elements based on the date that we see them, and from March 4th until April 1st, you can see everything we have is a demand element, and I know that because it has the negative sign against it and we can see this inventory slowly but surely running down until we get to the end of our replenishment lead time on 4/8 and it leaves us with a balance of 17 pieces. So all it's done so far is [00:02:00] deduct demand from the 87 pieces. Now, I'm going to go ahead and hit the page down up here, ~okay?~ and I can see here on 4/8 we have an additional 4 pieces in forecast that's coming out. On 4/15, we have another 5 that's taking us down to a balance of 8 pieces. Now, on 4/22 we have an additional demand for 7 and what is happening here is that in order to prepare for that demand, we actually have a planned order that is meant to start on the 16th and it's for 5 pieces and then the following week on the 25th we have an additional 5 pieces and then ~four weeks,~ 4 pieces happening the week after that and so on and so forth and so you can start to see we have planned order, forecast, planned order, forecast, planned order, forecast, planned order, forecast and it's going to continue to [00:03:00] follow the rules of our lot size key and our minimum order quantities as well as our lead time and our goods receipt processing time to balance our supply to our demand and to try to get our balance as close to that allowable minimum as possible because our safety stock has already come off. When we see a balance of 0 here, it actually means that we still have the 9 pieces of safety stock covered because that came off of our balance immediately and that is really important to know if you're using a static safety stock value. Now, If you are using ~um, ~ a range of coverage or coverage profile, then that will be the other piece is that you'll see that balance happening, but you're going to see the discrete numbers for it in your periodic totals, but you'll actually just see you're carrying more than 0 [00:04:00] pieces of inventory, and that's driven by how many days of supply you're trying to hold. The other thing, if you just noticed, I just hit the safety time button and we had positive balances before and that's because we had some safety time in place. So it was actually driving that inventory to arrive a little bit sooner. I've just turned safety time off so this is the purest view we can possibly get and you'll notice that as we're going through and we're doing all this supply to demand balancing now you'll see we're supplying to 0 pieces. So it's really 9 pieces in safety stock and so our balance is 0 ~um, of~ available inventory, so that's the minimum level that we're trying to plan to, so we're going to try to plan as close to 0 as possible. Now if I come in here and I actually make some modifications to this material, this is where it gets fun and where we would encourage you to play. So this is a lot for a lot, so this is stripped down so we can just see the balance, but I could do something like change it over to a [00:05:00] weekly bucket. And because we are in MD04, by the way, as soon as somebody makes an update to any of those demand elements as you're going through the day, if you hit refresh, you're going to see that. And once you adjust your settings here, if you go in and you run MRP, of course you'll be able to see those settings immediately as well. I could also do something like put in a minimum lot size, let's say of 9 pieces and I could hit save and now, if I go through and I just run MRP, I'm going to see that there will be some changes. You can see all these things that were adjusted, because this is a finished good, so it ran through the entire BOM. I could have run it single level too, just to get an idea of what was happening before I went ahead and released it out to all the other materials. But let's just keep an eye right now on what's going on with our quantities. So you can see, we've got some 5's, some 4's, some 8's in terms of replenishment, I'm just going to go ahead and hit this, and now you'll see we're starting to, turn safety time off, we're starting to run with a [00:06:00] little bit more of a positive balance and the reason for that is see, we now have this minimum lot size of 9 pieces. So as soon as we need to make, we're going to see that we'll have a minimum of 9 pieces each time. And so just by virtue of adjusting that minimum order quantity and changing to a weekly bucket, we would start to see the impact of that on our inventory balance. And it's very easy to go back through and check your settings and see what ~exactly~ is driving that . Because our forecast is in weekly buckets, the big adjustment there was purely in the lot sizing that we put in. We can start to see and understand what is happening with the inventory, and there's nothing magical about this, and if you start to see a number you're unsure of, then just back out one of the master data settings, go back to basics, and adjust from there, and again focusing on goods receipt, planned delivery time, the nature [00:07:00] of your lot size key, so whether that's a lot for a lot or fixed lot size, or if it's a periodic lot size like weekly or monthly lot sizes, you're going to see that impact here as well as your minimum order quantity and your rounding value. And that's going to be what helps to trigger what's happening. But again, negative numbers demand, positive numbers supply, and you can slowly but surely kind of follow the path through and understand exactly what is happening. Awesome. So no more black box. I'm only kidding, MRP is very, very far from an advanced optimization technique that's available in things like advanced planning solutions. Those can sometimes feel a bit black boxy. However, it is vitally important to understand how the system thinks, and today we went through a really basic example. What I would challenge all MRP controllers, all buyers and planners, and all the folks that support them, is that when you go in and you make a change to your planning, you think about how you would expect MRP to respond. And then you check your knowledge by walking through [00:08:00] the math, you'll be way more comfortable with what the system is doing, and you'll get a start on the place that we're working from in terms of refining the actual planning. It comes fun, yes I said fun. Martin: Brilliant Kristie, thank you. Being able to narrate the planning situation and understand that the system is doing very important MRP controller work day to day, understanding how the data and information flows in SAP is just going to drive optimization through the supply chain, second to none. So once again, thank you very much, Kristie. And folks if you want to know more about this and other topics related to your SAP system, check out our video log. Otherwise, please submit your questions below.

Quality & Batch Management

P2P; PTM

MD04; ME22N; MIGO; MMBE

[00:00:00] Hey, welcome back supply chain aficionados. Martin here with a brand new topic. Hot off the presses and built off a question from our client community. We've had a lot of interest in getting started in quality and batch management recently. And as we start to pick up momentum with managing multiple suppliers for parts that are largely the same form, fit or function, there's been a lot of additional interest in the vendor batches and how we see those in SAP. This is not the same as traditional batch management, where the batch assignment has many characteristics. This is rather an external reference of vendor provided information of an internally determined point of reference. However, if you aren't yet up and running on full batch characteristics, this might just be a place to get started. So to answer that question, we have Jake, who will give us a quick how to on finding the vendor batch number and a couple of places where it can [00:01:00] be seen. Jake, take us away, my friend. Hey, Martin. I love the intent behind this question. This question comes from someone who has a hurdle that they're trying to overcome in order to get their sourcing strategy into action and supported by SAP. It's a simple question, but we hope it'll have a big impact. So in today's walkthrough. I'm going to show you where and how a vendor batch can be referenced at time of goods receipt. I'll also then show you a couple of the places where we see that information for quick reference to create some needed visibility that persists across SAP. So let's jump in and have a look. Every once in a while, we have an opportunity to answer a quick question and today is that day. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to receive some goods. We have a purchase order that has an ASN against it. And that's great. We love advanced notification. So let's bring up trusty MIGO. I've got the inbound delivery right here. I'll enter that in, and now down below, we can head on over and put in the batch number if it didn't already pull [00:02:00] in for us from the inbound delivery. If they were really, really good, it may already be there for us, but if not, we can enter it here. The other thing we can do is enter in a date of manufacture or expiration. Once we've saved, we can now see this shows up for us in a variety of places. This is super helpful because sometimes we need very specific compliance or regulatory information associated with that lot, and sometimes we just need a simple reference that helps tie the batch to that particular supplier. For example, maybe I have a production run coming up, and I need to use up a batch from one supplier or data manufacturer before starting another. And this is a great way for me to build a foundation toward more robust characteristics. This could eventually lead to being able to automatically search for and select batches. Most importantly, though, this allows us to trace what came in from whom, where it is at this moment in our facility, and how it was ultimately used. And that is so very important. As you can see from our walkthrough today, vendor batches don't have a high [00:03:00] barrier to entry, but they do provide useful information that can help us with anything from compliance and regulatory concerns to simple informational cross references that can be a way point towards or be used in conjunction with a full set of batch characteristics if batch management is a path that you want to go down. They're quick to enter. Easy to reference. Have loads of use cases for recording and differentiating, where it matters. Over to you, Martin. Thank you, Jake. That's a good answer to a great question. Thank you, sir. If you want to learn more about this specific topic and other batch management topics, we have quite a list of videos around that. And of course, if you have a specific question for your business, feel free to submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LL01

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here and in this video we're going to focus on materials in the interim storage types that have exceeded their allotted time within the warehouse activity monitor. So Steven, tell us why these materials cannot be in an interim storage. Absolutely Martin. Interim storage within the name of itself is temporary and it's not a permanent home in the warehouse for any materials. If the material has exceeded the time parameter in an interim storage type, it is simply contributing to a supply chain disruption. Materials hanging out here are generally in limbo on the receiving dock waiting to be put away or on the outbound dock, just picked, waiting to be PGI'd. In this video we will. Analyze this portion of the monitor. And review strategies to manage and take action on. In this video we will demonstrate the interim storage stock without a movement in the warehouse activity monitor. So first we'll go straight into the transaction of LL01. You'll populate your warehouse number in the required field here, go ahead and hit execute. You could go straight to the exact of what we'll be covering today, which is a stock and interim storage type, or in this case, just to get the overall view, which most users do go ahead and just execute here so you get the holistic view of everything and today we'll focus on the interim storage stock without a movement. You can see that there's 4 past due potential supply chain disruptions here. So you can either click this dropdown arrow here, which then displays the actual storage type and the description of where they're held up, or you could just double click straight onto the header line. You then get the description or the display of the 4 materials that are held up there. And this portion of the warehouse activity monitor is giving you plenty of information here to do some analysis. So you have your material, the biggest thing here is it's showing you the actual stock category status and that these are held up due to being in quality inspection. So, they're in quality, they need to pass inspection, and that's why they are in the temporary or interim storage type of 902, or in other words, the receiving dock. Since they are in an interim storage type, the storage bin is dynamic and showing the actual inbound or the goods receipt delivery document number here. So all these actually represent those inbound deliveries, you can see 2 of these right here are for the same material, the same document here. The biggest thing that you want to do here is to not go ahead and just try to confirm these. You want to do your due diligence or escalate as to why these are in quality. Transactionally, these are held up so you want to get to the bottom and really get to the key user of who was really doing this. So you could do that by double clicking the line here, it brings you straight into the actual quant of this material. You can dig a little further and actually get the document number, so you can look at the inspection lot. To do your inspection here to get that queue or that quality block off there, I'm going to hit the back arrow, you can also get the document number of the transfer order in LT21. It gives you the key user information of who has really created this, so in this case there's a name so you could do your due diligence there and then you can also look at your goods receipt document information here from that materials or the procurement side who's responsible for this material document here. One thing that's very underutilized in the warehouse activity monitor is going to be your notes. So if we're going to do investigation, you can click on the actual line and write notes Skinnell followed up with so on and so forth. You can then save that and really at that point you can have a running log of what is going on with these issues, because again, these are supply chain disruptions held up in a temporary or interim storage type that need to be resolved. So, in summary we have covered. How materials in interim storage contribute to supply chain disruptions. Push through the warehouse activity monitor and have surpassed the time allotment. These materials are late and need to be researched and promptly corrected. Thanks Steven. Great points on taking action on these materials that need to be moved on from the interim storage types. If you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system, please check out our other videos and of course if you have a burning question you can submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

P2P; PTM; WM

MD04; MM03; ME23N

Hi there, Martin here. Here's today's curious question. Does your organization struggle to redeploy inventory across the internal supply network? Are your site to site transfers visible, accurate, and timely? Do you feel like there's a missing link that makes the process a little more challenging than it should be? Well, you're not alone. Many companies find managing transfers within their organizations to be a pain, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is a large topic, and we're going to get started with the basics today. I'm super excited to have Nicole here with us today. She's amazing at making the complex simple, and she's going to introduce us to how an intracompany transfer is meant to be used and how it should work. Nicole, take it away. Hello and thanks, Martin. You would think that managing transfers within our own organization would be so much easier than managing purchases from our suppliers, but there's a few things that often get in the way. First, we sometimes treat transfers with less diligence and often as an afterthought. Second, we don't set our sister facilities up for success. And third, our master data is often not as clean as it should be, and as a result, we're not playing by the correct rules. Today I'm going to give you an example of what good looks like when SAP is properly set up and we execute according to the rules. Let's dive in and take a look. An intracompany transfer is a transfer from one location to another location within the same organization, or in SAP terminology, the same company code. Today we're going to walk through what a good transfer process could look like. Let's start here in the stock requirements list. If we look at the planning situation for this material, we can see that we have a proposal for replenishment from another plant. We can see the plant number here. The way that SAP knows which plant to source this material from is because we have a special procurement key set on the material master within the MRP 2 view, indicating that it's a stock transfer from another plant. Now, there are a couple of ways that we could choose another plant as a source of supply. We could have a scheduling agreement in place, or we could have a quota arrangement in place that indicates 70% of the requirements should be sourced from an outside source while 30% are sourced via transfer from another SAP plant. In other words, there are several tools available to help with most any sourcing requirement. Today we're going to keep it simple. We have a planned purchase requisition from another plant, and according to the lead time set on this material master, it's time to place the order if we want to receive the goods in time for use. I know that it's time to place the order by looking at the release dates. Before we place this order though, I want to show that you can see this request at the other plant as well. I can change my plant within the stock requirements list to show the planning situation for this material on the source plant. The request shows up within the stock requirements list as demand, and also indicates from which plant the demand is coming from. I am going to return to the ordering plant, and let's go ahead and convert this purchase requisition this planned STO into a Intracompany stock transport order. For this demo, I will simply select it in the stock requirements list, and click the convert to PO button. When I do this, all the details from the planned transfer will copy over into the STO for me. This includes things like the planned delivery time, the goods receipt time, and the quantity or even the route if I've maintained that data for shipping . I'm going to go ahead and save. I am going to go ahead and adopt the requisition into the shopping cart, and all of that information we just discussed will copy over automatically. I will just make sure there are no errors and then I will save to create the STO. And I will get confirmation at the bottom of the screen that the STO was created. As you can see, we have confirmation that the stock transport order was in fact created successfully. If I refresh my stock requirements list, that STO will now show for that material in that plant. Now that the order has been created and saved, the source plant will see that they have an order that they can acknowledge, confirm, and ship against when it is time to ship the goods, this STO will show up in the delivery due list for outbound delivery creation. The source plant will then be able to pick and stage the delivery for shipment and when shipped, and inbound delivery can be automatically created at the source plant. Once all of those delivery related activities occur, we can then see the status change here within MD04 and know with confidence that the shipment is on its way to us. This also gives us early visibility if something is different than expected, providing a way to proactively intervene if the process has fallen behind. We will see exceptions in both plants when we're out of alignment and can look at the planning situation with our colleagues if we need to adjust dates or quantities and immediately see the impact. Through these types of conversations, we can learn a lot. It's a real opportunity to make things better and set each other up for success. We often hear. Oh, that's just a stock transfer. Here's the problem, MRP does not care and neither does ATP. That stock transfer is a valid source of supply. It has the same status as an external purchase or production order, so we have to manage this process with the same level of diligence. I know we want to help our fellow colleagues to be successful. So the next time a transfer seems like just a transfer. Double click and make sure we've got it right today. We saw the process and the way things are supposed to work. In future videos, we'll unpack where things might be going wrong and how to address common issues. Hey Nicole, thank you. Let's not forget intra means within . These site to site transfers are key to our success. The more diligent we are within our own organization, the better we are likely to be with our suppliers. There's a lot we can learn from having a focus from within. Don't let it be an afterthought or an assumption, and we know no assumptions are allowed in supply chains. We can do better with active management. Hey folks, intracompany transfers is a hot topic and we're going to have a lot of videos on that. If you're struggling to kind of list them all out, please use our AI chatbot.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD

VA03

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here, and in this video we're going to explore an often overlooked feature in SAP called the customer fact sheet. Kristie, this comes up over and over again, and most people don't even know it exists, take it away. Why yes I can, Martin. And I agree, this is a very underappreciated piece of functionality. When you're on the phone with a customer or trying to assist sales in preparing for their next meeting with the accounts, it's a fantastic asset to those kinds of conversations. Let's get into SAP and take a look. First, let's look at where we can find the customer fact sheet. Like most things in SAP, we can get to it in several different ways. We'll then take a cruise through the information available. And lastly, we'll touch on some of the ways to make great use of this information in conversations with the customer. Come on, let's go take a peek. Alright, so the customer fact sheet is super helpful when you are on the phone with a customer or you're getting ready to sit down with them and have a conversation where you want to rise above the individual transaction and into more of an account review. Or if you have the customer on the phone and they're asking you about multiple orders, you need to be able to quickly go through and see what their current status is. So here I am in a sales order and I am going to click right here on this guy. Okay, the piece of paper with the little person above it. And when I do, it takes me into something called the customer fact sheet and what this is really is the sales summary for everything that is going on with that particular customer. Now, if you are on the procurement side of the house and you happen to be listening to this video, it's very similar to what we would see in the buyer negotiation sheet, and really serves a similar purpose of being able to get a quick overview on what's going on with this particular account. Okay, and it's going to start with a bunch of just facts about the particular account, and then it's going to go into more of a review of what's actually actively happening today. I'm going to click on this little button that says info block. Okay, and what this does is this brings up all the different sections, now the quality of the information and the robustness of the information has a lot to do with how active that particular customer is and how well we're maintaining the information for them. You can see the kinds of information that is available, so the address and then anything around the classification of that customer. What kind of industry sector is it? Does it have a Nielsen ID? What other information or attributes are attached to that customer? Then down from there, you could see that some things around your performance measures, contact people, and then you get into things like the sales order information, your pricing, any of the rules for this customer around partial deliveries, anything around how we transport the goods to the customer, billing information, delivery conditions, partners, and then we start to get into the specifics around what is going on with their documents and then if there's been any type of messages that we've had to sit back and forth for quick resolution. And depending again on how robust this information is, the quality of the information will vary. But you also have things like back orders in here. So it's really nice to be able to come in here and take a look at this. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to scroll through a little bit, just to give you a bit of a sense of what's here. So we've got some of this fact information up here at the header level. But then as we get a bit further down, now we're going to get into some of the more specific things. What are the pricing rules for this customer? If they have a particular price group that is assigned to it, what is their, procedure and what price list is it reading from? For shipping, what kind of delivery priority does it get? Is there a specific shipping condition? Is it eligible for order combination? Are you allowed to split batches? Is there a particular delivering plant that's assigned? Your partial deliveries, are you allowed to ship to this customer multiple times against the same sales document? Are you allowed to split that delivery up or is essentially is back orders allowed for this customer? And then what kind of transportation information do we have in place for them? What zone are they transporting from? So how are we determining that transportation information in time? Let's scroll down a little bit more here. So then we get into things like the Incoterms and the terms of payment for them. Any partner information, so sold to, bill to, payer, sales employee, shipped to, very important. All that information is maintained in here, and then your stat information. How much did we sell to this customer comparison of prior year to this year, and then, how many times did they order. So you can see this is a fairly high dollar value for a few orders that are in place. And then you can see, again, the specifics of those sales documents and what the current status is on those particular orders. So this can give you a quick look at what's happening. Then under Quick Info, it just gives you some of the stats, but really helpful here is it's going to take you through to any orders that are maybe blocked for delivery. So you can quickly go through and see what's happening there. You'll get an arrow if there's something for you for you to navigate to. You've got something that's blocked for billing you've got something that's going on there, you need to go in and take a look and then over here, your back orders and your open sales orders. And if you click on this, it actually is going to take you right through to the full list of open sales orders, which is probably very familiar to you, and then from there, you can go in and do a little bit of further exploration. But really nice to be able to quickly navigate through there and see where the problems lie and get everything rolled up and you can do it right from that sales order. So when you're talking to a customer about a particular order or line item, then you can quickly navigate through and see what else is going on in order to be able to evaluate if there's anything else that you need to do for that customer as long as you're in communication with them. Whether that's on the phone, via portal, or via email, it's a q uick way to go in and get some good analysis from the customer fact sheet. So now that we have introduced the customer fact sheet. We know what kind of goodness we can find there that will help us with all of those different ad hoc conversations, proactive account management, and preparing for account reviews. I remember the first time I saw this, I was surprised at how much information was available all in one place. It reminds me quite a lot of the buyer negotiation sheet on the supply side of the house. Thank you Kristie I mean the customer fact sheet does sound cool and is obviously very interesting for the folks that can actually use it to help communicate with their customers. Thank you. So if you want to learn more about this particular topic or any other topic related to SAP, please check out our video catalog and if you have a burning question submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC

VA06; VA03

Hey, welcome back. And of course, to you customer advocates and ambassadors, Martin here. We're excited to help you unlock the next level of daily habits to support an excellent customer experience, gain a broader context to the support quality decision making, and truly begin managing by exception. We have a highly effective tool to introduce you to today, where we have found it to be a game changer for those of us who have not yet made the journey to S/4. If you're in S/4, then unfortunately this tool is no longer for you, but the principles still apply. So there's no wasted time if you're about to embark on that journey. The practice you'll gain here will help you on that path. Today, we'll be introducing you to the sales order monitor, an exceptional and often unknown and unutilized opportunity in the world of order to cash. Monique. You are, again, the perfect person to tell us more about the sales order monitor, share with us how we can use this to achieve better quality, better promises, and, of course, improve our customer service levels with our customers. Monique, take us away. Yes, sir. So, I don't know about you all, but I'm a big fan of one stop shopping. I also am a big fan of being able to keep a finger on the pulse of a lot of different things at once. And as the people on the front lines of creating a great customer experience, I bet you are too. You got a lot of customers, a lot of orders, and a lot of line items to look after. And sometimes it feels like we have to manage every order, every line, every time. The sales order monitor helps us to clearly identify which orders need attention and manage by exception. It allows us to gain an expanded perspective on what's going on with our area of responsibility by helping us to rise above the transaction. And it really does become the place to be and our easy point of reference as we go through the day. So come on, let's go take a tour. So when I say one stop shopping, I mean one stop shopping. Here we are at the sales order monitor. The transaction code as you can see here is VA06. Now some of you may see that this is not available yet for you. It may have to be enabled in your SAP environment. If it is not yet, don't worry, let's take a look here together. And that way you can see if it's something you're interested in pursuing. Obviously, I'm a big fan. When we think reports in SAP, we usually think list displays. Well, this is not that. It's much more along the lines of the exception monitoring tools that help us sort through issues with the supply plan's ability to meet the demand. You can see here that there are loads of options for selection criteria to help drive focus on specific hang ups in the order cycle and or specific subsets of orders relevant to your area of responsibility. There's so much more here that we'll definitely need another video to deep dive into the options and opportunities. The other good news is, is that you can save variants. So once you have selection criteria you're happy with, you can use it regularly and update as needed. Once we've run the report, we get this overview of order status broken down by the various points where an order can potentially get hung up. At the top is the header level information with all the various attributes and statuses. This lets us move through a work list that allows you to search, sort, and apply totals. When you click on an order, the item information for that order shows up at the bottom of the screen. We can also change up the layout to make it easy for us to work through. You'll notice all the sales orders are hotlinks so you can move right from the sales order monitor to work with the sales order. Or you can display other associated documents like a delivery that should have already moved. One of the things I like to do is to have this screen up and then another session open and ready to go to help with any of the hiccups or exceptions. Sometimes I may need to liberate some inventory promised against one order and get it over to another. With the sales order monitor, ahead or behind conditions are clear. Whether the order is incomplete, missing, blocked for credit or delivery, or simply falling behind in the process, I have what I need to get to work on resolving these challenges, and hopefully, before the customer has to reach out and inquire. We have so much to discuss about how to put the sales order monitor to work. There's a ton of great opportunity here. So we've seen the sales order monitor change the daily way of working for many teams. Our ability to rise above the transaction and see what and who needs attention and specifically what the issue or problem is to solve, let's us become truly exception minded. We're set up to be able to quickly take action by navigating right to the sales order or line item that needs attention. And we are all equipped to advocate for the customer and encourage conversation with our warehouse ops and supply partners to help orders move through the system and get the product and services delivered to our customers. Thank you, Monique. Wow, what an amazing tool. We talk so much about exception monitoring tools in SAP. I'm really happy to see a focus on such a nice one for our teams that are taking care of our customers each and every day. It's an opportunity, an exciting one for sure. Thank you again. OK team, there are so many other areas to focus on when you look at customer service. Please check out our videos. And of course, if you have a specific question, and how this may relate to S/4, please submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

MM

MD04; MD3

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we're going to provide an introduction to SAP's MRP areas. This feature in SAP was offered in ECC and is now provided as standard in S/4HANA. It allows planners to have a better control of planning across storage locations and their subcontractors. This solution is quite robust and something that material planners will appreciate having in their toolkit. Kristie, tell us a bit more about this MRP area thing. Fantastic Martin. MRP areas represent an important capability when used correctly and in this demonstration, we're going to focus on three key things as an introduction. First, the types of MRP areas that are available. Second, the way we're able to differentiate our planning parameters by MRP area. And third, some of the most common use cases for MRP areas. This comes up as an opportunity at most of our clients and I'm excited to dive in. MRP areas are coming soon to a theater near you if you are moving to S4. It'll be just a standard part of the way the system is going to operate going forward. If you are on ECC, you may or may not have these enabled already. They are a great tool for when we need to have discrete planning parameters across different locations, we need to have a logical segmentation of our planning and replenishment. We're able to transfer goods back and forth. We get some nice sets of planning parameters that we can set individually at each location and there are a couple of different types of MRP areas that are available. One is to facilitate our relationships with our subcontractors. Our planning then starts to look a little bit more like if we were transferring across plants, we're able to receive goods directly into the subcontractor, they don't necessarily have to pass through our facility first. There's a lot of great advantages that come with being able to separate that out into the MRP area if you have a need for it and it makes sense for your process. The other thing that it's used for is if we need to differentiate across different storage locations or different parts of a plant and we need to be able to have more specific planning information there, it gives us that additional level of finiteness in our planning parameters versus what we can do from a storage location perspective. So if I come in here and I click on this little button, if MRP areas are enabled for you, you'll see that you have entries here already. I can see the different MRP areas that are out there. So if it is a 01, that simply means that it is a plant level MRP area. So that means we haven't broken it out, it's still performing like it did previously, it's your main location or your plant. Then from there we can have things like your subcontracting locations, which is what we're going to look at today. We've got a 03, this means that this particular location is set up for subcontracting and then a 02 would be if we were associating it with a specific storage locations. So, a couple of different options there. Really, the advantage is to be able to control things like replenishment, stocking levels, and different planning parameters and even the forecast information based on those different locations. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go in and take a look at this particular material. So this guy is set up with a couple of different scenarios here, and you'll see everything looks perfectly normal, right? This is stock on hand, this is my main plant, and then if I come in here this is actually also set up for another MRP area. So I'm going to go ahead and pull that up, it will tell me what I've got for options here, and this is my second one, so this is the actual supplier location. So, rather than seeing my planning all consolidated onto one screen, now I can do something that feels a little bit more like planning across locations in terms of replenishment. So, I have safety stock that is specifically held at the subcontractor and you can see I've got an exception message there. I have purchased requisitions for replenishment, I might be shipping either from my plant into this location or I could even have it coming in directly from my supplier, if appropriate. So that's nice, I'm able to default those addresses directly onto my purchase order. And if I go in and I take a look at this material, you'll see the types of planning parameters that are available to me. So if I come in here, this is my main plant but I'll see down here I have this MRP area exists, that means an MRP area has been assigned to this material. If I come into the MRP area, it will give me the information on specifically what it is and now I'm going to see what kinds of fields are available for me in terms of being able to set up specific replenishment or specific planning roles for that particular location. And again, storage location, subcontractors, whenever we need to do a logical segmentation of our planning and have different roles. So you can see we've got things like MRP type, if you're doing your order point planning, I could make sure that I maintain a specific level of supply. If I needed to replenish up to a particular stock level based on some sort of storage constraint, I could do that. I have my own lot size keys and MOQs and rounding values for this particular location, so all of those fields become available. If I come over here to my MRP2 view, I have a select number of planning parameters here as well. So I've got my planned delivery time, if I wanted to do something with the planning calendar, I have that as an option. Probably the most requested item is to be able to maintain some sort of safety stock or reorder point, two separate and distinct planning parameters. One on the MRP 1 view, one on the MRP 2 view here. In order to be able to maintain those minimums at a subcontractor and make sure that you're positioned for success, I can control my replenishment from plant to MRP area here, or MRP area to plant. I can also procure this externally if appropriate. I also then can implement forecasts, so if I need to do some consumption based forecasting for the replenishment of that particular MRP area, I am able to do that here as well. I can also enter a forecast from planned independent requirements through demand management for this particular MRP area. When MRP areas go into your system, they are either on or they are off. So as soon as you make the decision to transition, you will see the adjustments to your table structure, you will see the adjustments to your reports and you'll see it pop up here and there throughout the system. So it's really important to go through and test any customizations that you might have in place. It's a great use case for saying the importance of trying to work customizations and custom transactions out of your solution as much as possible. But you'll see those adjustments being made and so there's definitely a vetting process before you go and turn this on in ECC if it's not already in place for you. But once it's on, then it's just a matter of extension, and there's not a lot of complications for a planner or buyer, because you selectively choose at the material and plant level whether you're going to extend to a particular MRP area or not. So you're able to go through and control and set that up at the material plant level all the way through. So, really nice feature for planners, it's great to be able to, and buyers, it's great to be able to have that distinct set of planning parameters and be able to break this out in a logical way so that you can get these set up. It's actually quite powerful, you've got quite a lot of flexibility in being able to plan those locations now without having to set up a new plant to do that. Sometimes we'll see people break even the same physical location into multiple plants just to be able to accomplish a full set of planning parameters. Now, you don't have a full set, but you have a much more robust set of tools to be able to use here. And in S4, the data maintenance does become a lot easier so you have that to look forward to and if you're interested in that we have a webinar that's specifically talks through what's new in S4 for MRP areas, MRP live and all those kinds of good things, so make sure you go and check that out. I really think MRP areas offer an opportunity to solve a variety of long standing planning problems and I'm really excited to see them used more commonly in organizations. Remember too, that if you are going to or are on S4, this will be required for managing your vendor provided inventory at subcontractors. More to come on that in a future video. To summarize, MRP areas offer the opportunity for. Discrete planning parameters for each MRP area that is planned. They support replenishment from the plant and also from third parties. And last but not least, we're going there eventually, so we might as well start thinking about all of our use cases right now. As always Kristie, thank you. MRP areas certainly offer an opportunity to plan more discreetly and more efficiently. So if you'd like to know more about your SAP system capabilities or even just have a question please check out our other videos and submit any suggestions below.

Procurement & MRP

DM; IBP; P2P; PTM

MC48; MD04

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's inventory graphs and analytic capability. Very much of an unknown feature in SAP yet incredibly powerful. When used correctly inventory graphs and analytics in SAP provide visualization of real time statistics and information on inventory levels, movements, consumption patterns and trends, which can really assist organizations make informed decisions on inventory management. Kristie, I'd love to know more about this cool feature. I'd love to tell you more Martin. I know you're excited about this one and so am I. This small demo represents the tip of the iceberg on one of the most valuable yet underutilized capabilities in SAP. Inventory graphs and analytics is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three key things. Number one, one of the many places where we can access this information. Number two, some of the key figures and statistics that are available to us. And number three, the red line graph and what it's telling us. Okay, let's go in and take a look at some inventory graphs that will help us to analyze what is happening with this particular material. So this is one of the most undervalued and underutilized features in SAP and I'm really excited to show you a little bit of the information that is available. So we're going to go in here, I've already selected a plant and an MRP controller. You can do this from most any MC report both LIS or document evaluation. In this case I happen to be an MC48. I'm going to go ahead and click through here. This is telling me my current inventory value and then it's telling me about the contribution of that particular material to the grouping of materials that I've chosen, what the percentage contribution is of that value and then the accumulation. And I'm just going to pick one of these, we're going to go ahead and take a look and see what is going on with the red line graph. So I'm going to go to detailed display. Okay, so the purpose today of this demo is to talk about the red line graph that we're seeing here. If you're curious about these MC reports I am quite certain we'll have future videos that walk through them, but I'm going to go in here and just choose the stock level graph first. Okay, and I've chosen that and now I'm going to go ahead and bring it over because it's hiding on my other screen, here we go and I'll make that nice and big so that you can see. So what this is going to show us in the document evaluation reports if we access it from here, it's going to show us the entire history of the material. If we find it through MC.9, then we'll be able to throttle that to a particular period of evaluation, but let's go ahead and see what's been happening with this particular material across time. This was a 2020 material, that's when it started to have some activity and you'll see here, it's moving up and down across time but we can see that we recently have started to build quite a lot of inventory, so there was a very large goods receipt. So this is our stock level historically so looking backwards in time. Every time the inventory goes up, that means that we have received it in or cycle counted it in, or did something that increased our inventory level. Every time we see it go down, that's our consumption or our utilization. And then any point where we have just black underneath that is the stock that is on hand that is not currently being used and so the lowest point over the period of evaluation, this guy right here, this would be our dead stock or opportunity stock, so that's the lowest portion of the inventory that we would get down to our lowest inventory value. But recently we've done a large goods receipt. So as we're looking at this, what we're really looking for is the consumption predictable? If so, there's lots of things that we could do to make the planning of this material far more stable. So there are a couple of exceptions where there's some significant or more steep drops, and we're going to look at what the pattern has been across time to see if we adjust our supply pattern, if we could have a more stable and predictable rhythm. This guy is all over the place if you think of this like an EKG, there's a lot of movement that's going on here and what we would want to do is make this steadier and easier, and that's going to help to protect us a little bit more against volatility. I'm going to close this guy out. I want to show you one more here. Now let's look at our cumulative receipts and issues diagram. So there's a really cool correlation here that makes it easy to understand. So if you have a hard time kind of laying the lines across the graph to go is this predictable or unpredictable? The other thing you can do is look at the consumption versus goods issue. So over time as we accumulate, I'm going to put the legend on here for you, as we accumulate our goods receipts and goods issues, what we're going to see is that we develop some gaps. So as we're moving across time, you're going to see times when you get more of the black space, so more time delay between when we've issued and when we have received that inventory and so the longer the delay between the time it's received and the time it's issued out or used, you'll see the peak up at the bottom in terms of stock level. So biggest gap, highest gain, and stock level. So this is another really effective way to look at the history of the material to see what's happening. Did you know that also in SAP you can get future looking graphs? So in one of the screens that you are probably most familiar with as a buyer or planner MD04, you can actually go in and see what the future is going to hold. So let me go ahead and put this item in here and I'm going to go through and find my future looking graph. So this helps me to evaluate how replenishment is currently being planned. So how long is it going to take us to dig out of the situation we're in? If we're in a negative situation or if we're building inventory, how long is it going to take us to bring that inventory level down? And so I'm going to pop into this chart here and this is going to show us our projection over to the future. Now I'm expecting, because we just had that really large production that it's going to take us a while to bring that down and so you can see how long it's going to take us based on our current demand plan to exhaust that inventory and we're all the way out until the end of the year, which is probably the end of our forecast horizon. So as we're going forward, what are some ways that we could work to optimize the planning output so that MRP is giving us really good results? Are our business behaviors accurately reflected in our business rules, are our master data and SAP so we can start to really manage this inventory. And so every material has its story and this is a good way for us to go in and see what's been happening and then work on trying to improve the process going forward so that we've got a good flow of material that's available for our customers without overstocking or overusing our capacity, our materials, our labor, our freight, or our space. Okay, so really cool to be able to do this both forward looking and backwards looking to be able to go in and find these graphs and charts and see what is happening. So in summary, we have covered how inventory, graphs and analytics will allow you to. Review the history of a material. Identify opportunities for improving the planning for the future. And, quickly grab statistics that are invaluable to us as supply chain practitioners. I would've loved to have made better use of these features right from the start of my career. I used to do so much of this work manually and you know what's exciting? The analytics suite and dashboard and capabilities that come with us for in Fiori just keep building on what we see here. So it's great for us to get a start in using these today. Thanks, Kristie. Yes, definitely a feature that I think all of us would've liked to have known more about and as they say, a picture's worth a thousand words. So if you want to know more about these inventory graphs and even other SAP capabilities, please feel free to check out our other videos and of course, if there's a specific question you have, please submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

PTM; P2P

MM03; MD04

Hello there SAP gurus, Martin here with another episode of Reveal TV in which we're going to be talking about early deliveries. I mean early sounds so much better than late, right? It's less to contend with, less impact. Sure it's not on time or in full, okay. So have you ever found yourself without space at the line or incoming to a warehouse or even a storage silo? Then early is not really as good as we think. So there you go Jason, I've already given you an example right off the top that shows that early might not really be as good after all. But could it really be that bad? You take it away. I think you just gave a great observation on when it's obviously not good there Martin. What I would propose is that the cumulative impacts of being early do impact our supply chain in significant ways, but perhaps, even more importantly, offer us opportunity. I'm a glass half full kind of guy who hates to see potential wasted, and early deliveries give us something we can go after. The not so good news is the cumulative impacts of early delivery in constrained spaces, unplanned burdening of resources, and tied up working capital. We're going to talk through some examples today, and then we'll wrap by how we can look to reward the right behaviors. So let's go in and take a look. Okay, so let's prove this out a little bit, because it feels somewhat counterintuitive. When we say a person is always early, that's a tick in their favor for reliability. I remember my band director from high school always used to say, "to be on time is to be early". So sometimes we view always early as better than always on time. Now, here we are talking supply chain and I'm telling you early isn't always better. Let's look at a couple of things. Imagine you have a plastic injection molding department, or maybe you're a chemical company and you have a tank farm. You've got SAP set up to manage the replenishment of those tanks, and you're watching carefully to make sure that your schedule is in line with what's actually happening. You can see here we've got a max stock level of 44,000 on this particular item. But if your supplier shows up early, there may be nowhere to go with that delivery and so then what do you do? Here's another example. You have some labor and equipment constraints in your warehouse, you've done the hard work to level load some of the inbound shipments from key suppliers by changing over to a planning calendar that allows you to manage the volumes delivered by the day of the week. You'll see in this case that our planning calendar says we're only going to take deliveries on Wednesday through Friday. If your supplier shows up early, it may disrupt the labor and equipment allocation and get in the way of the unloading or hot loading One more. In an effort to maximize efficiency, the team lead on the shop floor decides to pull ahead in order. You can see this guy here has already started even though it didn't need to start until next week on the 21st. So they may not be aware of a priority for custom orders and may have inadvertently used material that you really needed elsewhere. Or maybe producing that order early was at the expense of pushing another order back, making it late, for example, these guys here needed to start two days ago in order to meet this 11/15 date and they have yet to begin production. Sometimes an order will also be early if the floor doubts that material will arrive in time, so they move one order forward and push that order out. There's nothing worse than paying for expediting and then finding the line occupied when the expedited materials are ready to roll. There are always knock on effects to being early, and you need to define exactly what early, on time, and late mean to your organization. I would be remiss if I did not mention the cumulative impact on inventory and carrying costs. Take a look at your cumulative goods issue and receipts diagram sometime and see what's happening. I wholeheartedly agree that a supplier, sister facility, or manufacturing floor that is chronically early is better than one that is chronically late. Much better, in fact. But I do want us to start thinking about the next step, which is dialing in on time and focusing on making that the chronic behavior of all of our partners. Let's reward the right behavior. Early may be good in some situations, but it's definitely not really good. Early sounds good, especially when our supply chain is struggling and we're chasing demand. But the very best thing that we can do for our supply chain is make it predictable by adhering to the schedules we have put out for supplier deliveries, manufacturing, or stock transfers. When we want to set our expectations for early and late, clearly communicate them to all of our partners throughout the supply chain. And where there is consistent and reliable opportunity to reduce lead times, especially for those of us who haven't done so since the pandemic, we should update SAP with revised rules to stay more firmly in line with the behaviors. Thank you, Jason. There's some really important things to consider here. We want to make sure that we have consistent, reliable schedules that are up to date and well formed by the rules we have in the system. That keeps us investing time, space, and working capital on the best flow of materials to meet our customer needs. So once again, thanks a lot. Hey folks, if you want to know more about whether something's good or bad, please check out our other video catalogs. And of course, if you have a burning question, feel free to submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

MM; PP

MD04; MM03; MC42; MC43; MC.9

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, it's Martin here, and in this video we're going to focus on using SAP to determine if a material is living its best life. What a big question. We all want to know if a material is being planned efficiently and if we are investing wisely. And as we know, the best way to learn is by doing, so Kristie how about you take us away on this little topic? Of course Martin, I would love to. As a material planner this is a question that is always top of mind. We're constantly striving to improve the quality of our planning. In this demo. We're going to highlight some of the key reporting mechanisms that can help us to quantify whether this material is living its best life. I'll also go through a few of the visualizations that can help us. And lastly, I'll embed a few tips for what to do with the information as you find it. Alright, so one of the common questions that we get asked is how to tell if a material is living its best life and what I mean by that is how do you tell if your material planning is healthy, if you've got the right balance of in stock, inventory levels, if you have planning parameters that make sense, and if you're managing the overall cycle of that product's planning well. And you can see here I have a material pulled up in my MD04 screen, which means that this is live as of the moment that I've come in here and we're just going to take a little look through this material, and I'm going to give you a couple of different places where you can go to see what is happening. So this is a material that has about 1,000 units in stock, and it has about 1,000 units required for safety stock, so it's over at safety stock level and you can see that we are just starting to eat into that safety stock value as we're going into the end of this month, and that the end of the replenishment lead time, so where we would replenish without needing to expedite, is out at the 25th of July. And there is a purchase requisition sitting out here and it has a 30 on it, and a 30, if I double click, as some of you may recall, is that we need to actually get this process in motion. It's what I call the Alice in Wonderland, it is the Mad Hatter's message to us that we are late, right? The rabbit is telling us we are late, we need to get this going as quickly as possible. And so that gives us a sign that in this current moment in time, we are a little bit behind, our demand is exceeding our supply plan and we actually need to move quickly in order to get this in. So ideally, if we were to fully recover our safety stock by the time that we go negative, we need to have some more inventory come in the, June 23rd. And SAP's doing that math for us. It's told us how much we need and by when we need it. So that's our first little review is just to see how many exceptions there are. And then what you could do is actually take another look a little further down and make sure that your situation is balancing out, once you get past that near term horizon and so you can then see you've got another purchase requisition that is due in the 22nd, so about a month later. And then another one that is coming in mid October. So, if I were to take a look and see what's happening with this particular material, something else I might do is go in and take a look and just see what's going on with that lot sizing, make sure that that's lining up well, I don't have a lot size that's too massive for this material in terms of that lot size key in particular, if I'm pulling monthly versus weekly buckets and how that compares to the demand. Something that's really handy to do is to actually go in also and sum this up. So maybe come in here and just take a look at your plan in monthly buckets and see how you're looking. So you can look at that pattern of receipts versus requirements and there you're going to see the same thing. So we've got 1,363 units coming in July, we actually need that in June, we've got another 1,363 coming in in August, and then there's nothing in September, and then in October. And if we continue and just look as we go out, it looks like we are actually replenishing this every month to every two months is when it looks like this is coming in. So there's a pretty regular plan in place as we get a little bit further out into the time horizon. So some of the things that are really good to take a look at are your average daily consumption. So this would be one of your document evaluation reports or average daily requirements, so looking backwards or forwards. But the place we're going to go today is MC.9, so this is one of your LIS reports, and well go ahead and run this. We're going to run this looking out for the last 12 months, so taking a look back at our history and I'm going to go ahead and execute this, and I'll go ahead and switch this just so that you can see the material here. Go ahead and flip this over. Maybe you have brought in multiple materials here, I can see. And you'll see there's a bunch of different key figures going across out on the right hand side, and we can see the number of issues, and what our average inventory stock has been. So 750 kilograms in stock and all of those good key figures. But something else that is really great to do, and is often not known about, is if you come up here to extras, under detailed info, there's a wealth of information that is available to you that drives really good decision making. So the first thing I might want to take a look at is just my receipts and issues diagram. So this is going to tell me how my stock position has been over time and I'm just going to go ahead and bring this over for you, and you can see here, I'll turn on the legend, but your green and blue lines are telling you how much has been issued, so that's out, and how much has been received. And anytime that we start to see a gap, let me see if I can move this out of your way. Anytime we start to see a gap, you'll see there's a reaction down here in our stock level. So the red line is our stock balance. So that's how many units we've had in stock, and so we can definitely see a pattern here as we look at the goods receipts versus goods issues, and what we're really looking to do is create a repeatable pattern for this material, because if we can, it becomes much easier for us to manage, right? Reducing the volatility, we're making sure that our stock is staying in a positive position, but that we don't have a lot of dead stock or unused stock that's out there. Another thing that we can do, if it's a little hard to read these graphs, sometimes it's easier to just look at some of the information. So you can come to extras, and again, detailed information, and come down to key figures and then again total stock. I'm going to come in here and this gives me some really great information. There's all kinds of key figures, like if I went in and I pulled in all key figures, we'd have a massive list to scroll through. But these are very, very helpful. So this is going to tell me what the opening stock was as of the beginning of the period I've got my average, I can see my minimum, so you can see at one point we did go a little bit negative, and then I have my maximum, and then what my closing stock value is. If there's a big delta between the two of these, that also gives me some information I can go chase down. But probably even more important is it tells us the last consumption date and then what our average range of coverage is. So that's how long the inventory is expected to last. So over the last year, and I can even break this down and take a look at the last 3 or 6 months and see how it moves or changes. I can see that I've been able to cover about 31 days on average, and then I can also see information around my inventory turns, and then also very interesting, how many days that I actually was sitting in a zero stock position. Sometimes this is intentional, depends on what your stocking strategy is, so whether this is good, bad, or indifferent, that's important to know. Whenever we stock out our dead stock goes to zero because it's the lowest stocking value over the period of evaluation. So we're looking across an entire year here. So what we would want to then do is go back and maybe run this for a shorter period of time, 3 and 6 months and see how that compares. And then we can also go in and get some more stats just around where we were sitting from an inventory perspective before our goods receipt. So the last time that we've actually received those goods in. And this is really helpful information in being able to diagnose if this material is living its best life. So I'd really encourage you to go out and take a look at these key figures. And particularly pay attention to how those trends or pieces of information change as you look at 12 months, 6 months, 3 months. And then that's going to give you an idea of how that material is working, and then also use the graphs and charts to support your evaluation and see where there's opportunities to further refine your planning strategies and your planning parameters in order to get that material to behave just the way that you would like it to. And continue to revise and run MRP and review your results until you are satisfied. So in summary, we have covered how to use SAP to determine if a material is living its best life. Using SAP to evaluate a material's performance allows you to work towards stability and predictability. Optimize your planning. And improve your inventory levels. And it's really important that we go in and look at our materials in this fashion on a regular basis. This is one of the key things we can do to fine tune our planning engine and manage through business challenges. We know the only thing that is always true is change and doing this will help us to keep all of our materials in line with the new business challenges as they come forward. Thanks Kristie, this is especially important. We need to take a step back to determine the best path forward. SAP provides quality information that is often just not known. Love seeing some of these opportunities highlighted here. So, if you'd like to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system please check out our videos but if you also have a question please submit it below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

MCP1

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this specific video we're going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's lead time IO diagram capability. When implemented and used correctly, lead time IO diagram provides a visual representation of the inputs and outputs that contribute to the lead time deviation and helps identifies areas for improve. Eacliffe, how about you talk us through a little bit through this lead time IO diagram capability? Definitely Martin. Lead time IO diagram is a powerful feature that provides added work center performance insight when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on these three things. How to quickly identify work centers with operating inefficiencies using a lead time IO diagram functionality. Where the lead time IO diagram functionality is available in the shop floor reports. And how to evaluate work center's performance using this lead time IO diagram functionality. The intent here is to demonstrate the use of input output diagram functionality which is available for use in transaction MCP1 operation analysis and MCP3 production order analysis. In either case the use of the input output diagram is to gain a quick overview of the production process of a particular work center or a group of work centers. So here I have MCP2 queued up, let's go ahead and execute, the first thing I'm going to do is perform a switch drill down, and I'm going to bring up a works interview of the data. Let's take a quick look at the group of work centers, so I'm going to go to edit input output diagram, which then brings up an additional screen, let me transfer it over and here we can see what's going on. Let's center the legend and what this is telling us is we have the target information, so target output is the green, what do we expect out of production versus the yellow target input. Okay, and then we have what actually took place in terms of the red, which is the actual input versus the output. So when we have a gap like this it definitely means that we have some inefficiencies. In this case we have some significant inefficiencies which makes sense in this particular environment because this is a test box and we create lots of orders but we don't do much execution. Ideally when you run this in your production environment there isn't much of a gap between the target versus actuals. So let's come back out. I'm going to close this and I, what I'm going to do is pick a specific work center where we can really zero in on what's going on. So highlight the work center of interest, come back to edit input output diagram, once again it's on my other screen, I'm going to drag it over. Okay, and now we can see something completely different from what we saw when we had grouped everything together. Let's bring up the legend to remind us what we are looking at. So we have the targets, which are sitting up here, it's accumulation of orders over time, so this is what we intend to do versus the actuals. This is what truly happened in terms of confirmation. Because we asked these gaps here, again, target versus is actual, the key question is what's going on, and you can then continue to investigate further. You can actually, for example, double click on this graph, it brings up another chart. It's again, chart that comes up. I'm going to expand this and let's bring up the legend, So the white means that we had some intended production, the red means, hey, this is what actually took placeand the fact that we're seeing a lot of white, not much red something is definitely going on. The question is what is going on and this is what allows you to drill in at an order level to understand exactly what's going on? So here's an example here, again we intended to produce something, this is when it was scheduled for, we actually produced it early in this particular case, but we have all these other orders, this is when it was scheduled for and this works enter and there's no red telling us that something did not go according to schedule. You could see this input output diagram in combined with other functionality definitely gives us some quick insight into what's going on into the work centers. Again you can access this through transaction MCP1 operation analysis or MCP3 production order analysis to gain a quick overview of the production process. So in summary we have covered. How lead time IO diagram allows you to quickly identify work centers with operating inefficiencies using this functionality. Identify how to access lead time IO diagram functionality in the shop floor reports. And how to evaluate work center performance using lead time audio diagram. Hey, once again, thank you Eacliffe. Visualizing lead time inputs and outputs can really help create an understanding of how different factors impact delivery and contribute better to production planning and scheduling. So once again if you want to know more about how to get the most out of the SAP system please check out our other videos and of course if you can find a video or answer to a burning question, please submit your suggestion.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD04; MM02

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we will focus on why proper lead time management is so important. Often lead times are loaded at go live and never really maintained again. So when properly managed it can help your organization shorten replenishment cycles and become agile supply chains. Kristie, often people think it is a good enough to just get lead times right in their master data. Of course, that's an important first step however for world class lead time management the goal is to work on shortening your lead times with your suppliers, production lines, and of course, sales delivery. Tell us more about that. I'd love to Martin. Lead time maintenance is a powerful feature when used correctly, and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three key things. One, common places where lead times are maintained. Number two, things to think about as you look at the various lead time buckets available to you, breaking down those activities so we can make them better. Number three, the criticality of truth in the application of lead times and how they are used in MRP could not be more important. I want to talk a little bit about lead time maintenance. So we talked previously around how to evaluate lead times, and if you missed that video what we did is we went in and we looked at a transaction called WPDTC. Very, very powerful transaction, if you haven't watched the video on that yet, make sure you go back and take a look at it. What that allowed us to do was compare our information in terms of what the purchase info record says, to what the material master says, to what the vendor master says, to what we are actually seeing in terms of on time performance from the date the purchase order is issued until the date that we are receiving product in. And that evaluation is really important in terms of making sure that we have good insight into how our lead time is being managed and there's a lot of other tools that will allow us to do that too, in terms of the purchasing information system and vendor evaluation. But what I want to talk about today is what you do with that information. So through WPDTC there's some updates that are available, but most of us, most of the time are going to manage our lead times directly in the info sets. So first, let's start by just talking a little bit about the material master. We want to make sure that we remember that we can maintain lead times in a variety of places for items that are sourced. We can maintain it in the purchase info record and in the material master and scheduling agreements or contracts. I'm going to make sure that we have a good amount of alignment all throughout. Let me pop into the material master and I'm going to talk about why it's important to make sure that these things are consistent, or at least make sure that we're flagging them appropriately. I'm going to go ahead and hit change material. Okay, so all of our lead time information is going to be on the MRP 2 view. And I want to talk about the two different kinds of lead time. The first is our planned delivery time, so this is how long we are expecting from the time that we release an order to the supplier until we receive goods in the back door. That is our planned delivery time. And this planned delivery time field lives in a lot of different places. So it lives at the vendor master level, if you had just one lead time for everything that was coming from that particular supplier, it lives in the purchase info record, so you're able to maintain it there and it lives in the material master, it also lives in the contract, the scheduling agreement, and any discreet purchase orders. Now, why is this important? It's important because depending on how you have your sources flagged, you could get a big surprise if you have it in a material master say 15 days, but in your purchase info record as say 45 days. When that item is sourced, if it's not set appropriately in the source list, when the item is sourced, it's going to inherit the values from the record that is the most specific, and so we want to really make sure we've got good alignment based on the reality of how the supplier's delivering to us in all these fields. So let's talk a little bit about what plan delivery time means. So first of all, this plan delivery time is in calendar days. SAP does not know what your supplier's calendar looks like as a default. So when you come in here, it's going to go based on calendar days. So when I have 10 days, that is not two weeks. 14 days would be two weeks, 21 days would be three weeks. So this is really important to know, and if you're ever not sure what the setting is, if you hit F1 on your keyboard, it's going to help you to know whether it is calendar days, or work days. So the first thing it's going to tell you is the number of calendar days needed to obtain this material. Okay, and that does include the transit time from the supplier. Okay, so that's from the time you order it till the time it hits your back dock. The second thing that's important for us to make sure that we're getting correct in terms of lead time, making sure we have the correct buckets for everything set up, is the good to receipt processing time. So this one is your dock to stock time. So from the time that it arrives at our dock, or it's been released from production till the time that we can actually use it. And again, looking here, we can see what this is, and this is internal time, so it is work days. If you have quality inspection, your goods receipt time should align with that anticipated inspection time, if it's happening after you have received the goods in. Okay, so that's very important. Lead times in general shouldn't be buffered. They need to be set to what your actual expectation is, both for performance monitoring as well as to reflect the correct activities in the system so that we're able to work to improve those. So you've got lead times for pick, pack, and load, so all your staging time. You have a lead time from your supplier, which is your planned delivery time that reflects the time from the purchase order release until goods are received in your back door and you have good to receive processing time, which reflects how much time you need once that product has hit your back door to make it available for use, and we really want to make sure we account for all of these things in the correct buckets and then when we need to buffer in terms of time or quantity, that is what we have the safety stock types for, and there are three different types that we'll discuss in another video. But as you're going through and you're thinking about this, make sure that you're thinking about the specificity of the information. So whether it is in a contract or outline agreement or scheduling agreement, those are contracts and scheduling agreements or your two different kinds of outline agreements, your purchase info record, your material master, your vendor master. Just make sure that we the planned delivery time consistently maintained and that we're differentiating only where appropriate and where there's specific effectivity periods or source differences and then we're also accounting for the goods receipt processing time separately from that planned delivery time and that is reflective of your dock to stock time. And that's a little information on how to maintain those lead times once you have that information. So in summary we have covered how lead time maintenance allows you to. A plan for success. B, differentiate where it matters. And C, continuously evaluate and improve so we can focus on shortening those lead times successfully. Thanks Kristie. I completely agree. Using this feature allows you to position your end-to-end supply chain for success by ensuring we're getting these critical rules right while not inflating our lead times to buffer for volatility. Honesty truly is the best policy. So if you want to know more about this particular feature and of course other features in SAP please check out our other videos and if you have a burning question submit your request below.

Contract & Supplier Management

IBP; P2P

MD04; WPDTC

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's lead time management capability. When used correctly, lead time management helps organization manage the lead times it takes to complete procurement and supply chain activities. From ordering raw materials to delivering finished goods to customers. So Kristie, tell us how to make the most out of SAP's lead time management. I've got some great tips and tricks for you Martin. Lead time management is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I am going to focus on three key things, which are all around how we review the quality of our lead time master data. Number one, how we can use weighted plan delivery time calculations to see if our master data is consistent. Number two, how weighted plan delivery time calculation provides us with lead time performance information. And number three, the prereqs for being able to get quality information out of this very powerful transaction. Lead time performance management with WPDTC, waited plan delivery time calculation. So this transaction comes with the Surgeon General's warning. It is very powerful and with great power comes great responsibility and the reason why this transaction is so powerful is, first of all, the quality of the information that it provides is very dependent on how well our processes are organized and second of all, from this transaction, you can actually update your master data. And so we want to be very careful with that and make sure that we understand the values that we're seeing and we believe them and we're updating the correct information before we actually just turn folks loose to try to use this and to apply the information that they're seeing here. Okay, so that's your surgeon General's warning. So what does this show us? So you can see here we have the master data information on the left hand side so the info record that it's using for the comparison, the purchase organization and the purchase, and the plant, the supplier, and then the material. And then over a little bit further we have our plan delivery time that's maintained in that info recorder, the plan delivery time that's sitting in the material master. So there are some reasons why these might be different but we should know what those reasons are, so if we have multiple sources of supply, we have a plan delivery time with a particular effectivity period, we have a situation where the supplier has one particular plan delivery time that they're obligated to but we need to do something more conservative in planning. Those kinds of things but they should be very purposeful if they are different from one another. We have multiple sources of supply that are managed by quota arrangements so we get the right assignment through the planned delivery time in the info record and the info record's going to be the most important place we're maintaining that. Next door to that is the planned delivery time maintained at the vendor level, so in our vendor master. This is where we would have the same plan delivery time for all the materials coming from that particular supplier. And then lastly, is the calculated plan delivery time, that is the difference between when the purchase order is placed and when the goods are received. So this is the real supplier performance as the system would see it, or how they've been performing from the date of PO issue to the date of goods receipt. So this assumes a few things. This assumes that we are placing our purchase orders on the release date, so neither too early nor too late, that purchase requisition gets converted into the purchase order, the purchase order gets released to the supplier. So we maintain our flexibility for as long as possible before we're fully committed to that PO, and we're making sure that we are honoring the stated lead times from that supplier so making it very fair for them to be able to give us our product on time. It assumes that we are receiving goods in, in a timely fashion. So those are real time and accurate ,and it assumes that when we are asking the supplier to expedite we're giving them less than lead time that we are having that conversation with our suppliers as well, so it's a fair evaluation. And you can see here, this is always the hard part is we have to go through and say okay, what is actually happening is 42 days, what we are seeing in the info record of the material master so what we are using for MRP is 11. That means that there's a pretty significant variation in what the supplier has been actually delivering to us and this is going to be over a period of time, so in this case it was about a six month evaluation. This is really important because we are making promises that we want to keep both to manufacturing, to our sister plants, to our customers based on this lead time information so all of our planning is done here. Sometimes it's the opposite though, in this case down here we are planning for 35 days but they're delivering in 24. So is there an opportunity there to be able to reward the supplier for that, adjust the lead time, et cetera? Because if the supplier is able to perform in less without, major expedites, but they're able to accommodate that they're outstripping their performance, then we want to make sure that we're accounting for that because that's less inventory that we have to hold or buffer in order to make sure that we're in a position to promise. Okay. Very, very important stuff. So we can actually dive into the details here by hitting expand and this will go in and it will pull up the individual information for each of these records. So you can see here, let me scroll down just a little bit for you, get some records. You can see here that for this particular material, so 1066127, we've got all of these different purchase orders that have come in and it's calculating for us the number of days between the PO date and then the goods receipt date. Okay and it's going to give us that information as our calculated planned delivery time because that's the reality of what's happening. And so we can use that information then to go in and update our lead time records if appropriate. We can use that information to detect any process and efficiencies so when we're issuing purchase orders, on time, are we receiving goods on time? Are there any communication breakdowns that are occurring? It allows us also to even think about different master data parameters. So let's say that part of the reason the supplier is always off is because they deliver to us consistently every Wednesday, so can we use a planning calendar to set up for that kind of delivery? So understanding the variation and then working to resolve it or update our master data accordingly. Okay, very important. And then we want to just look for the overall consistency of our master data as we look across that info record and the material master and the vendor record if we've got things maintained in all three. Now, one word of caution, I talked a little bit about some reasons why the material master and the purchase info record might be different. One of those is going to be relevant for MRP. So if the purchase info record is not relevant for MRP, then it's the material master. The word of caution here is that MRP is going to plan according to that value. So let's say, for example, here's a good example, the material master says 9, the purchase info record says 12. When that purchase requisition gets converted into a purchase order, we're going to get a surprise if we're using the material master to plan, because what will happen is that purchase requisition, when it gets converted into a purchase order, is going to adopt the information and the purchase info record, and it's going to add 3 days to that plan delivery time. So this is really important to make sure that we have the right source of information flagged as relevant to MRP and we would do this in the source list. So if we don't have that, then the worry is that when we go to convert it into a purchase order we could see that change. But lead time performance management, super important, get in here regularly, review how your data, so what you believe is happening, looks compared to what is actually happening. Scrub for outliers, understand root cause, but then go in and update your records accordingly, based on negotiated lead times with the supplier and conversations with them around their performance. WPDTC will help you with your lead time management. So in summary, we have covered how lead time management will allow you to. Review the consistency of information across the different data maintenance points in SAP. Compare planned lead times to actual performance. And reconcile records for improved planning and performance. This is a powerful transaction and with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, thanks Kristie. Truly a mouthful that transaction. So using this feature however, does improve the accuracy of delivery dates, resource planning, and inventory optimization. So once again, if you're looking for more information on this particular transaction or other features in SAP, please feel free to check out our video catalog and if you have a question, please submit it below.

SAP Optimization

QM; OTC; P2P; WM

LL01; VA06; QA33; MD07

Hey there, Martin here, and in this very special episode of Reveal TV, we are sharing what we call a Leader's Digest. Yes, the pun is intended. This video is meant to be a quick power up for leaders supporting teams and their success in driving value, empowerment and quality out of SAP. Today we're talking about one of the powerful concepts SAP has to offer, proactive exception monitoring. Exception monitoring exists in all functional areas of SAP, doing the hard work of highlighting where our attention is most needed in any given day or any given moment. The path to quality, exception management is not easy, but it's most certainly worthwhile. Jason, Jason, Jason. This is a big topic. I imagine a lot of our leaders may feel exposed when first trying to support a team in pursuing excellence, in exception monitoring. How do you suggest that leaders get involved and start the process? The good news is that I have been here, I've done this, and I have so many t-shirts. I'm giving them away. This is seriously tricky feeling business, but it doesn't have to be. As leaders, we don't need to know it all. We simply need to be comfortable in our team's journey, being able to support them in it. So a few things. Let's not pull any punches, when someone first gets started, exception monitoring, no matter what function it's in, it can feel a lot like panning for gold. Data's not clean or well understood. What SAP is trying to tell us is murky and suspect at best. It's easy to get overwhelmed. So let me show you a few simple ways to see what's going on and ask the right questions to support the team. Second, for the team to get good, for things to start working, they have to get in and work on exceptions daily so they can start experiencing some wins and recognize trends. Trends are what we're looking for, cause and effect. We're dealing with an integrated system here after all. So let's go in and take a look. When we're talking exception monitoring at a leadership level, it's important to remember that there are exception monitors all over the place in SAP. When things are clicking, data is clean. Big chunks of work are handled automatically, and the team can focus only on exceptions. You monitor exceptions in MRP, sales orders, quality inspections, finance functions, warehouse activity, the list goes on. Ultimately anywhere where things can get out of alignment in SAP, there's probably an exception monitor of some kind. I think there may even be one to figure out when lunch is going to be delivered, but that's neither here nor there. You don't have to be an expert in each of these, but it's important to embrace and champion the approach and show curiosity with lots of questions to reinforce to the team that exception monitoring is baked into the organizational culture. Part of baking exception monitoring into the culture is keeping it front and center and watching trends. Now, it's not real easy to monitor exception trends and standard SAP, but the people that are in it every day will have a good idea of which direction things are heading and which items are most critical. As a leader, you can use that to drive conversations and get a sense of how things are tracking. So here's how a morning standup conversation might go from a leader's perspective. Hey Steven, how's the warehouse monitor looking today? Better or worse than last week? Better, great! Tell me more. What are you focused on this week? Okay, great. If you can attack those negative stocks, it looks like you can keep the downtrend rolling. I'm really glad to hear that the fantasy football draft didn't knock you off your game there. Hey Marcy, how are we looking in sales? It's going the wrong way, huh? Okay, so what's going on? Oh, we're still dealing with those staffing shortages in quality. So stuff's not making it to the warehouse on time, huh? Okay, I see, yep, yep. Jake, I see QI is really backed up. Is there anything that we can do to try to help get you back on track? I mean, you got lots of red lights and we're just burying you with the more stuff coming from production. I wonder, here's a thought, we've got a maintenance outage coming up for later in the week. What if we move that up to tomorrow and buy quality some time to catch up and get things back on track? We could even pull some production folks over that are trained on inspections to supplement the team. Hey Wayne, how are we looking for the materials on that outage? Let's look at IWBK. I'm seeing lots of green lights. It looks like it might be doable. What do you think? Good. Okay, good. So, Jake, if we can buy you this time and you can get some reinforcements for a day or so, will that get this done? Okay, let's do it. Hey Steven, just stay on your toes out there in the warehouse to make sure we don't just shift the bottlenecks over to you. But barring any issues, getting stuff packed and out the door, I think this gets us back on track by the end of the week. So you saw me flash through five different examples of exception monitoring tools in SAP in just a few minutes, that when taken together, provided a nice end-to-end view of the current supply chain picture and allowed us to react quickly to resolve a hypothetical disruption. One that probably didn't actually sound all that hypothetical for those of you out in the real world. So what's also cool to look forward to is the transition to S/4HANA. There are a bunch of really cool Fiori apps that are going to make this process even slicker and easier. But beyond the tools, you also heard me facilitate a discussion around the information. It's not enough to just keep an eye on exceptions. As a leader, it's crucial that you demonstrate the critical thought processes needed to collaborate up and downstream to solve supply chain challenges. Developing those critical thinking skills, that's really the secret sauce to taking things to a different level. Alright, now here are the words of advice post demo. First, if you do nothing else, show interest. If you're interested, the payoff on the time and the spark to the flame of curiosity become very real. It's the single most important thing you as a leader can do. And second, after hearing a team share a bit, you'll get a feel for some questions. Ask them and ask with an eye towards getting to an improvement objective, a knot you can help untangle. And when you find that golden thread, affirm your interest into commitment by driving some actions based on feedback that has come from the team with or without your influence. Show up for them by delivering on something they need and they might be surprised you would offer. And here I have one more parting word of advice and it may sound a little strange, but here it goes. Stop rewarding your everyday superheroes and rather reward and acknowledge the folks who are managing the business of the day only occasional superhero capes needed. Hey, thank you again, Jason. Supporting our leaders in supporting their teams is critically important. I love the points you've made today, they are just absolutely spot on. There are reasonable reminders that we can apply across the supply chain, so thank you. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about exception monitoring, we have quite a few topics on this particular related area. Of course, if you are not sure where to find them, feel free to use our chatbot.

SAP Optimization

P2P

MC$6; MC$8; ME61; FIORI

Martin: Hey there, leaders of leaders, Martin, here with a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Measuring supply performance. In our minds, measuring supply performance goes directly to the heart of setting our partners in the supply chain up for success. It helps surface important conversations, it reduces risk and recognizes excellence. They're both quantitative and qualitative components to a good conversation around performance. Today, Sean is going to talk us through some low barrier entry tools to get some of these conversations going. Hey, Sean, I know this is an incredibly important topic even in your books. As a leader, how would you help your team set up for success in these conversations around supply performance? Help us out, friend. Sean: Martin. Martin. Martin. I can't tell you how many organizations tell us that they either, A, are so busy managing their orders, that they don't have time to engage in good conversations around performance, or B, have invested heavily in developing tools external to SAP to build a scorecard, often not even utilizing the information already available in SAP. Let's get to the good stuff. We have capabilities right out of the box. The tools available to us build on one another and continue to evolve to better support, timely information that we can access when on a call or in a meeting or with suppliers. And the best news is that if we're able to get started on this journey using real time information, this can offer opportunities for gateway conversations. Gateway conversations are the ones that help to understand better the opportunities and the obstacles with our suppliers so we can collaborate with them, improve performance, and get the strategic partnership in a mutually beneficial way. Let's go now and take a look. Right, so before we can embark on a journey to improving supply performance, we must define our organization's success measures. Our goal is to understand what's happening with our suppliers, their successes and obstacles, where they are processed internally, setting them up for success, and then where we might have opportunities to mutually improve. Now the SAP toolkit to support supply performance is really robust and can tell us much about what's working and also what's not working. So before I give you the Leader's Digest version, know that there are dedicated videos that delve deeper into several of these examples, and I want to give you a quick hit on the feature and tell you what you can expect to get out of this today. First are straightforward supplier performance reports. These are standard SAP reports supporting the on time and in full evaluation and we can control the definitions of each of these via a small amount of configuration. And you can see an example of each here on my screen right now. So I've stacked them side by side so that you can view them and these supplier performance reports, what they do is they measure the supplier's performance based on a statistical delivery date in the purchasing document. This is primarily driven by the suppliers stated delivery time. And that we will have maintained obviously inside of the SAP system within the master data. In the early days of use, this report can help us understand the quality of our data, and once we're confident, represents schedule adherence and reliability with our supplies. We then get a full measure of in full, based on tolerances and the descriptions that we have configured. From here, we can then drill to look for outliers, look to see if we can find any trends, are there examples that are worth discussing? And one of the really cool things is that this information also flows through what's called the buyers negotiation sheet, and here’s an example shown here for you. It is a quick reference on what’s going on with that supplier or material? We can see things like recent purchase history. We can see pricing and terms and the pièce de résistance for today our on time and our in full statistics. So the good thing is we can pull this up on the fly to reference it in our conversations with our suppliers. The next thing I'd like to share is vendor evaluation, as different to supply performance. This is where we get the opportunity to produce what we think of as say a balanced scorecard, and it requires robust conversations on the business rules of how we want to rate our suppliers to produce a good review for them. We then need to configure those rules so that the report delivers a proper result for us. You can see here some of the selection criteria and the options right here. Vendor evaluation also allows us to rank and compare our suppliers where it's appropriate, which could be handy for business review, for awarding new business, and for recognizing them as high performers or needing improvement. All of this is coupled with a qualitative input from the folks who work regularly with the supplier or the goods or the services that supplier provides. Now, finally, the journey to S/4HANA then opens up all kinds of new ways to manage supply performance in the Fiori workspace. Examples of which can be seen here on the screen. Now, we have dashboards that push analytics to us alongside process monitoring. We've never had so much information right at our fingertips in SAP. There's so much we can dig into to generate improvements in the way we engage with our suppliers and ensure mutual success. I love a good roundup tour and I hoped that got some wheels turning. As leaders, we want to make sure our teams are armed with the best information to be successful. One of the ways we can do that is to be very consistent in our expectations. Where our expectations have been exceeded or unfulfilled, we want to attack that with curiosity. That curiosity leads us to important understanding that helps us promote goodness and protect against challenges while we work through whatever they may be. The other success factor is cadence. Being on a regular cadence of conversation helps everyone to stay on the same page and lessens the surprise. Since knowing is half the battle, anything we can do to stay informed sets us up well for knowing that the knowledge in the best way to support our partners in success. Martin: I love that Sean. You highlighted a few options that are definitely struck a chord with me and involving our conversation, reducing our risk, and figuring out how to partner with our partners well. Hey folks, if you're looking to maximize your value in your SAP investment, please check out some of these other videos. And specifically for these Leaders Digest videos, please check out our catalog.

SAP Optimization

P2P; PTM

ME23N; CM25; WPDTC

Hi folks, Martin here with another video that came from a question from the Reveal TV community. One of our leaders asked us what one of the biggest barriers to change is within an organization and how to overcome that. We love this question, but before I answer, let me ask you a question. What are the seven most expensive words in business? We have always done it that way. We may not even know the reason, but we trust that there was one and it's sacred and we hold onto it forever. So here we are today talking about this from an angle, from a policy perspective, how is that policy performing for you and when should we start thinking about changing it or even challenging it? To address this with us today is Steven. Steven, when you think about policy performance as it relates to getting things right in SAP and getting our teams moving in the right direction, what are some of the tips you have for us today? Yeah, thanks Martin. Um, yep. I've got tips. Uh, first of all, every time I hear, well, you know, that's just policy. I just have so many questions. Is it a policy or is it actually a process step? Can we meet the policy goal in another way? How do we get out of this box and back into options? A team or individual often hear a person within the organization say something and interpret that as a rule. It's not uncommon that this is something that was once said and, and may even be taken out of context, but now suddenly it's accepted as a policy. So to counter that, you have to demonstrate trust in the team by prompting them to challenge the status quo. Look for opportunities to do things differently. I'd recommend focusing these efforts on like a master data rule or a process goal. Make it something that you're able to adjust in SAP and then monitor the results. But as your team learns more. They need to apply that learning, which means they're going to need just a little space to change. I'll take you through some common policy assumptions and how they manifest in SAP. Let's go in and take a look. It's no surprise that it Reveal we're big fans of challenging the status quo, but we temper those challenges with small iterative changes and we encourage you to do the same and then also monitor the results. I'm going to give you three quick examples of how policy may manifest in SAP as something the team may no longer think about, but should. Number one, we don't change dates. Well, if you don't change dates, then you're not reflecting the reality of what's happening in the now. That means we have to go elsewhere to see what's really happening. And if our goal is a well performing system that enables process and empowers people. Well, we can't get there from here. Further, we can't make use of our rules engines. ATP and MRP are blind to what's going on. A good example of why people may believe in this policy is that they believe you can no longer measure performance if you adjust the dates, well, you can. You just need to adjust the right dates. We have options, but if it's policy, we stop looking for those options. Number two, we never take idle time on the manufacturing floor, we must fill in the schedule. This is usually driven by the KPI stack the floor is being asked to hit because you can never get that time back. But if you're looking to make the most out of your inventory investment available, raw materials, capacity, and labor, and maintain flexibility for the client, you might find that you'd benefit strongly from leaving some open capacity in the schedule. Number three, we do not update lead times. Lead times are a primary master data element that sets us and our partners up for success. When people say they don't update lead times, what that often means is that they don't want to commercially reopen the conversation with their suppliers to provide new lead times. However, think scalpel not broad sword, and there may be some important and valuable conversations to be had. Also, if your suppliers underperforming and you want to hold them to their stated lead times, then fine. Don't change them, but put some performance improvement steps in place and consider some safety time while they're improving. But riddle me this, what if the supplier is outperforming their lead times? Wouldn't it be nice to take advantage of that? Lead time is dollars in inventory, coverage, carrying cost and flexibility? We want the best ones we can reliably get. Those are three quick examples, but I can think of so many more. What can you think of that your team thinks is a policy rule but you'd really like them to challenge? I'll give you another one to think about. We always have to build or buy the full EOQ. Give that one some thought. All right. Thank you for taking that little tour with me. Uh, today we're able to go over some examples of how you might find opportunities to revisit policy restrictions that may be standing in the way of improvement. When we change something, we may not always get it right, so we want to start small, monitor carefully, and then course correct along the way. When we get something right, we want to celebrate and share those successes, and then iteratively identify the next opportunity. We want to build confidence over time and have the healthy and challenging conversations that ensure that SAP is running with the rules that empower the business to thrive. Hey, thanks Steven. You know, in matter of fact, a real company policy is a boundary that should not be crossed without plenty of debate and confirmation. However, the semblance of a policy that is no longer relevant should be challenged. Much of what flows down to the team as the policy is often not a result of a false constraint. Not just the rules in SAP, but to the way we think about the options and opportunities. That's a time for change. Alright folks, this was a Leadership Digest video. We are going to have many more of these as well. And if you're looking for some specific leadership topics, please check out our video catalog.

SAP Optimization

P2P; PTM; OTC

MC.9

Hey folks, welcome to the video that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. This is Martin, welcome back to the conversation. Today we're going to dive into the tricky topic of KPIs. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. We've all heard that before. It's about intentionally managing and improving what we have. In this Leaders Digest demo today, we're going to discuss what it takes to put KPIs to good, productive use. When we are looking for the right KPIs to drive our business, we have no further to look than our friend Sean. He is the master of balance and focusing on the widely important things. So Sean, can you help our leaders find some productive KPIs to dig into as we're looking to improve our teams and the use of SAP and ultimately have a path to achieving business outcomes? Sean, tell us more. So Martin, did you know that SAP is always talking to us? It's giving us so much information that sometimes it can be overwhelming. Oftentimes we don't know where to find what we're looking for. So as leaders, we actually force the team out of SAP and into an online report or spreadsheet. We ask them to spend time on pulling data out. And I'm here today to talk about driving activities back into SAP. There's no one metric to rule them all, but there are important KPIs that can be brought together to drive our improvements. As leaders, it's critical that we look for conflicts and help the team understand how to approach outcomes in an integrated way. The other point I'll make before we jump in. It's very important to target set the focus on getting metrics that are trending in the right direction. For some of those KPIs, it's not the discrete number that we're going after, rather it's a time phased incremental improvement. Right, so let's go in and take a look. Now my intention today is to spark some curiosity as to what some of the KPI summaries look like in SAP. For this, I'm going to look at the material analysis tool key figures that are available in one of our report options, MC.9. And so here I'm going to run this report, and we'll get some results in a moment. And from that for this exercise, what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on a single MRP controller and let's choose 008. There it is, so we've highlighted 008. And what we want to do is open the key figures that are available to this report. So if I go to extras, show me all the key figures. There we go. Look at that. Now, before we look at some of the details, let's remind ourselves as leaders, we need to use KPIs productively , to focus the business on collaborative outcomes that are going to bring balance, direction, and buy in. And in that way, try to minimize or avoid competing KPIs. Several typical competing metrics within the supply chain management arena often arise due to differing goals between various departments and functions. Think for a moment on inventory turnover versus customer service level. So higher inventory turnover aims to reduce stock levels, while high customer service levels requires that we maintain a sufficient inventory to meet that demand. And if we take a look at these particular measures that are out here, down the bottom here, we can see the stock turnover. So the valuated stock turnover here is running at about 13.2. Wow. I would argue that 13.2 is a pretty good turns rate that we've got. So inventory turnover seems to be doing quite well here, but it is potentially one of those that runs into conflict with the customer service levels. Then you can think for a moment around production efficiency versus flexibility. Or we could argue cost reduction versus quality improvement. Maybe order fulfillment lead time versus manufacturing lead time. And then of course, the capacity utilization versus on time delivery, and in that regard, we see that quite often that maximizing capacity utilization can also lead to lower flexibility, and then that runs into conflict in ensuring a high rate of on time delivery and getting to those rates. Okay, so I think we get a good sense of the potential and how we can run into conflicting KPIs. So if we continue to look at some of the key figures here that are used to inform, direct, and report on around what these KPIs look like. Let's consider the valuated stock coverage, for instance, you see this one here, valuated stock coverage, that's our days of supply. Now, very often we have a days of supply metric that says we want to carry X number of days. And this is where that opportunity exists for us to check how well we are doing or how badly we might be doing against it. Are we achieving those goals? Are we way above? Are we down below it? What is the situation? Because we one, don't want to carry too much, but we also don't want to affect service levels at the end of the day. The second one we might want to think about is the link between total consumption, and let me take you up there. If we look here, total consumption, there it is. So we've got 63 million and against that, the valuated stock coverage. So where's my valuated stock coverage down the bottom here. Value added stock coverage of 36. So we can start to see a relationship between that and if we take it to the mean valuated stock value, which is this up here, mean valuated stock value of 1.2. That 1.2 against the total usage of 13 million. That's almost showing us the turns rate. Think about it. Consumption divided by average gives you a turns rate. So that's the 13 divided by the 1.2. Then of course we have safety stock. So safety stock we need to say well is our strategy correct? Are we running too high? Are we running too low? But we have an opportunity to use these key figures to tell us that. What about the number of cancellations? If we look up here, number of cancellations 876 cancellations. And so we would ask, were we unable to make it on time or meet the full demand of the customer? Do we need to have a metric where we're going to look at reducing cancellations? Those are part of the conversation that we need to have as we go forward. An interesting one as well here is around the valuated stock receipts value. So if we look here, our receipts value is at 17.863 and our issues value at 17.8. Well, that looks pretty good. Because it means that which we're receiving and that which we're issuing out is very close to one another. And if that's true, then it could suggest that we are not building excess inventory. And we might then want to say, well, hang on, is excess inventory a metric that we want to track? In some cases, very definitely, we want to track excess inventory. But this here shows us that those two seem to be in a similar place right now. What then about the unplanned quantities? So if we look over here, there are two measures in here. There's an unplanned quantity usage and there's an unplanned consumption of about 9 million dollars. And that starts to raise some questions. Why have we got unplanned consumption? Is this a reflection of a breakdown between my plan and my actual, and is this going to be something that we need to consider in terms of a metric going forward? So as we consider productive KPIs, an example that's been top of my mind recently is the challenge, or maybe it's the fun, of being a production scheduler. Now think about it, as a production scheduler you're charged with balancing service levels, inventory performance, and efficiency throughput. Not an easy ask, is it? By a long stretch. No, it isn't. But as a leader, what we need to do is we need to help in the conversations that guide our teams along all of these metrics that are out here. We need to encourage them to work hard, to improve the quality of planning and the use of SAP itself, not getting outside the system. And in that process, we need to empower our people to to make the right decisions for business improvement and then work with them to ensure KPIs are aligned rather than in conflict with them. And so folks, as a final thought, let's suggest that rather than just have a fixed target, that as leaders, we work with the team on the trending in the right direction and on incremental percentage improvements. I think that's the key. Incremental percentage improvements. And this will give them a gliding path to the desired outcome. It will increase motivation and certainly build success in our organizations. Wow. I really enjoyed that. Now here's some closing tips for those of you who are trying to lead and support your team. First, create good daily habits and find the impact on the metrics. Celebrate the small wins and be curious on how the team achieved them. Work on the problems and be curious about how you might remove the hurdles and support the team in their success. Watch out for stagnation though. It's likely means the daily habit hasn't yet landed where it needs to be. Your job, provide clarity, support, and be to the team showing genuine curiosity in their journey as evidenced in KPIs that are productive and drive to the outcomes that you're looking for. Hey, once again, Sean, thank you so much. The importance of getting this right is often undervalued and it's a big missed opportunity for a lot of organizations. I'd wager most folks listening to this could uncover hidden opportunities in the organization simply by reviewing some of the highlights from this video in their business. Can't wait to hear about some of these outcomes. So folks, if you want to listen to more Leader Digest related topics, check out our other video catalog. And of course, if you have a specific question, feel free to submit it below.

SAP Optimization

DM; P2P; PTM; OTC; WM

MD04; MCPU

Martin: Hey folks, this is Martin and this is another installment of Leaders Digest where we are going to provide some insights to leaders in digest form. The topic we have for today is all about improving the quality of information in your system so that you can do the things like allow the system to produce realistic plans for you, or make a promise and keep a promise. It reduces noise, manual interventions, and improves clarity. It's incredibly important that we know how to foster a culture that values data as an asset that empowers decision making. Today is all about the integrity of our data. So Steven, what should our leaders know about transactional data integrity? Steven: Yeah, thanks Martin. Integrity is such a good descriptor for what we're trying to achieve with quality master data. Have you ever heard your team express that the system is lying to them? It's a common way to feel, but the truth of the matter is that if SAP's wrong, then it's because we have fed the system with incorrect or untrue data. Not the other way around. Keeping the system up to date with current information is a precursor for any digital transformation journey. When integrity is lacking, it is the bringer of chaos. And with each incremental improvement, we build trust. We shore up the foundation. And you as leaders have an awesome opportunity to promote awareness and drive focus within your teams to keep the system up to date and clean. You can build a culture that is invested in enablement and understands the cross-functional impacts, timely transactions, and visibility into upcoming demand and the requisite supply. Let's go in and take a look. Can we trust SAP? Well, yeah, it's a system, it has no bias, it only knows the facts, right? Now, can we trust the data in SAP? That's probably more of a a maybe, it depends. We hope so, and we can certainly validate the quality of the data. So if this is a right to play, a first step to conquer, to get the quality proposals for replenishment, making good on our promises and being able to drive insights from the system to make decisions in real time. Why is it so hard to get there? Well, first of all, data only gets better if you're using it. Now we're getting to it. Got a chicken and egg conundrum here, and team members lose faith when they try to keep the system up to date and there's not good cross-functional alignment in that effort. We succeed or fail as a team. It's the integrated nature of things. So here on my screen are some outdated demand elements, which are triggering exception messages for our planners and buyers. They can't hit a date in the past, so lose faith in the signal, which erodes their confidence in putting MRP to use in their day-to-day lives. Now signals lost, value gone, quality continues to decline, but the moment you can commit to using the information, the moment you focus on it and back it with daily work, so it becomes a habit, the healthier the quality becomes. If it's in use, it matters. Here. This is interesting. See this pattern of actual production in this candy cane graph. This measures our schedule adherence. All of the production seems to be happening at once. Then there's a gap and another slew of production comes through. I bet if we dug into the details, we'd find that we're batching our production reporting. There's several reasons why this happens, but I'll highlight two here. Lack of equipment or access on the floor, or reliance on a batch integration from an MES system, or lack of confidence in the ability to accurately report based on the quality of master data that supports production. This is a great opportunity to make improvements in focused bite-sized chunks, progress over perfection. There are many examples we can identify and improve the integrity of our transactional data. If you're looking for a place to start, check out our videos on housekeeping, COGI, the Sales Order Monitor, or the Warehouse Activity Monitor. These are all diagnostic tools that help us identify where we're hurting and break the work down in a way where the improvements are impactful and the team can start putting better quality data to use in their day-to-day lives. Here's one last tip. Without transactional data integrity, it's difficult to demonstrate that you have good controls in place. Taking steps here pays dividends to the integrity of your plans, financial controls, service levels, and inventory management. You can have a healthy system. We've seen hundreds of organizations achieve and sustain these gains. No one likes driving a car with dirty oil. It just never performs the way we want it to. And the worse it gets, the harder it is to clean up. When it's time to get serious about investing in data reliability as an asset, we recommend focusing on progress over perfection. Don't let your team get sidelined just because there's so much to do. Start small, create momentum. Let them see and feel the results. Show them that this kind of hard work pays dividends, not just for their desk, but for their colleagues as well. There's a ripple effect of goodness that comes from this hard work. Before I let you go, please don't make this a sprint and erode effort. Focus on the cultural shift and the move to well cadenced daily habits. That's the way to get real about data. Martin: Hey Steven. Thank you. This is kind of like the right to play stuff that we're talking about. If we don't build the foundation, then we limit our ability to grow, but with investment in the quality of data and the focus of empowering decision making, we can really make a difference and a change in our conversation. This is the path towards achieving business objectives. So folks, if you want to know more about this topic or even just some other leadership digest topics, there's a whole catalog of videos about this, please check them out and if you're not sure which ones to look for, use the chatbot.

Production & Capacity Planning

PTM

MD01; MD02; MD03; CM01; CM25; MD01N

Martin: Hey folks, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. So the best way to learn is by doing so, let's just get straight into this. This video in particular, we're going to be focused on using SAP's production planning lead time scheduling to generate machine and or labor capacity requirements to produce the required inventory. So I'd imagine I'd be preaching to the choir if I rattled off some statistics around related to being able to provide a quality promise to your customer. Making and keeping that reliable promise to a customer in many areas is a right to play and in others just purely a competitive differentiator. This of course, strengthens the integration between ATP, order fulfillment, procurement, and of course even product costing. So that's a lot. So how about we get into it and of course, tell us more about this Eacliffe, love to hear more about scheduling. Eacliffe: Thanks Martin. This topic allows production planners to aggregate capacity data to perform a relatively quick evaluation of manufacturing assets, for the short, medium, and long-term time horizon to make key decisions in honoring the commitments to providing manufactured materials in a timely manner. Production planning often occurs outside of SAP, given the existing solution needs to be fixed or takes too much effort in SAP. Unfortunately, this approach does not work well when integrating with other supply chain activities such as exception monitoring, purchasing, and finance, just to name a few. Why, of course, you should be able to promise against what you have. Why would you not be able to do that? If you are in this situation, don't worry, we are going to walk through what you need to be doing about it. Let's get into SAP. Let's explore how lead time scheduling works and let's understand its impact.What I've done is I've taken this material, put some demand in SAP or MRP as generated plan requirements. And when I ran MRP, I did not tell it to generate or use lead time scheduling. The results of that is when I double click on the plan order, I come into change mode, we can see that there are only three tabs, the header assignment, and master data. When I come to the master data tab, we can see that there is nothing related to the routing or master recipe. So that's issue number one. Okay the way this shows up in capacity evaluation is when I come over to the capacity evaluation transaction, the expectation is in this particular demonstration, we would expect requirements against this particular resource. So let me click on standard overview, and right now what we see is just 0 requirements. So even though we have planned orders out there over this time horizon the system is saying, look, don't need any capacity on the resource at this time. So I'm going to go back into the stock requirement list, and I'm going to rerun MRP using lead time scheduling functionality. So, the parameter of interest is this one down here, the scheduling parameter. When I do the drop down, there are two options. One is which is what I used before , is basically just give me timing. Based on other criteria I just need basic dates, but don't really give me capacity information versus option two. Option two says not only calculate the dates, the start and finish dates, but also tell me how much capacity I need to fulfill each of the planned orders for this material. So let’s select 2, I’m going to hit enter, enter to run MRP, come back over here, I'm going to do a refresh and now I'm going to take a look at the planned order. Let's come to this plan order, come in to change mode. What we can see is first, that there are now four tabs rather than three. But let's go to the master data tab and we can see that there's additional data now on the master data tab where the master recipe got pulled in. So this master recipe is now providing the production rate in terms of, hey, this is how many units we can produce over a certain duration of time. And then if I come to the scheduling tab we get the exact information in terms of basically what we will see is, let me scroll over or make this smaller so that we can see that basically 30 hours of time is needed. So 30.32 hours is needed to fulfill this particular, planned order. So when we convert it into a process order, that's how much time we would expect. And of course, when I come back to capacity evaluation, I'm going to do a refresh over here, and now we can see that we also have capacity information sitting over on this side. Okay, so you could see the impact of doing lead time scheduling and the fact that if the desire is to do things like work on the scheduling board, do capacity evaluation, we want to run MRP in lead time scheduling, regardless of if it's being done in background mode every night or it's being done online one material at a time. Hey, welcome back. In this demo, we have covered a few things. First, how to quickly perform capacity evaluation when performing lead time scheduling. Secondly, how to trigger lead time scheduling. And thirdly, the information required to perform lead time scheduling and strategic integration points. Martin: Eacliffe, thank you so much. Much appreciated. That's a lot of detail. So lead time scheduling allows for lengthening the runway on identified bottleneck challenges, and improving your supply chain integration. This is a topic often isolated in a spreadsheet that is poorly integrated with the remainder of the supply chain information in SAP due to data inconsistencies, et cetera. It's also going to be a journey to get us there. We have got to go from basics and kind of grow into maturity. But there's no question that this is a hot topic and can make a big difference in how we apply this to our supply chain. So folks, if you want to know more about this topic and other scheduling related issues related to SAP, please check out our other videos. And of course, if you have a particular question, feel free to raise it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P

MD07; MD04; ME21N; ME33K; ME38

Hey folks, welcome back, Martin here. Now here's a really fun topic that sparks a lot of curiosity. Let's go shopping. Now, SAP has many ways to make the process of placing PO's or shopping easy, but many organizations continue to manually enter or modify their purchase orders. That's a lot of work and is ripe for opportunity for error. Let's see how we can address this, exploring a few and different ways in SAP that can make the process of placing PO's easier. And here to help us today is Jen. Now Jen, does the prospect of shopping sound exciting? Or more like a chore for you? Well, it depends, Martin, what are we shopping for and who's paying? No one likes a clunky shopping experience, and that's exactly what we're going to work through today. Let's make the purchase processing easy by putting SAP to work for us. Today we're going to explore how to get the most of our data so we get a good purchase order right out of the gate, minimal manual maintenance. Then we'll talk about how to make the maintenance easier if we do need to make a change. And lastly, I'll highlight a few of the options to level up your purchasing game with a smart use of outline agreements. Let's dive right in and take a look. As a buyer, I'm responsible for setting my suppliers up for success. It is my job to release purchase orders for or delivery schedules to them on the correct cadence and with all the right details. There are many ways to identify what purchase orders need to be written today. First, I could pull out all of my materials by supplier through MD07. I then review my planning situation to see if I'm happy with my planning. Do I have any issues with lot size, lead times, or safety stock? Are there any open past due PO's? Do I have any exception messages that suggest we're falling behind to demand? Once I've got comfortable with what's pending for this supplier, I am ready to go shopping. Now, I could convert individual requisitions right from here. See this release date column. This tells me the date I should convert the requisition. I don't want to release a requisition too early because it limits flexibility if there are changes in demand. I don't want to miss a release date because I want to be giving the supplier the necessary lead time. This is true Goldilocks moment, we want to get it just right. Now, if I didn't want to go through and convert these one at a time, and I don't, one of my other options is simply to go shopping. Let's head over to ME21N, and let's look for purchase requisitions for the supplier and for the appropriate release date. This is going to create a work list for me. I can now take the requisitions and place them in the shopping cart. This is my favorite part. Now all the details from the requisition will flow in from me and auto-populate onto the PO. As you're getting used to this process and working away from manually entering the supplier, dates, quantities, or even price, you may find missing information or incorrect information, and that's okay. Just stop, take a moment and fix the input to correct the output. Next time it will be correct for you. One of the most common mistakes we see people make with purchase orders is the price or price per. We don't want to have to manually enter that information if we don't have to. Setting a rule in place certainly helps though. You can use the search functionality that we just tried here to pull all of the requisitions you're responsible for by the release date. Make sure to look for the requisitions that are missing, the supplier so you can fix that master data and don't miss the buy. ME57 is also great for identifying and correcting missing source data. If there's a lot, fix the data for 5 to 10 today, the pile will get smaller. Now, let's say we need to make a change to this PO. Maybe we need to update all of the dates. We can quickly do this with a fast change. If you look here, there are many options that are eligible for fast change. We simply select the change we need to make and we're able to apply that value to the selected items. Before we wrap up today, I did also want to mention another major helper to the procurement process, outline agreements. We have the ability to set contracts up and then call those contracts with discrete PO's. No need to create PO's for large quantities. We also have scheduling arrangements that allow MRP to create delivery schedules across time, so our supply is time for when we need it. Both allow us to give us the supplier anticipated volume with easy maintenance and excellent reporting. Thanks for shopping with me. The order acknowledgement really is a great tool to get closer to your suppliers and encourage a proactive exchange of information. The showstopper for a lot of teams is if they're just getting started and the volume seems impossible to keep up with. It doesn't have to be. There are lots of ways to get this information loaded into the system, and a pilot program supported by the manual maintenance will help the team see the value in the effort. Then you can optimize the process with your suppliers, broaden the program and make it efficient. Let's keep the communication flowing with the effective use of order acknowledgements. Thank you, Jen. You know, we work with buyers all the time that are experts at their functional areas, but struggle with the tactical aspects of execution. Walkthroughs like these just help make life easier and helps the team really focus on the good stuff and the spend analysis, the supplier quality, and obviously, good old performance and strategic sourcing. It doesn't have to be hard and dare I say, even fun. Hey folks, if you're looking for more fun areas to go and explore, please feel free to use the AI, they may have some recommendations too.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM02

The best way to learn is by doing, so welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here, and in this video we'll be taking a deeper dive into safety stock. Now in today's video, when we say safety stock, we are referring to static safety stock maintained in the material master. This is the flavor of safety stock most commonly used and therefore most familiar to most MRP controllers. It's one of the key decisions that needs to be regularly reviewed, and those discussions and approvals tend to be a cross functional in nature. Kristie, how about you tell us more about safety stock and specifically the static safety stock that we just called out. Kristie: Well, Martin, it seems that this is a high area of interest for folks. So what we're going to do today is take a deeper dive. Now, there are two major areas of discussion around safety stock. The first is what flavor is it, static or dynamic or safety type? Which one is best for [00:01:00] which planning situations and how do you determine a good value? And then the second is what the safety stock is actually going to do and how it should be thought about in the planning results. In this video, we are going to be focused on the latter. You've determined a value and now you're going to see how the system is going to respond. SAP has some options for us here and I'm going to get in and show you. What, where and how those options may play out. We will also touch on what a static safety stock might be a good fit for and some situations where it may not be a good fit. And lastly, what a good cadence of review might look like depending on what season of planning the business you're in. Let's get into it. All right, let's go in and take a look at the planning situation for this material with some safety stock on it, and what you'll see here is that we have an exception message 96, and if I double click on it it's going to give me the definition down here. So it says stock fallen below safety stock level, and we can [00:02:00] clearly see that. So our available quantity on hand right now is 87 pieces, and we have a safety stock of 100 pieces. That leaves our available stock balance at negative 13 pieces. Safety stock comes off the top, so it's the very first thing that MRP is going to plan for, it's the very first demand that it's going to see. ~Okay? And so,~ From here, it's going to go out and plan the rest of the month for us and start to get our replenishment in order. So the static safety stock needs to be looked at regularly, that's the very first thing that we want to make sure that we're mindful of. We don't want to change it too often, but we do want to make sure that we're going through and we're reviewing our safety stocks on at least a quarterly basis and dealing with any outliers. ~okay? And that is becomes very, very important. ~And then if there's a major forecast change, or if an item switches to a different point in the product life cycle, then we also would want to be able to go in and look at that and review it at that point as well. ~Okay,~ So some things that we want to consider as we're thinking [00:03:00] through our safety stock value, and I'm just going to go ahead and navigate here and remind you of where this lives, so it lives on the MRP2 view, and you'll see it right down here, ~okay,~ and we have the option of defining the safety stock level ourself or using an MRP type in conjunction with a service level that we're trying to achieve and having SAP go in and calculate that value for us. ~Okay,~ And that's a very interesting way to go about things, but most organizations are calculating this in some way either ~um,~ outside the system using another tool, and in some rare cases also using that feature in SAP that most people don't know about. So we'll have another video to explain that, but when we're thinking about safety stock and reviewing it, any changes, significant changes, in our lead time, in our minimum order quantity, in our lot sizing procedure, variability, new customers or structural changes to our forecast or in our product life cycle would cause us to want to go in and [00:04:00] review this, and you can see we've got this set right now just so it's really easy for us to see what's happening with the planning, which is the planned delivery time of 0 and in house production of 0 as well. So let me go back over here and we can see that this is also lot for lot with a minimum lot size of 3 and we do have a planning time fence out there of 7 just to park that demand out at the end of it. The other option that you have when it comes to your safety stock is you can make a decision on how much of this safety stock is considered available to planning. Now, as a general rule, you want to keep this as simple and as straightforward as possible and so most cases, your safety stock value that you see here is not going to be available to MRP, meaning that we want to honor the full 100 pieces. But you do have the ability to dampen the noise a little bit and let's say your safety stock is a 100 pieces, [00:05:00] you actually could change that so that it is considering a different value and i'm going to show that to you just so you can see what it looks like. I'll go to environment and change material and what we're doing here is we're actually controlling this by our MRP group. So let me go in and choose a different one here, I believe this one will do it and save And then right here from my navigation profile, let's actually switch that over. I'm going to switch to navigation profile, that's going to let me quickly go in and do the things that I need to do, which is going to include running MRP. So I'll go ahead and do that and save. Thank you very much for saving that, and now I've got my hotkey to go directly to MD02. It's going to let me run MRP. Go ahead and run that. And so the other thing that we can do is we can look at our periodic totals, which will help us to see how long that safety stock is actually going to last. So let me go ahead and [00:06:00] refresh. Okay. And what this actually is doing now, you'll see the values have changed over here. So it's letting me use some of that safety stock. I'll change it back here in just a moment so that you can see that again. So you'll see here we're swinging negative, we've got negative 69 pieces and when we come back here to our next replenishment, you'll see that we're able to actually go in and consume some of the safety stock, and what we've set it to is allow it to use 50 percent of that safety stock in planning. So that's an extreme level just so that you're able to see it today, but in general, ~first of all, I'll~ start first and foremost with being able to, ~um,~ have that safety stock stay clean and not use it in MRP, meaning you're not allowed to dip into that 100 pieces, you want to get that warning message immediately, get the exception message, and get the replenishment plans. But if for whatever reason you are in a position where you need to actually dampen that noise, you've gotten really good at keeping your safety [00:07:00] stock up to date, you're feeling confident with it, then you can actually choose to adjust the percentage ~of, um,~ of what it is that can actually be considered in planning, so, it's an ~alternate, um,~ alternate option there for you. What I wanted to show you also is this periodic total. So, we can actually come in here and see, let's look at our months, so we can see what our demand is over the next couple of months and that is going to help us to know how much we're covering with that safety stock. So, maybe that 100 pieces is way too high based on what it is that we are currently using. And you'll see here ~that~ that 100 pieces actually lasts us quite a long time, so this would be a good candidate for review, and bringing that back down, think about the class of the product and the variability. So your ~A, B, C, ~A, B, C and X, Y, Z, ~um,~ so your importance of that product and then the variability and how volatile it is to help you figure out how much coverage you're going to want. So a couple of different options for you there in terms of being able [00:08:00] to use that safety stock and set it up appropriately with a good cadence of review. Again, make sure that you don't change it too frequently, like if you're changing it every month, that is too often unless you are in ~you know,~ a very fast turning industry. And try to take a look at it based on ~you know,~ your own seasonality and review. And then make sure that you are triggering it with events like product life cycle management, reviewing to see what your usage looks like, and keeping an eye on those lead times and lot sizes to make sure ~that ~that safety stock still makes sense. Okay, so in summary, today we've taken a deeper dive into static safety stock and what the rules around it mean to our planning results? We still definitely have our floaties on on this topic and we could spend days actually workshopping it. However, we hope that this gives you a little more insight into the reaction of the system and the options for how safety stock can be used in the planning and availability checking. Remember that because it is static, it does not automatically change with the seasons, the [00:09:00] life cycles, or the changes in business dynamics. We are in control and we need a good cadence of review and adjustment that is exception based and at a frequency that makes sense. Back over to you, Martin, to bring us home. Martin: Once again, thank you Kristie. Brilliant. This is a hot topic and I don't see that changing anytime soon, frankly. Safety stock can be such an asset if planned well. I like the options and reminders we talked through today and hopefully that will support everyone with good reminders as they go into their next cycle of review. Choosing where you want to invest working capital, time, space and materials is a key decision in the planning process in any business that's a supply chain oriented. So folks, if you want to know more about this video and others, please check out our other catalogs and of course, if you have a particular question submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM02

Welcome folks, Martin here, and welcome to the service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. In this video, we'll be discussing one of the least well understood buffering techniques. It's called safety time. Now, so far, we've been talking about quantity buffers, but in this video, we're going to be focusing on time buffering. Let me make one point clear, though. Safety time is still an impact on working capital. You're holding the inventory in stock for longer than necessary to protect against volatility and variability and while both static and dynamic stock is primarily focused on protecting against changes in demand and we're often ongoing, safety time is focused on protecting against variability in supply and should be a temporary measure while the root cause of that constraint of performance issue is worked on. I know there's a lot there and a lot said so we want to get into the details of this, Kristie, tell us how to use [00:01:00] safety time effectively. Kristie: Sure thing Martin. Of the safety options, this is the one that causes the most confusion. Your point on working capital? I have a vivid memory of sitting across from my team when I was new to the organization. They were absolutely insistent that safety time was no big deal. They had it on every item because it's not safety stock and therefore it was low risk and less impactful. So, let's test that hypothesis. Let's go into SAP and try out some different safety time settings and let's look at some of the different results. What are the actual impacts for working capital? What do we actually risk? And why are we saying this should typically be a temporary measure while the root cause is addressed? I think the only way to effectively address this is to jump in and learn together by doing. Let's do it. Safety time. I think that this is one of the most interesting safety features available to us ~um,~ on the ERP side for [00:02:00] SAP and I'm excited to talk to you a little bit more about that and actually show you in the system today. So you'll see here, I've removed all other safety stock that's going on and now we're going to actually try to introduce some safety time and as a reminder, we want to use safety time really in specific situations, they should be ~um,~ event driven, short term, maybe we're working with a supplier and ~um, you know,~ we're going through an improvement activity with them. So we want them to actually see that it's due earlier, but still maintain the lead time and then be protected on the back end because we actually have buffered. So ~let's,~ let's look at this and see what it actually is doing. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to environment and I'm going to go in and I'm going to change this material and if we look here, not a whole lot going on, I'm just going to keep this really simple and easy to see. So I've wiped out most of the other planning~ um, different planning ~parameters so that we can focus purely on the safety time. So I'm going to come down here and [00:03:00] there's a couple of different settings. The first is the safety time indicator and you have a choice, so if it's blank, no matter what else you have populated, it is ignoring your safety time. So this has to be set in order for it to be MRP relevant and then one is if we want to just use safety time for our independent requirements. So things like our planned independent requirements, our customer orders, those kinds of things, deliveries. Or if we want to use it for our all of our requirements, meaning also considering dependent requirements that are coming through. So in this case, we're going to go ahead and say, yep, use it for everything, that's just fine. So now that we've turned it on, okay, think about that as turning it on, now we need to decide how much coverage we need. ~Okay,~ So let's take the example of you're working with a supplier, they're having some trouble, you've gone through and you've run your lead time reports, you've done some ~um,~ looking at what it is that they're actually delivering to you [00:04:00] based on your purchase order date versus your goods receipt date, and you're finding that their lead time is maybe ~it's~ 19 days and they're actually delivering in ~like~ 25 days. So let's go ahead and say ~Okay, ~that's 6 days, let's give them 7 just ~to,~ to help. And so you've got a specific improvement initiative, you're working hard with that supplier, you want to maintain your lead time while still keeping you safe. So this is going to tell the supplier you need it 7 days earlier, but you're still going to give them their stated 19 day lead time, but you're actually going to be allowing for it to take up to 19 plus 7 days in this case. Now we have zero lead time on here right now, so I'm going to go ahead and hit save. And what we're going to see is we're going to see all of our requirements actually change by about 7 days. Okay, so we just saw here, we've got some start and [00:05:00] release dates that are coming in and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click this little button that says switch on safety time, and what I want you to keep an eye on is this requirement for 325. Okay, see this guy here 325, 6 pieces. I'm going to hit safety time and this one for 4/1 here is for 55 pieces. ~ All right, ~So, now what we'll see is that thing for 325, that independent requirement has gone actually to 314. And we had another requirement out there for 5 pieces and it actually went to 321. Okay, now let me turn it back off, there you go. See your 6 pieces moved out and if I scroll down just a little bit, there's your 5 pieces. So it's doing that offset and it's basing that on the factory calendar. So let's go back in here. I'm going to show you something else that's really cool. And if you're not sure how it's doing that math, then just [00:06:00] come down here ~and you can always do, here you go, and it will, ~you can always do F1, and you'll see here safety time is in work days. Okay, so based on your factory calendar. So 7 days could be 7 calendar days, if your work calendar is for 7 days a week, in this case, it's 5 days because my work calendar is actually 5 days. ~ ~And then the other thing that is here that is really helpful is this is called a safety time period profile. So let's think about when you have a particular situation that only lasts for a couple of weeks, and I'm thinking here that the big example is Chinese New Year. So perhaps you are working with your suppliers in China and you want to actually offset just for the period around Chinese New Year and actually have your requirements pulled forward. You could set up a safety time period profile that only lasts for that particular period of time. And we'll do [00:07:00] something like bring all your requirements in two weeks early to help you navigate that. I can't tell you how many times I've gone through and had to manually manipulate that to get it to be two weeks early. So this is a great way to explore that as well. Now this is a little piece of configuration, you go in and you set up the profile and then you'll have profiles to select from when you click on this little drop down here. Okay, so you see here, there's one here called dynamic safety time, and this is set up for just one little period of time, and it will do the offsetting. So that is another great option if you're looking for a way to accommodate some sort of periodic adjustment. Maybe you have physical inventory every ~you know,~ December, July, or June, and you can actually schedule to have your deliveries coming in just a little bit early just for that particular period of time. Then you don't risk carrying a lot of additional inventory because ~you, um,~ you've got this ~just kind of~ turned on and you forget to turn it off. So, make sure ~that, um,~ you consider that as an [00:08:00] option. As well, be mindful of your work calendar and then consider whether you're using safety time just for your independent requirements or for everything. ~Sometimes when it is, I'll give you~ Another great example, candy season in Chicago, it's really hard to get trucks, so you need a little bit of extra lead time there. Sometimes there's congestion at the ports. ~So, um,~ You want to make sure that you're using this very ~Uh,~ specifically, ~so, ~and it's not something that becomes ~a,~ a time offset ~uh,~ that is ~always,~ always happening for you. You really want to be ~um,~ driven ~by,~ by purpose when you choose this. And then when you're using safety stock or coverage profiles, again, make sure that we don't stack ~on,~ on top of one another with quantity and time buffers, or we can find ourselves going It's carrying way too much inventory very quickly, so be very judicious with this and make sure that you're reviewing it on a regular basis. But there's some really great tools here for you in terms of being able to buffer that kind of time versus having to deal with quantity. And it also allows you to quickly see what's going on and which items are set up with safety time and you should have a good reason, a specific reason why you're using [00:09:00] that. So nice features there in terms of being able to go through and do that balance and bear in mind, you do not get an exception match since 96 with safety time you're only going to get that with your static safety stock. All righty, let's review what we explored together today. We went into the material master and tried a couple of different options for safety time. We ran MRP and we reviewed the results. And then we took a look into how to incorporate safety time into our review or not. We discussed the benefits and the challenges and we talked about how to think about safety time versus safety stock. And Martin, if I can make one more point. We've also seen organizations try to use all three techniques on the same part. Doing that is like saying Beetlejuice three times. I will appear in your office. And while it's awesome to use all three flavors of safety buffering across your organization, please choose and build a plan for that part and make sure it's a good, clean plan where everyone can [00:10:00] understand the results. Martin: That's an excellent point, Kristie. Thank you so much. So safety buffering is a commitment to resources and working capital right. We need to be very deliberate and transparent in which technique we're using and why in order to get the best value out of your inventory investment. So these conversations should typically take place cross functionally in a mature MRP environment and should be at the forefront of sharing information on what they are seeing and which part is the best choice for which particular product. So folks, if you want to know more about what particular parts and rules to use for your materials, please go ahead and check out our other videos and if you have a particular question in mind please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

MM; PP

MD04; MM03

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here and in this video we're going to focus on key master data rules, lot size keys. Lot size keys define where the MRP will accumulate quantities and the timing of proposals for replenishment. And as we know, the best way to learn is by doing so Kristie tell us more about lot size keys. Oh, Martin, lot size keys are often misunderstood and commonly underutilized. This key master data field sets the stage for replenishment and there are great use cases for the different types of lot size keys. Today we will touch on. The different lot size keys. Review where to find this key information in SAP. And provide some tips on how to get more value out of this underutilized key rule to empower MRP. One of the key planning rules for our MRP run relates to our lot size keys and today I want to go through and show you where to find this in the material master and then talk you through a couple of the different options. So I'm starting here from my stock requirements list, of course, because this is where I spend most of my time as a planner or buyer and I'm actually just going to go in and take a look at this material. Now if I was just going to display, I would double click, but I think we're going to do a little bit of changing here, so I'm going to go to environment and say change material. and my lot size key lives on this very first MRP view. And there are really three different kinds of lot size keys, or categories of lot size keys, and I want to break them down for you. So the first is a static lot size key. So this is going to be things like a lot for lot order quantity. It's going to be things like replenish to a maximum stock level. These are the kinds of lot size keys that we will be using if we are going through and have a static way we want to replenish. Also things like fixed order quantity which is what this guy is set up as. So let's say, for example, you always have a truckload of product coming in. You're going to have a fixed lot size with a fixed order quantity and MRP is only going to give you proposals for that full truck, or half truck, or pallet, or tier, or layer, or whatever the case may be, but you know that you are only ever going to order and lots of that. So you may get multiple trucks for the same day but you're going to get a proposal, a replenishment proposal, for exactly that amount. Or you might have something like a lot for lot, and so it's going to look and see what that requirement looks like and if you need 2,000 units to supply production then it's going to look at that value and then you may have something like a rounding value or a minimum order quantity that is also going to go into play. So as soon as you see that you have a need for those 2,000 and you are required to order 2,200 it will follow those rules. So it will say, next proposal and then what is my MOQ and my rounding value. Another good example would be something like an HB, which is replenished to the maximum stock level. So maybe you're working with a min max, let's say for example, you are dealing with constrained storage, so maybe like a tank or a rail car or something, and you're going to say, okay, as soon as I hit X volume in that tank then I want to replenish to the max, I'm going to go ahead and fill it up. This is often used sometimes with giving signals to our VMI suppliers, they are managing that for you but it gives them a good idea of what your forward looking plan might look like. The next kind of lot sizing technique is a periodic lot size. So now we're gathering requirements. So we're going out and we're saying, I want to supply for that entire day. So I might have multiple requirements within that day, I'm going to produce a daily lot size, and again this can work with minimum order quantities, or rounding values, or maximum lot sizes, okay? So based on what those rules are for your supplier. Or I might be doing a weekly bucket, or a monthly bucket if it's a really, really low volume item and I'm only going to order it every once in a while, so those periodic lot sizes. Now, those generally will work in combination with what your planning cycle is, so how often you're placing those orders with your suppliers. And to protect against variability and volatility, we ideally want to place orders in the smallest quantity that is economically feasible and as often as possible. So really focusing on the richness of our mix to help mitigate the variability and volatility that we might be seeing in demand. So based on that ABC and XYZ classification or segmentation of your goods, that's going to help you to get the right assignment in place. The last type of lot size or last category of lot size would be something like an economic based lot size. So you might be running one of the statistical algorithms to help you to figure out what the most economical order quantity would be. Now that is a more advanced technique, so that means your master data is beautifully clean, we've got a high level of trust in MRP, and now we're ready to start allowing SAP to put some of those economic principles in play for us. So really more of an advanced technique once you've gone through the others. One other one I will highlight for you that is also a periodic lot size, this is PK. So let's say that you need to control your amount of goods coming in on a particular day or you need to divide what days particular suppliers are going to be delivering to you or you have a supplier that only delivers on a particular day. This is where you set up those planning calendars to say this supplier is delivering Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but never Tuesday, Thursday. You're able to go in and set up those kinds of calendars to help manage that influx of goods. This is also very effectively used for trying to balance out how you're receiving inbound goods across the week so you can manage your workforce or your dock doors and that will help play into what's happening with the warehouse. So oftentimes this is not richly populated in the material master and there is a huge opportunity to be able to use these different lot size keys. You will want to use each of the fields that are available to you to reflect the rules of your supplier. So for example, don't use a monthly lot size because your supplier has a higher MOQ. Think about your replenishment cycle, think about how often you're going to place your orders with your supplier, and then use your MOQs and your rounding values to reflect minimum order quantities and the rounding values associated with it. Your rounding values are really your container sizes, it helps to play into your price breaks you maintain in your price conditions, but that MOQ is the smallest amount that you would purchase and then you're going to use the amount of gathering, so if you're gathering a day or a week's requirements together in order to place that order with the supplier. So those are three different categories of lot size keys used in conjunction with several other settings in the material master in order to drive your planning, but this is a great way to go through and model your procurement strategy and start to work through these pieces together. It's also incredibly helpful as a planner, as you're setting up for manufacturing, you're going to tend more towards those EX lot sizes, or very small buckets of periodic lot sizes, if any periodic lot sizes at all. So, in summary we have covered. How applying a quality lot size key allows you to drive better plans for replenishment. Meet a variety of different business needs. And be set up for success with your suppliers, sister facilities, and the manufacturing floor. There is so much goodness in this topic that we will most certainly be back for further exploration in another video or three. Thank you Kristie. Driving synergy across the different rules for planning is the fun part. We can definitely put MRP to work for us and start to drive better results as we explore the options here. This is a key one for managing working capital and reducing manual interventions. So folks if you want to know more about how to use lot size keys or any other feature in SAP please feel free to check out our other video services, of course if you have a question please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we're going to specifically focus on the taking advantage of SAP's MRP exceptions. When used correctly MRP exceptions can help organizations be much more proactive in responding to supply chain disruptions, allowing the business to become more agile. Kristie, how about you take us through some of those specific examples to teach us how to be a more agile business? I've got some great tips and tricks for you today. MRP exceptions viewed via the exception monitor is a game changing feature when used correctly. And in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three key things. First of all, where and how do we find these exception message? I'll give you a tour of the exception message groups and what standard looks like. And then lastly, I'll cover off on MRP's job and the reason we receive these exception messages. So everyone knows that SAP is built for exception monitoring and we talked a little bit about the fact that there are tools in every functional area for exception monitoring. Whether you work in demand planning or demand management whether you're in order to cash or customer service, whether you're in the warehouse, production planning, there's all these different tools that help you with exception monitoring. But of course, the one that is most known to planners and buyers is the exception monitor. So we'll go in and we're going to take a look at this today through MD07. I could also look at my business of the day if I'm on ECC or I'm running standard MRP versus MRP live and MD06. And I'm just going to go ahead and pull up one of our plants here and take a look and I want to just talk a little bit about what an exception message actually is, and what it means, much like all of the other alerts that we would receive in life or doubt on the floor, like an and on alert, a stoplight, anything that pops up on our dashboard, the buzzer on the dryer, going off the beeper on the stove or the microwave, letting us know that something is happening. The purpose of the exception messages is to alert us to a situation, and what we can see here is that there are 8 different exception message groups, and they all mean different things. But the purpose is to let us know which materials need attention and to allow us to prioritize based on the severity of that exception message, which material we want to look at first. And if I click on this information icon here, it tells me a little bit more about each of the exception message groups. And so there's 46 total exception messages spread against 8 groups. They are grouped logically, and so you can take a look and see what your system says versus what you're seeing here, this is the standard setup for the exception messages, and they're grouped in a way that makes sense. So let's take for example exception message group 7 and exception message group 6. So these are the ones down here at the bottom. You can see here that exception message group 7 is all about exception messages that let us know that there's a misalignment of the dates or quantities of supply to meet that demand needs. So you're going to see here bringing process forward, pushing the process out, canceling the process, or we're behind and getting the process started, that's exception message 30's, exception message 6 lets us know that we've got a problem with either where we're storing the stock or based on the rules around how we're able to supply that demand, and so it's letting us know where we need to go through an explore those types of things, but they're grouped in a very logical way so that we're able to go through and address them. It's, really any type of alert when something is not happening as it's expected to, when there's a deviation from plan. So if you think about MRP, it has kind of two jobs. The first is determine what we need, how many we need, and buy when we need it. So seriously, fifth grade math, if not second grade math. Really, it's just the puts and takes on a large scale that we can't do just with Excel or another tool. So it's going through and it's actually addressing that constraint for us and processing all of that information through and exploding our BOM's. So that we get the right requirements at the right time with all the different considerations for the different rules around lead time, lot sizing, safety strategy, all of those good things. So it's going to do all that math for us, and then whenever that plan does not match up, it's not able to satisfy the demand based on the rules that we have in the system, or based on the firmness of the element, it's going to let us know by generating one of these exception messages, and that is going to help us to be able to go in and review our materials. But when we review our materials, when we're doing exception monitoring, it's not about resolving a particular exception message, it's about resolving the planning situation for that particular material. So as planners and buyers, that's what we're looking for, is to prioritize our materials for review and as long as we have them open, we want to be the right kind of lazy, we want to address the entire planning situation so that we do not have to go back and look at that material again. And that is the point and the purpose of the exception monitoring and management tools that you will see all the way throughout SAP is where we need to intervene, let the system do the heavy work for us, and then proactively manage the planning situations so that we're in a good place as we move forward through time, and we start to reduce the amount of exceptions and get to a place where it's manageable on a day-to-day basis. So in summary we have covered how MRP exceptions will allow you. First of all, proactively manage what's happening in the supply chain. Second, resolve an entire planning situation for a material by using the exception messages as a way to hone in on the materials that have the most severe planning situations. And lastly, develop a daily habit because we all know a good cadence of daily habits helps to keep the crazy away and the chaos at bay. Thanks Kristie. As always very insightful. Changing to an exception mind in organizations is critical in becoming world class. Proactively responding to these exceptions will allow us to be more agile and responsive. If you'd like to learn more about how to get the most of your SAP system please check out our other videos and if you can't find something you're looking for feel free to submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; PTM

MD02; MD03; MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we're going to focus on how to interpret SAP's MRP run results. Often organizations ignore the MRP results since they don't understand how to interpret these results. However, when you understand how to read the tea leaves, this becomes a very powerful tool to set up your daily work. Kristie, take it away from here. Absolutely Martin. Reviewing our MRP run results provides a powerful feature when used correctly. Let's take a look at what happens after an MRP run, in this demonstration, I'm going to focus on three key things. First of all, MRP basics.,I'll provide a basic house tour. Second, the processing indicator and what it means when we check it. It's way more important than we typically will value it as. And lastly, a key exception that we need to be on the lookout for that commonly occurs in our MRP runs. Okay, so let's pretend for a moment as though it's the beginning of our day and we were coming in and we want to see what has happened overnight so that we can see what's going on with our MRP list and what the business of the day is. So we're going to go first MD06 and this is we're going to be able to see collectively the results of the latest, greatest MRP runs. I'm going to go ahead and do that, and while I'm working through bringing this up, just a note, we still would use MD07 or MD04, our stock requirements list throughout the day. This is to get the day started, so what is the most recent information? And when you come in here, you're going to enter most likely your plant and your MRP controller number if you have the extended selection criteria in place, then you're able to enter multiple plants or multiple MRP controllers or buy materials, so you get a lot more of that selection criteria. But if you're using just standard, regular old MD06, this is what you're going to see. And if you're on S/4 you may be doing something similar, except you're going to be doing this through MD07 if you're running MRP live. So you'll come in here and you'll enter your plant and MRP controller, in this case I just want to look, I'm going to look wide open, I just ran for this entire plant. So I'm going to, I'm going to bring the whole thing up today, but I just want to point out a little bit of the additional selection criteria when you're going in to review your results there's a couple of additional pieces of information if you want to be able to really hone in on the results from last night's run. And so you can actually come in here and you can put in your MRP date, so let's say your last good MRP review was last Thursday because you took Friday off and now it's Monday morning. You can put in a range of dates so that you're seeing all the MRP results for the MRP lists that were created in that period of time. So that can be really helpful if you're out for a period of time. Otherwise, as you're going through your week, if you're able to get through your exception messages on a daily basis, which I know for a lot of us that are getting started, probably sounds nearly impossible, but rest assured it is. When you're at a place where you're able to get through them on a daily basis, you can actually just run for the last day, which is awesome. The other thing that you can look at is the processing indicator, so you can look at just the things that have not been processed. So let's say you get started in the morning, and I know this would never happen, but you get interrupted for reasons, right, and you have to go attend to something else. If you're clicking that processing indicator then you can come back later in the day and just focus on the things that are not yet processed. Okay, but for me I've done nothing, I'm going to go ahead and just run this wide open, and this is going to bring in my total list. So I had about 1,100 materials that fell into the criteria of what I was looking for, and you can see now I'm in here and I've got my red, yellow, and green lights, which you cover at length and some other videos, but the other thing I can see here is my MRP date. So this is the date that this item was last run through MRP, so you can see I've got this one that was really recent. So if I'd used my dates to filter. I wouldn't see a lot of this old stuff, and there's an opportunity for you to go through and reorganize your old MRP list and just make this cleaner, and that's part of the process of just getting into the daily habit, but you're able to quickly, at a glance, see when the last time MRP was run. The other thing you can see here, this is that processing indicator I was talking about. So as you're going through and you're reviewing your materials, and I'll go in and pull a couple up in a second, you can actually click that processing indicator, that means I've reviewed this, I've cleaned up that entire planning situation, not a particular exception message, but the entire planning situation to the best of my ability, and there is nothing else that I can do with this material right now. Then you click the processing status that updates and then you will not see that if you filter it out at the beginning until the next time something changes. So the next time MRP is run on that item, the processing status will reset because there's new planning information and it's going to highlight that for you. The other thing that's going to happen as a result of this planning run is you're going to get updates to all of your statistics as well as any exception messages. So just as a reminder, there are a couple of exception messages that are going to show up for you here in your MRP list that will never show up for you in your stock requirements list or your collective use. So your MD07 or MD04, and the first is the exception message group 8's, those are the ones that tell us if we've had a termination in the process of running MRP. So that's MRP saying, hey, I tried, I did not complete my job and I'm letting you know about it beacuse I am like very trustworthy. And then the other thing you're going to see is there will be some of the exception message group 4's that will not show up for you because they are informational and related to the MRP run. So let me click on my binoculars here and I'm going to go ahead and update my statistics beacuse otherwise I'm just going to see the list of exception messages and no numbers and the MRP elements and no numbers. So I definitely want to be able to get that information so I can see here, here's some examples of what will not show up. So here's your exception message group 8, abnormal end of requirements planning, and then things that are directly related to the MRP run, like newly created proposals, order proposal has been changed, order proposal has been re-exploded. So those are new things that have happened as part of the MRP run, and it's going to let you know about this here. Everything else, aside from those informational messages and the exception message group 8, will show up for you in MD07, and so you're able to monitor and resolve for any master data issues, process integration issues or misalignment of the plan and be able to go in and action that and clean it up throughout your day. But this is very important so you can come in and make these adjustments. So very quickly here, let me just pick one at random, I'm going to pick my cancel processes and that I want to look at because I want to see if I have an opportunity to free up some capacity. I'm going to say find exceptions and what I really want to do here for you is just show you where that processing indicator shows up so you can see it right here. So once I've reviewed and I've done everything I possibly can to update this material, this one is obviously in need of housekeeping, it's got stuff from 2017. Once I've gone through and I've cleaned it up, then I can click that processing indicator, that way we know that we've addressed it for the day and it's also a really great metric if you are, say, in the leadership of your supply chain organization, you want to support your folks. Being able to see how much they're getting through in any given day in order to be able to make sure that they're getting the support that they need, you're able to come in and click on these processing indicators to get an idea of how that's going for them. So great tool and then it'll lets them step away and come back as a planner or buyer and address it as you're going throughout the day. So that's a little introduction to what you will see, as you're looking through the results of your MRP run and how you can identify what is new and recent, you can look at those informational messages and then particularly focus on any of those terminations to make sure that everything is looking good and you can manage and throttle what it is that you're seeing based on the MRP date, and also that processing indicator. So in summary we have covered how MRP run results allow you to. Get into the business of the day first thing we do every morning. Second, resolve planning situations with some view on the prioritization of those messages. And lastly, set the processing indicator to keep track of the progress as you clean up and address the planning situation. Thanks Kristie. Understanding the MRP results allow users the ability to identify and resolve planning inaccuracies proactively. Resulting in better production planning, procurement and inventory management. So if you want to learn more about how to get the most over the SAP system please check our video catalog and if you can't find a video you're looking for or have a burning question please submit it below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

CR02

The best way to learn is by doing and welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of a special feature called intervals and shifts. When used correctly intervals and shifts can enable organizations to improve quality of the capacity evaluations and resource utilization. Eacliffe, sounds like a pretty cool feature, how about you tell us more about it? Definitely Martin. Maintaining intervals and shift is a powerful feature when used correctly it allows capacity evaluation and finance scheduling functionality to work correctly. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on these three things. Identify the need to maintain intervals and shifts. How to maintain work center availability downtime to a shift level for a specific time period. And to validate the results using capacity load transaction. Here we are on the capacity planning transaction CM01, to appreciate how intervals and shifts influences available capacity. Individual and shifts are used to provide more specific definition of a day, in other words subdivided into shifts so do we have a one shift, two shift, or three shift operation. And it can also be used to define exceptions to what's considered a normal day, such as schedule, downtime et cetera. So I will demonstrate how to maintain the intervals and shifts using the work center change transaction CR02. But recognize that this step is exactly the same for resources, which in that case you'll use transaction CRC2 or even pooled capacity which is transaction CR12. So first we are focusing on this column which is available capacity, I'm going to come here, do a refresh just to ensure I am reflecting the current definition, and you can see that for capacity category 001, machine capacity looking at it in weekly buckets, it's 40 hours a week. Okay, so for this specific work center we are going to go into CR02 which I have sitting here in a different session. So here is transaction CR02, here is the work center, I'm going to go into the capacity screen and from there I'm going to drill down into the capacity category 001 machine capacity. So drill down in here and from here we will then go into intervals and shifts. So right now the way it's currently set up is that for the entire time horizon the day starts at 8, it finishes at 5 with a 1 hour break and this is giving 8 hours of capacity. So let's say that we want to reflect some downtime, for example what I will do is come along click on add an interval, we are going to specify the start time. So right now we are going to go into February, I'm going to pick the week of the 13th and basically say that that particular week is not available for production. So start from the 13th, I'm going to go from the 13th to the 17th. Notice that 18 19 is blue in color, the point is it's a 5 day work week based on the calendar, and therefore I just need to go to the 17th and there, that's the range I'm interested in. So length of cycle we can specify 1 or 7, if you specify 1 our settings apply for the entire date range. If we use 7, it gives us the ability to maintain different profile or availability on a daily basis. In this case, I just want to focus on the entire week, so I'm going to change this 7 to a 1 and I'm going to hit enter. Okay, so we get one line item here, and basically what I'm going to do is, this number of individual capacity, I'm going to say, look there is no capacity, I'm going to change this to zero, hit enter, and we can now see the capacity is down to 0, I'm going to click save and that is completed. So let's now go back into CM01, the capacity planning transaction. Fortunate for us there's a refresh transactions, I'm going to do a refresh and we can now see that available capacity for this particular week has now come down to 0. So if something gets scheduled in this particular week, week 7, that requirement will get compared to 0, it will then go red to tell us, hey, you are done, there's no capacity available, you need to take a corrective action. So take whatever production is sitting here and either produce it earlier or produce it later, thos are your choices. So let's go back into the change transaction again, CR02 and again I'm going to go back to the capacity tab, what I'm going to do this time is maintain a shift profile. So drill down into 001, again go into capacity, into the intervals and shifts, and let's pretend because there is no production going on maybe the following week I want to run an additional shift to compensate. So again, I'm going to click, let's add an interval and that interval is going to start after the 17th, so again we are in February, let's go to the 20th the Monday and again, we are going to go the Friday, so the 20th through to the 24th. I have a shift profile which is already maintained, so I'm going to come here, I am electing to use the PP shift profile, I'm going to hit enter and you could see it brought in this information where it's a 3 day, 3 shift operation, 8 hours available for each of the shifts, and that holds true from Monday through Friday of that particular week. I'm going to come click and save, we are going to go back into CM01 and verify our results, so come back here, again we're looking at machine capacity, do a refresh and we could see that the following week the available capacity is now 120 hours. So 8 hours a day, 3 shifts per day by 5 days, which equates to the available capacity of 120 hours. So in summary we have covered how to maintain intervals and shifts which allow you to. Maintain work center availability downtime to a shift level for a specific time period. Validate the results using capacity load transaction. And to trust the availability capacity used in the capacity evaluation process. Thanks Eacliffe, much appreciated. Using this feature improves the data and therefore allows the planner to make more informed decisions and improves overall operational performance. If you want to learn more about how to use this feature and other features in SAP please check our other videos and of course if you don't find what you're looking for please submit a suggestion.

Production & Capacity Planning

PP; PTM

CR01; CR02

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's multiple capacities capability. When used correctly maintaining multiple capacities can help organizations manage the capacity utilization of multiple resources such as equipment or personnel in a much more effective and efficient manner. Tell us how to make the most out of SAP's multiple capacities capability Eacliffe. Sure Martin. Maintaining multiple capacities is a powerful feature when used correctly, it'll allow us to look at different type of capacities for a single work center. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on two things. How to assign and maintain different capacity categories for a single work center. And how to evaluate capacity for these different capacity categories. The intent here is to discuss working with multiple capacities for a work center. Let's look at an example of what I'm referring to by looking at the capacity planning transaction CM01. So here I have this single work center. We are going to take a look at the standard overview. Just aid with visibility I will change my settings to look at things in a monthly bucket and so here we can see that for this single work center, I have this capacity category of 001 machine and I have a second capacity category ZLB which is a pool labor group. So the point is, it is possible to define different categories of capacity for a single work center. What I'm going to do now is jump into the change transactions for work center and add an additional capacity category. So I have this session queued up here is the work center we are going to modify, we are going to go to the capacities tab and here this is where the existing capacity categories are defined and the goal is to add a third capacity category. So scroll down, got these icons, click under create capacity icon, and here I'm going to create one for labor. So the existing labor capacity we have, ZLB, this is for a pool capacity which is covered in a separate, session, but the point is that the labor force here is shared among more than one work center versus 002, this is direct labor, in other words any labor that's maintained in the routing is dedicated to this particular work center. So I'm going to use 002 maintain the formula for calculating the capacitor requirements. You have to come in here, do some added maintenance, and that maintenance can be, using a calendar. If you don't do the calendar then it picks it off the plant. I am going to change this to, starting at 8:00AM so when I hit enter it comes down to eight hours per day and this is a default I'm going to work with for now. I'm going to save this. We have now defined an additional capacity category. So with that, coming back to the capacity evaluation, let's see if we could do a simple refresh, and by simply doing a refresh, this third line showed up down here. So let's scroll down and confirm that new capacity category of 002 is now included and if there were any orders that had that capacity category, which it wouldn't have at first, because the point is we first have to maintain the master data, then we have to maintain the routings and then the third step was that when we then create plan orders, production orders, it would pick up this additional capacity category and it would populate this column, the requirements. Okay, so this is how we go about defining multiple capacities for a single work center. So in summary we have covered how to. Maintain multiple capacities, which allows us to assign and maintain different capacity categories for a single work center. And how to evaluate capacity for the different capacity categories. Thanks Eacliffe. I can see how this feature will help us optimize resources and increase our overall productivity while reducing waste and downtime. If you want to learn more about this and other topics in your SAP system please feel free to check out our video catalog and if you have a specific question feel free to log it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; IBP; OTC; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM03

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's make to order capability. When planning strategy make to order is used properly it enables organizations to produce goods based on formal demand, ensuring that customs receive the products based on mutually agreed to lead times. Kristie, tell us a little bit more about make to order. Let me tell you a little more about make to order. Make to order is one of our categories of planning strategies. Planning strategies are a key rule in how the system or MRP will evaluate and respond to demand and to signal manufacturing. It is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three key things. First of all, what make to order truly means. Second where we set the rule for SAP or MRP to follow. And thirdly, how it looks in our planning. All right let's talk about one of our other strategy choices. So if we say the easiest strategy choice to understand and the one that we probably are most commonly used to seeing is make to stock, the next most common is going to be make to order. So make to stock simply means that we are going to stock in advance of that demand or be in a position where we have supply available in advance of that customer demand or stock transfer order. In make to order now we are not even starting the replenishment process until we have that customer order on hand. This is very important. A lot of times we will say we are make to order when we are not, we are actually finished or assembled to order. Make to order means we do not have any of the components, the sub-assembly or the finished good in advance of that customer demand, we are going to respond and react only to firm demand in the system. The forecast does not come into play as we are getting ready to make that product. We are working only with firm demand. We're not stocking in advance, so no safety stock, no additional inventory is planned to be on that shelf. Our go ahead for manufacturing is the actual receipt of an actual firmed order. So if we look at this in SAP, let me just go ahead and back out of here and let's go over to our stock requirements list. And we're going to go ahead and pull up a material, this guy right here, and let's take a look and see what is happening. So you can see here, this is what is often the case and we should never, ever see, is inventory that is hanging out here that is not tied to a customer order. What we should be seeing is a pair between the customer order and the production that we are planning or the production that we have confirmed to produce. And then when we actually go through and we produce that inventory, it is going to tie directly back to that customer segment and this is one of the planning strategies for make to order. This is a planning strategy 20, which is going to tie these two things specifically together. So we can ee that our demand is discreet for that particular customer order, and that is why you see the 20 pieces here are not being used because they are not coming directly from a customer order that needs to be placed, so we would have to actually move that inventory into that customer segment in order for it to get drawn. We mentioned this just because this is very typical. People will say, organizations will say that they are make to order, but they are actually stocking in advance of the demand and the problem with that is that we don't draw the inventory through as we should. We need to make sure that if we assign a make to order strategy or we say we are make to order, that our clearance to go into manufacturing or into procurement is based on that customer order, that we are flowing that inventory back into that customer stock so that it can be pulled and assigned and shipped out the door in order to meet that customer's needs, and is allocated properly all the way through. So nothing is produced or procured in advance of that customer signal. So where you'll see this happen is going to be on the MRP 3 view and your material master. So if you come in here, you'll be able to see your different strategy groups get assigned. Okay? And so this is make to order production, and you can see make to order, no assembly order. So everything is going to be related directly to that customer order that we have received and we're doing everything based on that customer order. So common strategy, we want to make sure that we are honoring the intention of it and if we say that we are make to order, we are not replenishing or starting that process until the customer order is actually in hand. We're going to talk in another video about assemble to order and some of the benefits of that. So if you're going, eh, we say we're make to order, but we're still forecasting and driving components or sub assemblies. Watch the assemble to order and that will walk you through how that process is intended to work, but make to order strictly means we are waiting for that customer demand to come in and then we're reacting responsibly to it and that is our strategy group 20. So in summary we have covered how make to order allows you to. Pull your process through according to your actual customer demand. Control replenishment based purely on the customer's commitment. And develop lead times based on the total lead time of that product from soup to nuts. Thanks Kristie. Often used for low volume, high mix, or highly custom products, using this feature can really help us be more responsive to our customer demands and ultimately increase our bottom line. Once again, so if you are looking for more information on this particular topic or other topics in your SAP system please feel free to check out our other videos and of course if you have a question please submit it.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; IBP; OTC; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM03

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's make to stock capability. When using the planning strategy make you stock effectively, it enables organizations to produce goods ahead of the formal demand and therefore shorten sales delivery lead times. So, Kristie, the flip side is also true, when we use make to stock ineffectively we will produce goods we don't need or sell. Tell us a little bit more about how we use this feature properly. I'd love to Martin. Planning strategies represent one of the most vital governing rules for MRP. Choosing make to stock is a powerful feature when it is used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three key things. Number one, what it really means to be make to stock. Number two, where we set the planning strategy. And number three, how MRP is going to expect us to respond to a make to stock strategy. All right, let's talk a little bit about planning strategies. Specifically, let's talk about make to stock. So these are the planning strategies that many of us are probably most familiar with. And most particularly, planning strategy number 40, by far the most common out of all the planning strategies in a make to stock environment. Now, you also may see a planning strategy 52 or 63 out there, and we're actually going to talk a little bit more about those in some upcoming videos. But this is all about being in a position to service that customer demand as needed, and your demand program may be made up of a variety of things. So it could be your customer orders, it could be independent requirements in the form of forecast, it could be stock transfers that are pulling through to another location servicing a sister plant, it could be the dependent requirements that are flowing through from a BOM, so on your semi-finished or your raw materials. So this just means that you are stocking in anticipation of that demand. You're in a position where you're able to store inventory on the shelf. And let's look at an example of that in SAP, so let me pop over here and we'll take a look at one of our items. So you can see here, this is a pump, and for this particular item we are planning on stocking in advance of the demand signal. So that's how this is set up today, this is forecasted, the forecast type is a VSF, this is our ongoing anticipated pull for the customer, and we are planning on supplying that. The other thing, you'll notice that there is safety stock, we're planning on keeping some stock on the shelf as well. And so as we're gearing up for our production runs, you're going to see that they are set up to cover that safety stock and our forecast, even though we do not actually have an order from the customer yet. Okay, so we're positioning that stock in anticipation of those customer orders to come in and pull it forward. This is one of the most simple versions of how you might see a planning situation as it relates to a make to stock item and you can see we're going to continue to plan for that across time. So we're replenishing our safety stock and then we are covering our planned independent requirements, and if I pull this into a periodic view for you so that you're able to see what it looks like in time buckets, we look at this by month. You can see here you've got your planned independent requirements, your remaining balance to sell for those periods, and then you have your receipts to continue to replenish. And because we're in a hole right now for March, you can see that's where the majority of the receipts are coming back in, in order to get us back up to a positive, available to promise quantity. So we're anticipating that demand, we are planning for it, and our trigger to manufacturing in this case is allowed to be a forecast, and based on that forecast we'll make those commitments for manufacturing or for procurement. And we are able to control the horizon with which we're doing that, so we can use things like periods of adjustments to drop that forecast, and then of course our consumption profile so that we're seeing a clear demand signal, but we are going to make to stock in anticipation of that demand. So where are these settings? On the material master, if you go into display, you're going to navigate over to your MRP 3 view, and this is where you're going to see that strategy group show up as well as the consumption profiles for that particular forecast, and if I click in here you'll see all of the different options. I can click into strategy group and it will not only tell me the kind, but it's going to give you lots and lots of different options for what you can set up. So many of us use one or two in our operations today. You are not a make to stock or make to assemble or to order organization, a lot of cases you have materials that fall into each of those buckets, and so you want to apply the appropriate planning strategy for how you want that particular material to behave. So your raw materials don't require planning strategy, just your items where you are putting in a forecast or they are available to sell to a customer or to transfer to another facility are the ones where you would set that strategy in place. So in summary, we have covered how planning strategies or make to stock specifically will allow you to. A, stock in advance of the formal demand and be positioned for when that demand occurs. B, shorten lead times for our customers. And C, protect against volatility and variability that exceeds our ability to respond within the customer's tolerance time. And your point is well noted. This is the most commonly used planning strategy and we do run into trouble where we set all of our materials to make to stock. It's a good thing to have a plan for every part and determining the correct planning strategy is a great starting point. Thanks Kristie. A very effective planning strategy and can really help differentiate you from your competitors. However, has to be clear and be carefully used with clear intent. So if you would like to learn more about how to get the most of your SAP system please check out our other videos and of course if you can find a video to answer as burning question please submit a suggestion.

Procurement & MRP

MM; PP

MD04; MEQ1

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we will focus on how to use SAP's quota arrangements for managing capacity constraints and prioritizing across sources. This is a feature in SAP often underutilized and is very important. So often we create multiple material numbers to manage multiple sources, even when the form, fit, and function of the material is the same. In a previous video we discussed fair share rules, today, we're going to level up on another important opportunity with quota arrangements. So Kristie, tell us more about quota arrangements and this capability in SAP. Well, of course. I've got to say this is one of my favorite use cases for quota arrangements. In today's demo we're going to. Get into the system and see how setting up simple capacity rules can influence the volume split across our sources. We'll also talk about how to prioritize the allocation of volume from source to source. And lastly, what the MRP results will look like once we put those rules in place. All right, let's jump right in and let's take a look at how we can use quota arrangements to help us to manage some of our supplier capacity constraints. So what we want to do here is take a look at this MD04 screen. You can see I'm in the stock requirements list right now and I have an item that is set up on a quota arrangement and I can tell that because it says quota arrangement right here, this button appears as you set your quota arrangement up, and then also down below I also have my supplier split already in place, and you can see it's going back and forth between two different suppliers, supplier 1000 and supplier 5595. And what I want to do is I want to go in and I'm actually going to constrain supplier 1000, and I'm going to limit how much volume we can send to them over a period of time. And I'm going to do this so that we can see what would happen if we had a supplier that was able to, say, only supply a certain number of units and then you wanted your secondary supplier to provide the remaining volume, rather than just using a simple fair share rule. And if you're looking for information on a simple fair share rule you'll also find that, there's another video But if you come right in here, this is taking me directly to my quota arrangement, I'm going to go into the details, and you can see I've got this 50:50 split right now, and you can see the allocated quantity based on the volume that is out and available for the suppliers to replenish, and you can see that 5595 has a little bit more right now. Next up would be supplier 1000 and that's just because we need more demand to create that next replenishment proposal and net it out. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go in and actually change this to maintain and we're going to go all the way over to the right hand side so that we can get some additional options for how we can set this up. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to impose a maximum release quantity in here and I'm going to say, I'm going to keep it really simple and say this supplier can do a total of 1,000 units and then I'm going to say every week, and I'll set this to weekly buckets. You can see here I can choose between week, month, or if I was dealing with a production planning situation, I could even use a PP planning calendar to help me with that. And I'm going to go ahead and say save. I could also simulate right from there, but I think it's a little easier to see this if I just run MRP, so I'm going to go ahead and do that, before I do just take a look down here at the screen. It's not going to change this one because you can see the asterisk, that means that schedule line is firm, it's already been released to the supplier, so it's not going to make an adjustment there. But where we would expect to see it as we're going further out into the July timeframe. So I'll go ahead and run MD02 and let that happen, confirm my entries, and you'll see here that there's been some updates. You can see the planned order changes, purchase requisition changes, and schedule lines that have been changed, and I'll go ahead and click the green back arrow to take me right back into the stock requirements list. And because this is live, as of the moment I enter it, I'm going to hit the refresh button. It's going to bring the new information in and what you'll see is that it's actually controlling how much can be released to the supplier and it's going to let me know any time where I might be bumping up against more volume than what I can send through. So you'll see here there is an exception message that we actually are already over because of the other schedule lines that are in place. So because of that it's letting us know we need to purchase additional volume from our alternate source, in this case 5595. And as we look further down, you'll see restrictions, so it's not going to exceed that volume. So we've got 850 in here, and then if I page down a little bit more, you'll see the requirements across time. It's going to limit how much is going out to that particular supplier and always going to keep it under the quantity that we put in in a given week. So it's throttling that based on the maximum volume that we've told that particular supplier can handle based on the periods that we've entered. And so we could do that across every two weeks, we could do it across a month, we could easily do it across a quarter, and then go in and prioritize the suppliers accordingly. So if you're looking for a quick and easy way to cap the capacity for what you would want to send to a particular vendor and you're in a multi source environment, meaning you could either be procuring from multiple external suppliers, from multiple facilities within your own network, or across a combination of internal work centers and manufacturing and external supply. This is an effective way to just do a quick rough cut on how much you're sending through to that supplier in a particular period of time. A bit of an uncommon use for quote arrangements, but that is part of what it's designed to do is to help us to be able to control and throttle the maximum award volume to a particular supplier over a particular number of periods. So in summary, we have covered how using quota arrangements to manage capacity and priority across your sources will allow you to. Honor volume constraints that have been shared. See the results of post MRP runs. And note exceptions that may occur. And often we feel like we have to do this management offline. We are here to tell you that there are tools that will help you. Let's put SAP to work on the execution so that we can focus on the strategy. Wow, thank you, Kristie. SAP does love to follow rules. This is another great example of how keeping the system informed relieves a chunk of manual work and brings our sourcing strategy to life. So folks, if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system please check out our other videos and of course if you have a question please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P; WM

ME22N; MD04; ME2N

Hello to the curious, we are here to feed your appetite for change and improvement. Martin here, ready to dive in and explore how SAP can empower your processes. Today we're going to explore a situation that none of us love, but all experience, the need to send product back to our supplying partners. There are a few ways SAP can facilitate this for us and in this video we're going to start simply and explore the return to vendor PO. It's the most basic approach, and once in place we can continue to build from here and manage more complicated scenarios. Today we are Patrick with us, who has lived this life by supporting supplying partners and helping them improve. He's very data-centric and takes a very pragmatic approach, so I'm very keen to hear his introduction today and how to manage the returns to vendor process. Patrick, you seem like you have a lot of experience in this space. Take it away. I would love to. Martin. No one loves having to do this, but sometimes we do have goods we have to return. We've all been there. The product didn't meet spec, there's an issue with the quantity , it doesn't meet minimum shelf life requirements, or maybe you have an excellent and flexible partner who will help you mitigate excess inventory. Bottom line, supply chain stuff happens and it's a matter of when not if. So we want to be prepared for that and make it as easy as possible on us and our partners. As Martin alluded to, there are a variety of ways for how we can initiate the return, and today we're tackling it as if the buyer has been notified and is issuing the return. Last but not least, I'll point out some ways that we can keep an eye on the return and encourage progress. Since I hear the best way to learn is by doing, let's get into it. So off to SAP we go. Now a return to vendor facilitated via return to vendor PO looks really just like a normal PO. We'll see that this PO looks strikingly similar to any other PO and that's both a good and not so good thing. It's good because we understand it. It's easy to use and it falls within all the normal reporting structures that we use to working in that makes it easy to work with. And by the way, I didn't mention it, but I'm in the ME23N transaction. Unfortunately, the not so good piece also lies in the similarity. Sometimes it can be confusing or easy to miss that it's a return to vendor and to make that easier, let's look at some of the telltale signs that will clue us in that this is indeed a returns PO. So first of all let's acknowledge that this PO is very old, October, 2018. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon when it comes to less common processes like returning goods to a supplier. It should get a ton of focus because it is less common and there is a reason why you're returning these goods, so that could drive to a corrective action in the process, and at the very least, represents time and money that we don't want to have tied up. So, as I said at the header level, this is a standard PO, if we scroll over to the right though on the item level down here, in this case way over, we're going to see that it's a returns PO. And how do I know that? There's a little text checkbox next to the info record here, if I hover over it, you'll see that this is for returns item. That controls the rest of the process change. Now you can totally move this column over. Right, move it over to the left so it's closer for you to see. You can expand the width so it's harder to miss, I'm going to actually expand that column right now. Here you go, so you can see returns item. Do all that stuff and save this as a default view so that next time you can see that little checkbox. But let's go highlight a couple other ways to keep our eyes on these return PO's. We can also see this in our stock requirements list, so as you know, we're going to go navigate to MD04. All right, here we got our material number, I'm going to execute that, and one of the things I want to point out might stand out, might not, but if you look at the PO that we were just on, it actually has a negative quantity, so it has a -5. This is showing us that we plan to ship 5 pieces of this material back out to the vendor. So that's not something you'd normally see, right? With a purchase order, you usually see a positive value, like 1 piece, 9 pieces, those are regular PO's bringing product in. While this is a PO for 5 pieces getting shipped out. So MRP plans to send those 5 materials out and then replenish what's needed. We also have an exception message here letting us know, right, that this activity was supposed to already happen. Message 07 tells us the finished date is in the past, so that's another way to monitor and manage these and let us know if something is falling short in the process. But that's a little reactive. What else can we do? Well, we have other options. One great option is to put our list displays to work. We can use something like ME2N or ME80FN, to keep an eye on these PO's and track them through the process. So let's start with ME2N. So here, let's set up a variant that's going to include the characteristics that we want. So in this case, you could see I have a purchasing organization populated, I have a best scope of list, selection parameter of WE101 to show us the PO's that are still open for processing, my plant, all that normal stuff. But now we need to go find that little tickbox. So this is a little tricky, but let's give it a shot. We do this by adding a field from the dynamic selection criteria. That's the multicolor sort of traffic light looking thing up here, you could see it's popped up, dynamic selection. So I'm going to click on that. Now we've got two options. Our purchasing document, header and purchasing document item. As we saw on our ME23N transaction, we want to go down to the item level, and also like before where I have to scroll away, right, in this case, I'm going to have to just scroll down until I find that returns item flag. So bear with me while I do that. Okay, so I scrolled down and now I found my returns item. I'm actually just going to double click on that and it's popped up the dynamic selection over here, right? And what we're looking for is we're looking for returns item where we have an X. So if I've got an X here, I can now go and save this as a variant, and once I save it as a variant, I'll be able to look at my return to vendor PO's pretty easily. So I'm going to click save for this one, I'm going to save it with a variant name of our RTV, let's do that and as our description, we'll call it RT PO's. Okay. And let's save this and run it. Okay, so it's saved, let's go and execute and there we are, right? You see up on the screen, we've got our return to vendor PO so if we had more than one, unfortunately we just have this old one from October, 2018, the other ones would show up here, but now we can track the status and make sure that we get these PO's fully processed in a timely manner. Welcome back from the tour on how to recognize and create visibility around your return of vendor PO's. By using some of these techniques, it helps us to stay connected to the process. Monitor progress and watch for trends. If we have recurring issues, then that's a strong indication that there's an issue and we need to look deeper into what's happening and how we can set up the supplier for success in the future or look for better performing alternatives. Thanks for spending the time with me today. That's some great stuff. Patrick. Thanks so much. We need to commit to closing the loop on these processes. Yes, the PO is a good start, but we need to make sure the goods move and the credits come in as well as preventing issues from recurring in the future if the need to return becomes excessive. Thanks again, Patrick. Well, this was a good topic guys, there's plenty more on this PO processing side that you can check out on our video catalog. Otherwise, please submit your questions below.

SAP Optimization

OTC; P2P; PTM

MD04; MM03

Hello and welcome future supply chain experts. My name is Martin and today we're going to explore how you can tap into the untapped potential of your SAP system. Ready to dig in? Let's get going. In this video, we're going to address sometimes the contentious conversation that exists. Should I centralize my master data or decentralize my master data maintenance? So to answer this question, this vital question, we're going to tag Steven. Steven's inquiring minds want to know, should master data governance, control, and maintenance be centralized or decentralized? Take it away. Contentious conversation? The only way out is through. Now let's get into it. There are a couple of key highlights we're going to discuss today. The first is that we can use our views to set our rules. Since the views indicate not only the functional area that the data is closely aligned to, but also, the organizational impact. Second, proximity matters. The closer you are to that particular element of data, the more incentive you have to care about it. Lastly, we'll talk about how to govern responsibly even in a decentralized master data environment, by focusing on standardization, static versus dynamic data, and understanding the data definitions, use and impact. Well let's go in and take a look. When we say this is an often asked and often contentious question, well, that's an understatement. Nothing gets people fired up like master data. All right, all right, that's not entirely true. But here's the deal. When this conversation comes up as a big ticket governance topic, it does get people riled up. And we really love that. It's really important, critically important actually! But in the small day to day moments, it can practically become invisible. So let's make it visible. Because it's critically important. If we don't get the right rules in the system, good luck getting value out of it. These are basic building blocks, our chance to inform the system so it can provide recommendations that resonate. In effect, spending the time on master data is what allows the system to work for us. We're in the driver's seat of the quality and ease of our processes and ultimately the result of the system's proposals in critical functions like MRP, ATP, capacity evaluation and finite scheduling, procurement, effective use of the warehouse, and where, when, and how much we invest in our inventory to achieve our strategic objectives. The system is the single source of truth, so it's only logical we spend time getting it right. You likely noticed that I've spent our time scrolling through master data views. SAP has conveniently provided structure to help us decide what needs to be maintained centrally by experts, what would desirably be maintained locally by the folks closest to the information, and thus with the most reason to care. And even then, only with education. And then last but not least, maintained in a decentralized fashion but in collaboration with other groups. All master data objects in SAP are oriented to a hierarchy within the enterprise structure and have either a static or dynamic nature to them. Let's talk through some examples. Let's take for example the basic data view in the Material Master. This contains largely static data that, when changed, affects everyone. It's at the lowest level of specificity, as is the alternate master data. These are great candidates for centralized master data scrutiny and maintenance. And following on that thought, the same is true for material master creation and extension. Then we have things like the sales views, which are a combination of static, which contain rarely and purposefully changed master data, and more dynamic, which are regularly revisited and changed with intention master data. These views are still at a pretty high level and set in place a number of rules for how we will take care of a customer. Another example would be the quality management views, which control things like standards and quality inspection requirements. Certainly, neither last nor least, we have views like Purchasing, MRP 1 through 4, WM and many others that belong to a lower level of enterprise structure and also require frequent updates and changes. These are our best candidates for individual ownership, and sometimes individual ownership in collaboration with others. Think of safety stock or planning strategy as examples of where collaboration with a larger group might be needed. So as you're thinking through your master data strategy, think about smart allocation of responsibility based on familiarity, necessity, experience, and education. You want that maintenance to happen with a person who is the very closest to that particular process. Now, even with a well running master data program that allows for decentralization, it needs to be a closed loop process with the appropriate governance in place. Is our master data trustworthy? Is it driving quality decisions? Are we accountable and responsible for the quality, and happy to make adjustments where needed? All of these pieces come together to create a model that is set for success and drives the outcome we're all looking for. Well, thanks for joining me on the tour. A few reminders and highlights from our discussion. First, no matter your environment, there's always necessary oversight, and that oversight often manifests in education and collaboration. There are definite prerequisites to moving to a decentralized environment, but the payoff often shows up in drastically improved data quality, planning improvements and quality supply chain outcomes. Most importantly, granting some degree of autonomy for fields directly related to a functional area of responsibility, especially for the fields that require regular updates, allows people like customer service, planners, buyers, and warehouse personnel to be in the driver's seat of quality, refinement, and direct responsibility for results. Thank you, Steven. I love the reminders. The reminders are proximity, functionality, and areas of responsibility, accountability, and oversight. Wow, that's a lot. Okay folks, if you want to know more about this video and other videos, please check out our catalog, and if you have any specific questions for Steven or for the rest of our team, please submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; DM

MD04; VA03; CO09

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we are going to focus on a feature in the sales order management toolkit called fixed quantity date flag. Now I've heard two competing schools of thought on whether we use this and how to use this particular field. Some organizations use it a lot and others avoid it completely. I think we need to demystify what this flag actually does. So Kristie, can you please clarify the purpose of this particular field for us? Oh, yes, I can Martin. This is one of those fields that causes a lot of confusion and like many other features in SAP, it does so because a lot of times we're looking for a single business rule setting that we can apply to everything, all the time. This is a situational field. It's a decision point and a tool in the toolkit that is situationally oriented. Let's go into SAP and demonstrate, and then I'll recap the thought process of where this can be useful and where it should be avoided. In this demo, I will walk through three key points. First, where to find the fixed date and quantity field. Second, the impact on the transfer of requirements to MRP and how this presents in the stock requirements list. And lastly, what happens when we try to run ATP or rescheduling with the fixed date and quantity field turned on? Alright, let's go look at this contentious topic actually in the system. And this is the fixed date and quantity flag. And I'm going to go ahead and go right into the sales order here. Let's just go find it. First of all. Let's know where it is and we're going to keep working on the same availability situation that we have been working on for the last couple videos. So you may have seen this guy already. This is our P-110. It's one of our phone cases, and let's just go in and let's run the availability check. Let's see what happens here. Okay. So, what we have been doing with this guy is we've been working on this partial delivery situation, so we've been working with 11 pieces on the 15th and 3 pieces on the 22nd. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and select this by clicking on it, and I'm actually going to just go back in here. I want to take another look. You want to take a look at the item availability, and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to come in here and choose this guy right here. This is a fixed date and quantity checkbox. It is a little teeny tiny checkbox with a great deal of power. So right now, if we look at our MD04 screen, our stock requirement screen, you're going to see that these 14 pieces are actually showing up for that earliest date. And what we're going to do is we're going to choose the fixed date and quantity flag, and that's going to take it and say, okay, we're making this promise for 11 pieces on the 15th and 3 pieces on the 22nd. We are not repromising this. We are going to stick to those dates. We're not going to work to improve them. This customer requires stability and wants to believe with integrity in the promise that we're making above any and all things, and we're not going to try to improve these dates. They have to stay the same. Now, this does not preclude something bad from happening on the supply side of the house. The machine breaks down, mold approval gets delayed, material is suddenly short, you get bad quality. Any and all of the complications that can happen on the supply side could still happen. That's the reality of the supply chain. So once we tick this box, it means that the system is no longer going to try to improve these dates or prioritize getting inventory to this order over other orders. It's going to try to just stick with the dates that we've put in here. So we have to monitor and make sure we're basically taking the wheel. We're saying, okay, no more ATP management system, we're going to handle this from now on, and we'll monitor and make sure that it's okay. The other thing, is that if this confirmed quantity was less than 14 pieces or it was nothing at all, as soon as we hit that fixed date quantity flag, the system's no longer trying to get inventory onto the order or improve the dates. So it is not going to keep trying to find additional inventory for us. So if it says 0, then it's stuck and it's not going to pick up any additional inventory. So we have to be really careful with great power, great responsibility here. This can be a great thing. It creates stability for the supply chain. You're not expediting unnecessarily. If you're not trying to improve the dates to those customers. Let's say you're delivering to a production line or a job site. Once you have those dates locked in, that's what they're counting on. They're shaping their activities based on what it is that you've confirmed back to them, then this can be very, very effective. Now let me show you what happens when we tick this and then we go into the stock requirements list. I'm going to go ahead and save I, all right, go in here , alright, and I'm going to go ahead and hit refresh. Now watch this guy, 14710, says 12/4 right now, and you'll see it disappeared and you'll see it's down here. So there's our 11 pieces on the 15th, and if I scroll a little bit further down, you're going to see the remaining balance on the 22nd, 3 pieces on the 22nd. Okay, so that is different now. The supply chain is no longer trying to expedite to get that inventory in sooner. It's not going to work to try to bring the materials that fall into producing this in sooner. It's going to allow everything to reschedule to those dates that we have chosen for the customer. And if I come over here, the other thing to know is when we go to run something like rescheduling or back order processing, now that order is no longer eligible for processing. See, this guy here, there's an X. That means that we are no longer allowed to do anything with this, we would have to go in and literally untick the tick box before we're able to move this around in terms of priority. The dates are just going to stick and stay the same. That's what we're marching to. So this is make a promise, keep that promise no longer overdriving the supply chain to improve those dates. So really important to know what this does. It can be very, very useful. But again, please make sure that your quantity confirmation is in place before you tick that. If you tick it when you have nothing confirmed against that particular line item, you will not improve the quality of that promise and you're not going to add additional inventory onto that order until you go in and you actually untick it because it is fixed date and quantity. So the quantity and the date will stick. Really powerful, really great tool, but very important. Now if you're curious about the screen, we'll have some additional videos that walk through backorder processing and rescheduling in the future. So as we've just witnessed, turning on this flag means that we have made a promise and we intend to keep that promise and we will be running the supply chain to that committed date rather than the customer's original requested date. We are making a promise and we commit to keeping this promise when we do this we're also taking this out of the ATP run, so the quantity and dates hold. And we need to be careful when we do this because when we turn it on and there's no committed quantity available, there is no automated rescheduling to bring that inventory onto the order. This is a very powerful tool and we want to make sure that we fully explore the roles before we try to apply it. Thank you, Kristie. It's very important that we think about what our goals are and then choose the right technique in the right situation. It's also clear that we need to be very aware that when we are using this flag, we are making a promise and striving to keep that promise. SAP will not reschedule that order, so it's very important that the promise made is a good one. If you want to learn more about this particular topic or any other topic, please feel free to actually look at our video content below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

MCP5

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, I'm Martin and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's material analysis capability. When we understand how to interpret some of these reports, we're able to have a clearer understanding of how well we are performing from a production perspective. In essence, manufacturing material performance reporting. Eacliffe that's a mouthful. How about you tell us more about it? For sure Martin. Material analysis is a powerful feature when used correctly to focus on improvements from a material perspective. In this demonstration I am going to focus on two things. One, provide an understanding of how material analysis report works. And two, identify which materials to focus on and apply critical thinking so we can understand and mitigate availability challenges. The intent here is to use transaction MCP5 to perform material analysis for produced materials. So here we are, going to the menu, it's logistics, production, shop floor control, shop floor information system, standard analysis, and here we have MCP5 material. So let's double click on that. I'm going to just expand this horizon going back so I can get some good data, going to hit execute, and I already have my key figures laid out to provide information in terms of plan versus actuals and then provide some other information from a material analysis perspective. So if I come here right now by default the information is brought in at the plant level, I can do a switch drill down, I can take a look at, let's see, MRP controller. So I have these different MRP controllers that's contributing to this overall content of this report. So the goal is to basically use this report to see how reliable our plan is against actuals or even our target against actuals. On the main screen I had just the plan versus actuals, here we can see the target which is really coming from the production order. Actually the emphasis is that is more likely on target versus actual versus plan, but it's still good to see it from a plant perspective because at the end of the day, ideally we want to see positive numbers saying, look, every time we schedule this material, we are getting it at least prior to when MRP said we needed it, versus if it's coming afterwards, it means we are not providing that inventory in a timely manner. Okay, so let's close this and we can see for the data that I retrieved we had 13 production orders. Let's do another switch drill down we're going to go to a material and here we can see that for each material how many production orders we have, what kind of timing are we dealing with in terms of, are we getting any inventory or any item late? These are what we would target first, so maybe if there was negative I would sort it in ascending order and when it's an ascending order it would then tell me there's a couple of materials here, or probably even this column more so, let's come to plan versus the start. So I'm going to sort this column here, so let's cancel the sorts, let's just sort under one column. Again, if we are not providing the produce item in a timely manner, those are the items we would zero in first. Why is it not being provided in a timely manner? Because it means that there's some kind of disruption that's going to happen. Is it a handoff of a semi-finished or finished goods for example, hence the finished product is not being impacted negatively? Or is it just the finished good not being done in time to hand off to either the warehouse for make the stock or to the customer if it's like an assemble to order or made to order situation we are dealing with. So that's the type of insight that we can gain from using a material analysis where we do have multiple, so we can take this one, we know two orders, was it both in the same year or not? We can do it two ways. We can either do a drill by and drill down by the month, for example, and in this case the two of them was run in the same month. The alternatives could have been if I came back here and I take that same item, I can then do a time series. Let's pick the key figure and then show the time series and then we can see, oh, okay so from this perspective it says, one was in April, one was in May. So broard approach is taking two different days to work with obviously, because one we said everything was in May, and the other one said, nope, it's actually split between, April and May. But the point is you can still see how things are trending and so forth from month to month, either way. This is the material analysis, again this is for produced materials and the goal and the point is that you can use this to ideally, there's all talk variances of zeros. So in summary, we have covered. Material analysis which allows you to provide an understanding of the material analysis report. And two, to identify which materials to focus on and apply critical thinking to try and understand how to mitigate availability challenges. Yeah. Thanks, Eacliffe, for sure, I can see using these reports and analytics can really help provide the users and managers with the information needed to make more informed decisions, identify the challenges, and improve operational outputs. So if you'd like to learn more about this and other topics in your SAP system, please feel free to check out our catalog and of course, if you have a specific question, please submit your suggestion.

Warehouse Management

WM

LS24; LS26; LX02; LX03

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we're going to focus on how to quickly identify material locations in the warehouse. So, Steven, we know the best way to learn is by doing, show us how we can find these needles in a haystack. Certainly Martin. The biggest thing you want to move away from is tribal knowledge of warehouse workers "knowing" where they place materials in the warehouse versus utilizing SAP. Materials move often and are touched by many people. So it's critical to always utilize SAP. To identify where materials are located. In this video I'll demonstrate a few ways to quickly find material locations. In this video I'll quickly walk you through how do you locate a material in WM. We'll go through a couple transactions beginning with LS24. LS24, it's going to be your fastest way to find where a material is located in each storage band. So you'll need to enter your warehouse number, your material number, and then the plant which corresponds to that warehouse number. So once you have all three of these, just select enter. It then brings up your material, the description, and then all the bins in which that material is located. So you have storage type information here, below that you have which storage location each of these are tied into. So really you have all of your information of where this material is located. You then have the quantity that's available to these bins or that's consuming these bins here. So you could see that, you have all this quantity within these bins, and then you have a minus 73 here because this is in a production bin waiting to be consumed for production order. This is the default view, which is great, but if you want more information you can go ahead and click this little three staircase. What's shown on here is all this information on the left, but if you want any other information that speaks to you that you want, you can just simply start clicking, hit a single arrow, and then click copy or that check mark, it'll bring it over. So if any of this other information is relevant to your situation and you like it, you could go ahead and just save this as a personal variant to you so that way you don't have to go and click that staircase like we just did every single time. So LS24 is going to be your fastest way, it's a great transaction to quickly find where your material is located in each storage bin. Now the second one I'll just quickly I'll show you through because a lot of the WM users that say, well what is the difference between LS24 and LS26? LS26 is really for storage location and not WM. So I'll just quickly, I won't spend too much time here, but the same information is shown, you get your warehouse number, your material, and your plant, and just click enter. But you see it just kind of summarizes high level of where your inventory is located per storage type. So it's putting in subtotals now. I'm going to take that off so we can get a better picture and you can see here, here's my actual material number, my total pieces are here, and then it just provides which storage type and quantity that it's in. So it really doesn't give you that specific granular detail that WM does. So that's the difference between LS24 and LS26. In WM, we want LS24 and not 26. The final transaction is going to be LX02. LX02 is going to be all of your materials within your warehouse, so from a bin level. So I'm going to enter my warehouse number here, I'm going to click execute and it has your material, the description, your plant, all this information, but then finally your storage bin. So you could see there's a lot of materials here because this is every material within that warehouse, 361 in this case. But if I wanted to specify a specific material, just like LS24, you could just simply click the material header and you could filter and then you could just enter your material number there and then, same information, it brings your material number, the description, the bin, and all that available stock. With LX02 you probably get even more flexibility of the information that you could pull in. So using the same method you can bring in all this other information to be shown. So in this case, let's just do the double arrow, copy, and you could see all the different fields that it brought in. So again, same thing, you could save this as a variant so that way you don't have to enter it every single time. Two very, very powerful tools to use in different ways, LS24 and LX02. So, in summary we have covered. How to quickly identify where materials are located in SAP. Which allows anyone to be able to locate these materials and not just the person who put them away. Hey, once again thank you Steven. Excellent points on how we need to always be in SAP to find materials versus relying on tribal knowledge. Hey folks speaking of tribal knowledge, if you want to learn more about how to use SAP's system and actually get the most out of it please check out our other videos and of course if you have any suggestions for us please submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LS41; LX40; LX41; LX42; LX43

Hey folks, we know the best way to learn is by doing so let's get into this video. My name is Martin, and specifically what we're going to talk about today is focusing on material staging for production. Spending a good portion of a career in a production environment, I can tell you firsthand how important it is to have the right materials in the right place at the right time. Steve, I know there is integration and handoff from the warehouse to the production floor, but it's often not known. Can you please tell us more about that? I would love to, Martin. Some organizations use WM solely for this integration alone. There are many options suited to specific business needs that WM offers in how and when materials are picked and or staged, when they should arrive at the production supply area, which we will cover in other videos. In addition to the other options, there are many standard reports to assist and identify potential staging disruptions, which are game changing if used correctly. So let's get into SAP where I'll demonstrate. The staging parameters. And a few reports that may greatly improve your warehouse production service levels. With staging materials for production, everything really starts in the control cycle. Control cycle, best transaction for that is going to be LS41. So we'll go into LS41, and what you'll do is you'll just populate your plant here to start with, we'll go ahead and run that just wide open by plant, execute. It lists all of your production supply areas, the materials that are assigned there, the plant, your warehouse number, storage type, all the good stuff. Whether or not it's a dynamic bin, and then really these are going to be your staging indicators, the things that trigger the way that materials are stored and brought over to your production supply area based on the production order release. So that's really where all this data lives here. So we'll start here with this LS41, you have your number of options of how you're staging again. Other good reports really from here, you could look at LX40. Transaction LX40, it's going to do a stock check against a specific production storage bin. If you know this data, if you know where you have materials in or a batch etc, if there's anything against it, it will bring back some data right here, there's no material number transferred. So it brought back blank. LX41 is another transaction here really to evaluate. So again, we'll run this wide open. What this transaction checks is what your status is and it shows in a traffic light symbol there of your production supply bin and if there's allocation or available stock against it. So in this case, it's all red. There's a production order open for there that's why the stock is negative because there's a degradation against these production supply areas there but really it's just a good way to show what's against that production supply area and what's open what picks are going to be there? So right now again, you have your negatives there all within this production supply area and all these materials there. So moving along, we're going to go to the next transaction right in order LX42. LX42 is really going to evaluate and if you run this wide open, it populates at a thousand, so let's narrow this down because that could take some time, we'll just go to 10. Really, this just shows kind of your statuses of orders. If you have a specific order, it's probably best to enter it there, but we're just going to narrow this down to 10 to have this thing run quickly and it just shows the overall status of is that production order closed, traffic symbol there again. So all of these have been released, they're okay, everything is good to go. The final transaction that we'll go through is going to be LX43, and LX43 just really does an ATP check against your plant and how your PSAs and the rules of how you're staging work, so we can run that wide open. There is my control cycles, everything is green, which means the configuration behind everything, all the control cycles is good to go. So that's really it on some of the transactions that you could use, but really you're going to live a lot in that LS41 where it identifies the materials and everything under those control cycles, and that's going to be your good starting point. Welcome back. In this demo. We've covered material staging data. And reports that can drastically improve your service levels. I hope you enjoyed this video and please tune into additional material staging videos that we have. Steve, that's excellent information, thank you so much. Especially when it comes to staging and those parameters and the reports, I know we are just scratching the surface with this particular topic. If you want to learn more about this topic and all the production related topics that we've been preaching about and talking about in the other videos, please feel free to reach out, otherwise please submit a recommendation down below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; PTM

MD04; VB11

Hey, everybody, Martin here. Does your organization struggle with product transitions, promotions, or managing substitutions? If so, you're not alone. These type of situations are often managed offline or in Excel. It's time that that changes. We don't want the stranded material, send a substitute material to a customer who won't accept it or forget to change a temporary substitution back to the material we want to be replenished. Today we have our great efficiency builder Ed. He's going to introduce us to a key but woefully underutilized feature in SAP called material determination that facilitates scenarios like material supersession. Ed, take it away. Thanks Martin. I'm a big fan of the simplicity and efficiency of material determination to support things like promos, material substitutions, or suppressions Material determination allows us to set up a series of materials in a chain. The system can then move from one material to the next to look for the next eligible material. We have the ability to control eligibility for substitution with both validity periods and key combinations. This could be as simple as material entered, or we can be a bit more specific and choose something like customer and material. This allows us to control when a substitution is allowed and which customers the new rule applies to. Let's get into SAP and take a look. Let's begin in the stock requirements list. Let's say we've just received news that the release date for the next evolution of this product is ready for release as of today, which is great news because we have more customer orders than we have inventory and nothing left to come in. To make this fun, let's imagine that this is wine and we are moving from one vintage to the next. This is not a super premium wine where the vintage demands different market value. But we do want to track the change, use up our old inventory, and then move into the latest release once the old one is exhausted. This is a material super session. Super session simply means that we are replacing old with new, and the technique in SAP that we use to do this is called material determination. Here you can see the new part number, and this is the one we want to plan replenishment for going forward. Note that there are currently no customer orders sitting over here. Let's see if we can get SAP to help us reroute the customer orders over to this new release. We want everyone to have wine when they need it. Here we are in transaction VB11 where we create or set up our material determination chain note the key combinations button at the top. This is where we can select options like material entered or customer and material entered. We can can configure whatever key combinations might make sense for our business. Let's keep it simple today, and we'll go with material entered. Up next, we need to set our validity date. This is a great feature because it allows us to do a temporary rerouting of orders. For example, maybe you have a promotion coming up and you want to sell the special holiday edition for a fixed period of time, and then go back to the original material. And while today we're working with an immediate change, you could proactively set your release dates in place well in advance. Below the validity period, we have the opportunity to set a reason code for the material substitution. This helps us to track the reasons why we're shifting orders over time and in the main body here, we set our material entered and the material we want to progress orders to. As you can see, we can enter many materials at one time. So if you have a longer list of transitions, you could work a whole list at the same time. Once we have this entered, then we need to choose which material we should be running MRP against. In the case of a temporary substitution, you may want to continue to replenish the original material entered. For our scenario, we're going to choose the material number that represents our latest and of course, finest vintage. I'll save this, and then we'll go back over to MD04 for the original material entered. Now we'll run MRP. It'll ask us if we're sure, yep, we are. See here, there are some new results. Now let's go back to the stock requirements list. We will hit refresh and we can now see our list got a little shorter. And if we look at the new part, here we go. We can see that our orders have shifted over. Excellent. All new orders will shift to this new part number and this will be what we plan to replenish going forward. A couple of notes before we go back to the studio. First, EDI can be a bit tricky, so be sure to communicate and keep an eye out for any EDI issues Second. This was a very simple example of a very robust functionality in SAP. If you need to build out a longer chain or you're struggling with a key combination, don't hesitate to reach out to us. I was chatting with one of my fellow Revealians and she told me that when she was planning this was one of her favorite tools in SAP. Not only is it easy to use, but helped her make sure she was in compliance and also that she used the inventory to the best advantage of the company. It had measurable impacts on their inventory investment, for sure. Let's summarize today's chat. First material determination is much easier to maintain than manual entries. Put SAP to work for you. Second, we were able to set up the rules in ways that honor customer requirements. And finally, we get to choose which material should hold the requirements and be relevant for replenishment proposals from MRP. Very powerful, highly valuable. Thank you Ed. Most organizations have a use case that fits material determination perfectly, so thanks for that. It has the capacity for complexity, but can also be kept simple. There's so much opportunity here. Hey folks, we have a whole catalog of videos, and if you're looking for something really specific, just use our AI chatbot and ask your question.

Warehouse Management

WM

LX03

Hi, Martin here, and welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. In this video, we're going to focus on materials not turning in the warehouse. So, Steven, we know the best way to learn is by doing. Tell us how we're going to find these dusty old materials without actually walking the warehouse floor. Sure, Martin. Being able to systematically locate materials not turning in your warehouse is a game changer. Storage bin real estate is critical in a warehouse, and it is important to identify materials that are not turning or selling to have cross functional conversations as to why. In this demonstration, we will focus on using time in location feature to quickly identify these materials. If you're walking through your warehouse and you spot a material with dust on it, you should absolutely question why. There could be some strategic reasons why a material isn't turning such as you need that part or there's been a decision made to keep that for services down the road but in most cases there is most likely something wrong, either no material master or put away strategy, so it's all manual, it could just be incorrect rules or even outdated rules. Although the warehouse associates and team may not be directly responsible for material turns the buying and selling, it's critical because space is critical in the warehouse and every square inch, every volume, every bin adds up and counts, so you really want to manage your materials very well and you want good, healthy materials that are turning. You want those high velocity materials in there. So how do we find those materials or that data that we could potentially identify and partner with maybe the buyers planners who are responsible for bringing in and fulfilling our warehouse. So quickest way rather than going and just doing some spot checks around the warehouse by walking, just go into LX03. LX03 is going to be your overall bins in your warehouse. You could run it wide open with all the storage types in there, you can do only bins with stock. So if you ran this wide open, it's going to show you all the bins within that warehouse, whether there's materials in there or if they're empty. So in this case, let's just execute it and this is the default that's shown here. You just have your plant, your storage location, your storage type, so on and so forth. There is so much information in LX03. So I clicked on this staircase, which again shows you, I'll move this over here, all the information that's shown. But then on the right is everything that you can bring over in this view and the power of LX03 is you can save variants for specific things. So we want to just find those materials that are expiring. But the fifth one down is duration. So we want to highlight that and do a single click over, and there you go. So you could see, all right, these ones are empty. But then you have TiL and TiL simply time in location. So these are some pretty old materials. What I would do is go ahead and sort these descending so it brings the oldest to the top and you could just quickly see the quantity where they are what the material is and the time in location. So now you have a set of data where you can go and identify who's responsible for the material, such as the MRP controller, and say hey, this material has been sitting in the storage bin for X amount is that, did we know that, is there something that we could do about it, because I really need this bin for something else for something high turning. So there's just a quick way to find some materials that are not turning in your storage bins and in your warehouse. So in summary we have covered how to quickly identify materials not turning in your warehouse to provide data for strategic conversations. Thanks, Steven. That's great stuff and some powerful information to arm our warehouse folks to have strategic conversations. Speaking of strategic conversations, guys, if you want to see more about how to get the most out of your system, please check out our other videos and of course if you have a burning question, please submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

PTM; P2P

MD04

[00:00:00] Welcome back, folks. Martin here. And today's the day we're taking a closer look at one of SAP's features that is so underutilized that it must be hidden. Well, we're here to walk you through value that's been hidden in plain sight. We're always looking for tools that highlight integration, good conversation and enable further data backed decision making. So many times the answer to a question that could be a great conversation is a side note, and I'll look into that. We believe that getting more of these conversations happening in the moment and in the room promotes integrated thinking and is more effective in problem solving. Monique, you are probably the queen of the brief, the promoter of the aha moment, and a huge believer in the importance of context. What is this tool? Tell us more about it. What are some of the things you can inspire us regarding this particular tool? Way to tee it up, Martin. [00:01:00] That was like a legit Paul Bettany in a Knight's Tale moment. And I love a good moment. So, okay, I'm going to rise to the occasion. So the question is, can we do it? This sometimes can give us a good idea of whether we are in a position to say yes or no, and why. It can help us to understand the impacts of changes and the ripple effect of our decisions. What it doesn't necessarily have is the insight for what cards we might be holding that will open up the door to the yes. Being able to use a tool like this to drive conversations. Gets us engaged in the room and thinking about solutions as a team and over time, this lets us recognize patterns and get to the outcomes more efficiently. So let's get into SAP and have a quick briefing on the anatomy of the order report and the good stuff we can get from it. So here we are again, friends, picking up from our home base, the stock requirements list. Imagine for a moment that we needed to reschedule an order to meet a pressing customer [00:02:00] need. If that's not currently our plan, there are a series of checks that we need to go through to evaluate the availability of capacity, labor, and materials. The job of a planner or scheduler is not an easy one. It's our job to balance service levels with inventory performance and efficiency. That can be a delicate puzzle that requires sometimes difficult conversations. But by the time the shop floor has a scheduled order that will be released and executed, we want to make sure all of our ducks are in a row. So how do we get started? We have a bunch of options. The order report is special because it's a quick validation in the room that can open up the conversation to problem solve and find solutions. Now, while we're talking, I'm doing a few things. First, I found an order that needs to be expedited. I've selected that order by clicking on it, and then I've clicked on the icon for the order report. This [00:03:00] has opened up a new section on my screen here, and I have options for how I might want to see this information. I like it at the top of the screen so I have more real estate to display the columns. And still have a good portion of the stock requirements list visible below to interact with. I can also control how much real estate on the screen this information is allowed to take up by setting a percentage in my user settings. Now this information is interactive. I can navigate to any of the materials we see here by double clicking. And their planning situation is going to display for me in the stock requirements list below. It's easy to jump between materials and take actions interactively. Refresh and see the impact in the order report. Now I want to highlight a couple of important features for you here. Consider them to be a few of my favorite things. First of all, we can see each of the levels of the BOM and what's needed to produce each. Then we can see the requirements date [00:04:00] compared with the current plan availability date. We'll also see the associated exception message and the date it needs to be rescheduled to in order to support this run. We can also see, and this is my favorite part, what kind of MRP element we are counting on here. Do we have an order in motion we can expedite, or is it just a planned MRP element like a planned order or purchase requisition? Do we have stock and may need to redeploy? This helps us to ask questions and seek out opportunities. Two other points to be made before we head back into the studio. First, this does not replace the full production plan and cycle of material availability checking, capacity evaluation, and finite scheduling, or calling a supplier to see what can be done, or working with the customer experience team to discuss priorities. But it helps to get the conversation started in the room and actions agreed upon. [00:05:00] This speeds up the conversation. Second, another great use for this tool is if you are working on your use of the exception messages in SAP, is to see the impact of realigning activities through the BOM. It can really help the team see how we can resolve several exception messages all at once. Now let's get back to the studio and wrap this baby up. I hope I was able to deliver some helpful context and a few aha moments in this walkthrough. I believe that was my end of the bargain after that great introduction today from Martin. So a couple of quick things before you go. This tool is a great jumping off point to explore not only can we do something, but should we? Many times when we're entering this conversation, it's because something hasn't gone to plan and we're looking to see if we can meet a need. Having the conversation cross functionally in the room promotes integrated thinking that can lead to a good decision on next action. Which may involve redeploying of [00:06:00] capacity, labor, or materials to meet an urgent need. And this helps to build a context for that question. Ah, all right, Monique. That was pretty good. And if this conversation sparked your interest, especially the points about evaluating options and impacts, you may want to check out another video that's coming soon about the companion of the audit report, and it's called the pegging report. Integrated system, integrated supply chains, that's what we're striving for. We need some collaboration to support that integration for sure. So once again, Monique, thanks a lot. So folks, if you want to learn more about this topic and the pegging report to come, you will see this in our video catalog. And of course, if you have some specific questions on these topics, feel free to submit it below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

CM21; CM25

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we are going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's midpoint scheduling capability. Midpoint scheduling can be great help to simplify the production planning process and help focus on the bottlenecks. Eacliffe, how about you tell us a bit more about midpoint scheduling? Sure Martin. Midpoint scheduling is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. Explain the concept of midpoint scheduling. Show what settings are required to get midpoint scheduling to work. And demonstrate how midpoint scheduling process works. The intent here is to look at midpoint scheduling functionality that exists on the production planning, graphical planning board transaction, CM25. Midpoint scheduling is an approach a production planner can take to create a realistic production schedule when dealing with multiple operations. Basically involves focusing on a strategic or bottleneck equipment that's involved in the manufacturing run, which drives the scheduling of other work centers involved in making that item. So let's take a look at transaction CA02 to show what the routing would typically look like before we actually get into this functionality. So right now this is transaction CA02. We're going to go to an operation overview and what we can see here is that we have multiple operations involved in making this product and these are the different work centers which are involved in making that inventory. The goal is that when we schedule one of these work centers here, the other, in this case, the other three work centers will align from a scheduling perspective. Okay, let's go into transaction MD11 and create a plan order for this material. Okay, so this is our material it's in MRP area, 1000. Okay. let's do for quantity of 10,000 units and I'm going to pick a date of, let's see, do the drop down and we want it to finish, so right now it's February 13, let's move it to March 4. I'm going to hit enter to populate these dates. Notice there's only three tabs here. Basically that header tab, the assignment master data. I'm going to click the scheduling icon, I have a warning, get through that, click on scheduling a new tab detail scheduling got created and here we can see the different work centers involved and the start an end date for each one of these work centers to produce this item. Okay and it's these work centers that we are going to bring up on the planning board. So with that said I'm going to click and save and we now have this planned order, now let's go into transaction code CM25 which is the graphical planning board slash m CM25, I'm just going to pick a generic keyboard. See there are multiple options in terms of which profile we end up working with. I'm going to pick this one here, the two graph, green check. Okay, I do have a variant already defined, say get variant. I called mine V1. Okay, and by doing that it has now populated the different work centers of interest. So we can see this here and from here we are going to, we're interested in this case the focus is on machine capacity because we're scheduling the equipment, which are machines, in this case, and execute. So here we can see that we have multiple entries sitting available for scheduling. Anything that sits in this section in the pool section of the graphical planning board is what's available for scheduling. Anything which was scheduled already would be residing in this section up here. So, with that said, let me just adjust this a little bit, okay, so before we can do midpoint scheduling, what we are going to do is we are going to take a look at our settings. So we're going to go into our strategies and there's one setting which is specific to midpoint scheduling, it resides in this section, the dispatching control, so I'm going to scroll down and let's do this again. So we can see under dispatching control, we have this midpoint scheduling and that indicator is turned on. So with that said, the way this works is that any orders which are, or operations which are associated with these work centers, would be displayed here and in this case you could see we have two different orders, one ending in 533, and the other one ending in 534. So the question is, which one is crucial to how the line is scheduled? Instead of looking at Operation 10, let's assume that operation 30, the MB Work Center, is the one that has some challenges for us. So what we want to do is take that work center and we are going to schedule it. So let me dispatch it and you could see it is now sitting here. So here's another work center, another order for that same work center, I noticed it's overlap. So the point is that we have finite scheduling, in other words we could only run one at a time. If I took this one now and say dispatch it you could see it came to the end here. So because this moved out into the future, the point is it cannot run at the same time as this one. If I come to Operation 10, suddenly you could see Operation 10 is no longer aligned with 534, it's no longer in the same timing as 533. So, the point is that we have things sequenced in terms of who could run first, who could run second, and so forth. We can see that there's still a bit of overlap from a 10 perspective so based on the rule of the master data, we know that this has to move out a bit. So if I took this and I moved it out a bit, you could see this one now moved out. You could also see that these guys are now starting to move out. So there's a gap between, for operation 20, there's a bit of a gap, and for Operation 40 there's a bit of a gap, and you can see now looking at all of them there is no overlap. So from a scheduling perspective, the midpoint scheduling says, look when I moved something, for example if I took the previous order and I moved it, let's say moved it a little earlier, the other operations tag along automatically. Okay, so that's the whole point about midpoint scheduling is you pick that critical work center, you schedule that work center and once it is scheduled, so I can take this guy, hold the shift key down, take the other one and dispatch them both. Okay and now you can see they are up here scheduled together where we have the first one, the second one, this remain intact, and the point is because these operations are no longer overlapping, the schedule is now considered realistic. So that's the feature of midpoint scheduling on the graphical planning board so that we can reflect a realistic production schedule. So in summary we have covered midpoint scheduling which allows you. Perform scheduling using the graphical planning board. And how to maintain the settings to perform midpoint scheduling. Yeah, thanks Eacliffe. Much appreciate it. Using this feature can really help planners and schedulers optimize their order scheduling, and in doing so, of course, improve productivity. So if you'd like to learn more about how to get the most of the SAP system please check out our other videos and if you can't find a video to an answer to a burning question you may have, please submit a suggestion.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; IBP; P2P; PTM

MC.9; MD04

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we are going to provide an overview of the value of moving our organization from a push to a pull company. Now, what that really means is from a material point of view, are we pulling our materials through the supply chain or are we pushing them through the supply chain? I'm going to let Kristie explain that in a little more detail. Thanks, Martin. Moving from push to pull is a powerful strategy when used correctly. And in this demonstration, I'm going to focus on three key things. First of all, what are some of the reasons and techniques for why and how we would move from push to pull with an emphasis on decoupling techniques. Also, how would we analyze materials behavior to determine the truth of whether we are pushing or pulling? And lastly, what does that transition from push to pull look like? Stabilization, inventory optimization and responding to the signal. Moving from push to pull is such an important conversation. So, whether you are starting to receive information from your customer, so they're getting more integrated into the process, so you're getting a clear pull signal from them that's more reliable, you're starting to integrate that into your demand planning process through CPFR, or maybe even receiving scheduling agreements from that customer with firm free and tradeoff zones, or whether you're thinking about decoupling strategies. So how you're able to service many customers by going to an assembled to order model and just being in a good place to be able to supply depending on what it is that they're asking for in their final variation or you're thinking about decoupling because your signal at the end item is just not good and so you want to be able to position for pull and you're starting to pull through your supply network or your up and running on S/4, maybe you're exploring a DDMRP strategy, which is kind of the ultimate in pull. As you're thinking through these things and locating where your inventory in the appropriate places throughout the supply network, it's really good to be able to evaluate how you can shift from push to pull. But one of the things that's fundamental to doing that and one of the starting places is to just be able to go in and analyze the behavior of your materials. So I picked a material kind of at random here, and this is MC.9, and I'm just going to look and see what's been going on with this over the last year. So I've got a material and a plant in here, and I've got a period of evaluation that I'm going to look at, I'm going to look at it for the last year. Now, if I'm going from push to pull, I'm probably looking at smaller more finite pieces in order to be able to take cuts on what's going on. And immediately when I come in here it's going to give me some statistics so I'm getting some evaluated stock values, my current stock value, how many units I have on hand, my average, and then I can compare where I am for evaluated stock versus average. Wow, almost twice as much as what is normal for me, so it's going to be some good information for me to consider how many times I've issued the product, and then what, I'm looking at for patterns over the last year. But what I'm really interested in is if I come up here and I go to extras, there's this detailed info button, I can get a lot of, first of all statistics on what's going on, but I can also get some pictures. So the two things I'm most interested here right now are the key figures. Coming down here, I'm going to go ahead and pull based on total stock. And what it's going to do is pop up a bunch of information for me so I can see, what has been happening, my opening, my mean value, and my closing so I can see I'm actually growing an inventory on this particular item. I can see the last time it was consumed. What my average days of coverage is. So this is definitely, I'm pushing, I've got 394 days of coverage. I can see my current inventory turns, how many times I've stocked out. Very, very important as we're going from push to pull. We may make an intention to stock out if we're moving to make to order, but in general, we want to make sure we're working that slowly down, I can see my dead stock percentage and then I get just a little bit more information on what is going on. Now for those of us who like to look more at time series information I can also do that from here as well, so I can go to extras and then I'm going to go to detailed information and what I actually want, I could look at just more red line graph through stock level and look at total stock, but I want a little more information. I want to see how I've actually been planning this item, so I'm going to do my receipts versus issues diagram and I'm going to click on total stock. This is going to give me a little bit more information on what's been happening. So, you can see here, let me make this nice and big for you, so over time, over my period of evaluation, I can see the red line here and I can show on my legend. My red line is my stock balance so I can see my stock has started to go up a little bit and then my blue is my cumulative receipt quantity so I can see my supply pattern, how that's playing out and my green line is my cumulative issues quantity and what we can see here is that the patterns are very similar, but as we're looking at that accumulation, my issues is really lagging behind my receipts. And the bigger that gap gets, we can see it has a direct relation to what is going on with my stocking level, right? So as we see more blank space between the receipt and the issues, that's a time delay and I can see that my red line is graph is going up. So if I'm thinking about how I can get this back into control as I'm thinking about how I'm working through the behavior of this item, I want to start to get things just to be as stable and predictable from a supply perspective as I possibly can. And what that's going to allow me to do is as that becomes more predictable and stable, now I can start to reduce down how much inventory I am holding with less risk of stock out. So you can see at a very normalized pattern, we just recently started using it and then as that has happened now we're really starting to see this tick up in a big way. So I want to reduce that process deviation, it's going to help me get closer to, being in a position to pull rather than push and really start to bring that inventory safely down to a level that allows us to serve the customer within that customer's tolerance time. And that's a couple of the different ways that we can evaluate and look at information that will help us to go from push to pull. So in summary. We have covered how moving from push to pull allows you to position yourself for your customer's demand. Reduce inventory that is stagnant and stabilized supply. And decouple where necessary to protect and buffer against volatility and variability in demand. Oh, once again, thanks Kristie. Making this philosophical decision and allowing SAP to pull the materials through the supply chain can make such a difference to the business. If you want to learn more about this specific topic and others about your SAP system, please check out our video catalog, and if you have a specific question feel free to submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LT10; LX02

The best way to learn is by doing and welcome to the video service that reveals and unlocks the hidden value in your system. Martin here, and in this video, we're going to focus on how to move materials in mass within your warehouse. Steven, tell us a little bit more about how to do that. Yes, Martin. Moving materials in mass truly can be a game changer for warehouse folks. This powerful capability can save a lot of time, but also it can create a lot of damage if not utilized correctly. In this video, I will demonstrate the use of this powerful tool and highlight the pros, cons, and when it may make sense to use. The most common way materials are moved in a warehouse are from system generated transfer orders, usually in the form of a goods receipt, a production staging, or an outbound pick. These are usually singular or specific transfer orders created from a material document or an integrated area within the supply chain. But what about moving materials in mass where there's no system generated documents? That is where transaction LT10 comes into use. This powerful tool has tremendous capability and streamlines moving materials from one storage bin to the other. So let's just jump straight into LT10 and I'll demonstrate how this transaction works. So a couple of things to point out. The first two things, a warehouse number is a required field. The storage type right below is going to be your origin storage type or where you want to move the materials from. You have the option to specify other details, a storage location, a material, et cetera. It then defaults in actual movement type. So in this case, we'll just go with a 999, a straight bin to bin, not tied to a material document. You then have three bubbles at the bottom, which display a quant so you can actually move a specific quant if there's mixed materials in that storage bin. You can actually do the same from a storage unit. So again, from a mixed storage perspective, if there are multiple storage units or different storage units, you could specify that storage unit and do a bin to bin. In this case, we're just going to use the storage bin transfer. What this will do, it's black and white from the standpoint, it will move all materials from one bin to the other. So if there are mixed storage, if you have mixed storage enabled in your warehouse, it will move all the materials that are in there from your origin bin to your destination bin. So let's just go ahead and execute this. I'll show you the next screen here. What you'll get is within my warehouse and storage type, it pulls up a number of options starting with the bin, the material, the stock, et cetera. You could pull in more fields if you would like but this is going to be your standard layout. These lock boxes over here are demonstrating that they are a lock, you cannot actually perform a bin to bin transfer. I just, I know there's an open material inventory counts. So, it's nice because the system is smart enough to know that there's a open inventory document so it won't allow you to do a bin to bin transfer because that would throw off your inventory. So those are going to be locked. You then see some check boxes right below, and these are the options that you have for bin to bins. First thing that I will point out, you see there's a gap here and then all these other ones are just singular boxes. Well, that gap is because there are two different material numbers in that same bin. So that's fine, let's go ahead and actually just move that. So all you do is you simply click the box, it selects and highlights both, you then want to go to this plus with the forklift, which is going to be your stock transfer in the foreground or where we want to move those materials to. So, again, you have some options here. You do have to pull in a actual storage type for your destination. So, in this case, we'll just show you the different variety or flavor. We just want to move it to 007, our pallet storage. If you leave it blank, like we're going to do so, it will actually use the system rules and go ahead, depending on your material master and your structure setup, it will automatically just place these two materials in a bin. So let's go ahead and just do that. I can even click this confirm immediately, and it will close out that transfer order. It's going to use that 999 movement type. I'm going to click copy and they both turn to green. You could refresh and they should drop off and let's just go ahead and see where those went. So I'm going to go and I'm going to open a new session, LX02. We moved it to storage type 007. So let's take a look, and there we go. You could see our two materials actually right there went to the same bin. So because of the material master and the setup, they actually consolidated both into the same bin. So it went both from the origin bin in that same bin to the destination bin in the same bin. So we will then just go ahead and click a singular, let's specify a bin here, click that. We're going to do the same thing, the plus foreground, same storage type, but let's pick a different bin, let's just go to 01-02 here, the one next to it, confirm immediately, went to green, it'll drop off, and go back to LX02, unfortunately you can't refresh, so we just have to go back and execute it once again, and there you go. It actually went to 01-02 or that bin that we specified. You can also straight from here, it doesn't have to be a different storage type so this last example, we will just move this material here into this bin and that same storage type. So we're just going to hit the plus once again, we're going to keep it in 001 and then we're going to specify 01-05-04. Okay, confirm immediately. All right, and then we'll refresh and there you go. They're both in that same bin. LT10 is a fantastic and very easy to use transaction, especially from the standpoint of you just confirm immediately and it moves materials. The transaction, the power that we displayed, the best practice would be to not use this on a daily basis or on your regular operation. You really want to utilize this transaction when you're doing warehouse projects, so in the past I've used these a lot from slotting. So we're moving materials around for the sake of finding the most optimal or that golden zone and we want to move all those materials from one bin to the other. It was a specific project. That's the form or fashion that you want to use it. Another way that I've used this in the past was we were doing an actual warehouse reconfiguration where we're moving racking around and we want to quickly do bin to bin transfers. This was going to be it. So. This is how you want to actually utilize that transaction and kind of those one off situations that will support any projects that you have. So with great power comes great responsibility and I would highly recommend you do not want to open this transaction up to just everyone. You want to ensure that this is only locked down to your trusted SAP users that are fully educated on the capability of this tool. So in summary, we have covered how moving materials in mass can save warehouse folks significant time, but if not done correctly can cause a lot of systematic damage within your warehouse. Thank you Steven. Wow, I can certainly see how this can save a lot of time for our warehouse project. Folks, if you want to learn more about warehouse management and any kind of capabilities in your SAP system check out our other videos and please submit any suggestions below.

Procurement & MRP

MM; PP; SD

MD04; MD05

Best way to learn is by doing and so of course welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. My name is Martin. In this video we will be discussing something called navigation profiles. Now, navigation profiles are typically a role based selection of transaction codes that are embedded in the top of the MRP stock requirements list and it makes for moving seamlessly between transactions as it relates to the planning process that we have to conduct. They aren't hard to set up, they do drive significant value, and profoundly important. So Kristie, show us where these navigation profiles exist and how to use them. Fantastic, Martin. I'd love to tell you more about this efficiency builder. Let's jump into the system and understand. What navigation profiles are. Where they live. And how they work. Now a navigation profile is a planner's best friend when they are properly configured for that role. Let's go take a look. Navigation profiles are one of those great tips or tricks that really help to enhance our experience when we're working in these cockpit transactions like MD04 and MD05, so the stock requirements list and the MRP list. And if you're not sure what a navigation profile is, it's when you see these little buttons that appear. Now there's a couple of different ways to make this happen. Navigation profiles are kind of hotkeys but the navigation profile is the standard way to be able to add transactions to the header of your screen and be able to navigate directly to them. So if I click on MD02, It's going to take me directly through for this particular material, in this particular MRP area, in this particular plant with my standard default values for single item, multi level MRP. Now, depending on your environment, it may make a lot more sense for you to be going to MD03, which is single item, single level MRP. But, it's very nice to be able to have these transactions listed here for us and I'm going to show you a couple of different ways for how you can get to and select your navigation profile. So the first option is under settings. And if you go to Settings and then down to Settings, you'll see here we've got a whole lot of different options for how to customize our experience in the stock requirements list and the MRP list. If you haven't started exploring in here, there's so many good things that can really help you with being able to get the most out of your experience. It just makes life a lot easier. This is all the usability stuff that helps to be able to get to a place where you're seeing your information exactly how you would like to see it. It really is helping you to make decisions and flow. One of those things is the navigation profile and if you've been through a transformation with us you probably will see one that has oVO in the description, that's what I have displayed here. And then if I click on this button right here to see the drop down list, what this is going to show me is all of the navigation profiles that are out there. So this is something you can have your IT department go out and configure for you so it appears in the list and it will appear for everyone. And when you come in here, and you can also default these, when you come in here you'll see a bunch of different options. So, right now I'm on the Optimization Profile for OVO. I could also go in and choose based on the type of role, or the type of experience that I'm looking for. So you can see here, I've got one for Buyer. Let's go ahead and click on that. And then when I choose this, it's going to come in here and I'm going to say save, if I wasn't sure I wanted to keep it, I could just hit continue, but I'll go ahead and hit save and it's going to say settings for my user have been saved. I'll go ahead and click continue and now you'll see up at the top, I have an entirely different list of transactions that I can move to that are really germane to the role that it is that I'm trying to perform. Some of us are planners and buyers, so we may want to flip across navigation profiles depending on what it is that we're trying to do, where we are in our daily cadence of activities. So we might want to be able to quickly navigate to these other transactions. And there are so many different ways to move directly from MD05 and MD04 to other parts of the system. We know we have these elements here that we're able to move through. We know also that we have all the different options under Go To as well as under Environment and all of these things are related to the work that we're trying to do. So the other thing that you can do here, we went to Settings, Settings and selected Navigation Profile. You can also use this Navigation Profile button right here. And so if you come in here, you can choose Assign, and it's going to take you right back into that screen, and you can select a different option to help you with the process. I'm going to go here and just go to a third one, Profile for Planning, and again you can go out and explore these. and see what is the most useful to you. So simple little trick or tip that can make things much easier. And you can see I just picked one for planning and this is really oriented around more of the long term planning, going out and working with the forecast and those kinds of things. So again, depending on where you are, your area of responsibility, what you're working on at that particular point in the day, where you are in your daily, weekly, monthly cadence, you may want to use different navigation profiles to help you with that process. And the more you think about orienting it to your process and the types of transactions that you might want to seamlessly move to from your MD04 stock requirements list or MD05 MRP list can make a huge difference in the usability of these transactions and they're intended to be a cockpit and really help you with the end to end process. So this is another way that you can increase the value and make it easier to go out and do the things that you need to do. So today we learned a little bit about the navigation profile and how it can actually make our life easier. We explored some of the standard profiles as well as the ones we typically have for our transformation teams. We will focus on some of the key transactions that are most vital to their success. And lastly, we looked at how to choose a navigation profile and began actually working with it. Great stuff, thank you, Kristie, much appreciated. Navigation profiles are super powerful for planners and buyers and can really make life so much easier to just seamlessly kind of work around different environments and different transaction codes. So guys, if you want to know more about this video service and anything else please check out our catalog. And of course if you have a burning suggestion or question please submit it below.

Demand & Supply Planning

DM; IBP; P2P; PTM

MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we are going to focus on how to find needles in the proverbial SAP haystack. Given the breadth and depth of SAP, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. If we just focus on the vital few things we can quickly uncover where the biggest differences can be made. Kristie, how about you help us figure out where these needles/problems potentially exist? Absolutely Martin. Let me give you the tour. Needles in haystacks via the exception monitors provide a powerful capability when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three ways to identify these needles in the haystack. First of all, we can use red lights to help us. Second days of forward coverage. And lastly, using the exception messages to help us identify these needles in the haystack. Let's take a look. Do you ever feel like you come into your exception monitor and you're looking for a needle in a haystack? Usually feels that way when you're first getting started, and sometimes when we have a lot of volatility or variability and the situation gets away from us a little bit, it can feel like it then too. So you're definitely not alone, I certainly have felt that way. So how do we find these supply situations that are the most urgent? I'm going to give you a couple of different ways to do that. So the first one is the one that we're likely really familiar with, and that's our red lights here. So when we have a red light, it means we're at risk of service level degradation. It means that we do not have enough inventory as of this moment in time to cover our current or past due demand. And you can see here we actually get a calculation that says how far in the hole we are. So that's one of the ways we can know which items need the most support in order to be able to recover. And then we can also see if we have a recovery plan currently in place based on what's going on in this first receipt days of supply and your second receipt days of supply. There's another video that walks through examples of how those calculations are made, but that will help you also to know where you want to focus your time and attention. So particularly on the ones that don't have a recovery plan in place. So we're not seeing any improvement in the days of supply after the first receipt days of supply. Alright, so then the other way that you can do it is you can come into the binoculars and we can look for some exception messages. Always update your statistics, you can see I've got a lot of different materials that I've pulled in here and I'm going to go ahead and update those statistics because as we go through the day things are changing. So I want to make sure that I have the most up to date information and I can work my exception monitor throughout the day. And as I'm moving forward in my day, I'm probably transitioning if I'm in ECC or I'm not yet running MRP live from MD06 to MD07, so I've got the current stock situation and I can come over here and I want to go to find exception messages. I'll come in here and I'm going to look to see which exception messages have me the most concerned. So, highlight here we've got one where we've got some items that have the stock fallen below safety stock level. So that message 96, I've got 4 occurrences of that. I also have a lot of reschedule ins, so those are items where my supply is due to come in later than what is needed. So beyond that mad date for the customer or beyond the forecasted demand for orders that have not yet filled in or beyond when it's needed for use in production or for stock transfer. Even more important or more critical than that are these, these 7 30's These are the ones where I know that I need to get this process in motion, I'm actually already behind. Unless I had a time machine, I would not be able to get the material here according to the current lead time. So my goal with these is to get my orders placed and then start to work through the process of moving them in within lead time if possible, and in order to do that, I might need to work some of my reschedule out or my cancel messages to free up time, space, materials capacity, room on containers, all of those good things that will allow me to create a hole to bring in these critical items. So I can use this to help me find those really critical supply situations and then start to work through them. There's also reporting an SAP that will help us with this. So some of our inventory analysis reports would let us go in and take a look to see where we've got that negative days of supply. So really helpful would be MC42 or MC43 to be able to go in and filter on negative days of supply and even work that near selection criteria in. As you're going into your exception monitor, you also have some of those filters. Let me go ahead and leave this overview, yep, that's fine, and I'm going to go ahead and scroll down to the bottom. You'll see here I'm using the extended selection criteria for MD07. This is also there for you on one of your tabs if you are just using regular old MD07, but this extended criteria is nice. I wish when I was a planner that I had known that this existed many, many years ago at the beginning in my career, I didn't find out until I'd been working with SAP for quite a while, and boy was this a game changer for me because I could look at multiple plants or specific material numbers altogether. It gave me lots of different ways to group and prioritize. So this is really helpful. But you can see down here in this range of coverage, you can actually pull in based on certain stock days of supplies, so you can work through your threshold. So for example, eliminating some of those positive 999 messages, really throttling to your inventory that you're currently managing through and then looking at your 999's as a seperate use case might be helpful, focusing on some of the recovery for your first receipt days of supply. So those are, in most cases, it's going to be the things that are scheduled to come in, so purchase orders, ship notifications, production orders, process orders, those kinds of things, firm stock transfers. So you can see how your pipeline is filling back up and what you're looking at in terms of recovery, that will also help you to prioritize. So really nice to have not only the exception messages, the red lights with those days of supply calculations sitting right next to them, but also some of the filtering on the front as you're entering into MD07 to be able to set some of these thresholds so you can focus on them as well as the inventory analysis reports. So things like MC42 or MC43, where you could go in and actually filter based on specific days of supply and that allows you to look at it not only from forward looking, so what you're predicting to use, but also backwards looking in terms of usage. So nice to have those different options in your back pocket. That'll help you to find those needles in the haystack so that you can move through and work through those exception messages and get those orders placed so you're in a good position for supply going forward. So in summary we have covered how using the exception monitor to find needles and haystacks allows you to. Focus on the materials in the most critical planning situations. Evaluate and resolve the supply and demand imbalances. And lastly, find materials with very specific planning situations. When we are first getting started with exception monitoring, it can feel completely overwhelming. In fact, you may feel like the data or exceptions are not real, rest assured life can be different. Too true Kristie. Thank you. Understanding how to get key insights from SAP allows you to narrow your focus and get the biggest impact from a few key actions. So if you want to learn more about doing that and other things around your SAP system please feel free to check out our video catalog. If you have a specific question that needs to be answered feel free to log it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LL01

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here, in this video we're going to focus on the negative stocks within the Warehouse Activity Monitor. Steve, I know this is a big deal, why don't you tell us more about why negative stock is such a problem? Sure, Martin. Negative stocks within the warehouse activity monitor have surpassed the time allotment and are now deemed as critical and are creating a supply chain disruption. In this video we'll demonstrate. How to analyze this portion of the monitor. And review strategies to manage and take action upon. In this video, I'll demonstrate negative stocks in the warehouse activity monitor. So we'll go into LL01, which is the activity monitor. The required field here is going to be your warehouse number, mine defaulted to 001, so I'll go ahead and execute this. Negative stocks are going to be at the bottom of this report. You can then hone in and the interim storage types where negatives maybe listed there. So you have the option to include these in specific variants if you own that portion of the warehouse monitor, you could create ranges, so on and so forth. But what we're going to do here, just like many other users that use the activity monitor, we're just going to execute and get the holistic picture of everything. You can see I have 33 negative stocks. If I click this subfolder, it just breaks down the actual storage type in which they're in, both are interims. One is 999, one is 998. So we'll just go ahead and get the whole view here, the list. Unlike the other portions of the activity monitor, you cannot just create or convert the straight into a TO, a little more due diligence and research is needed because at this point, all we see is that there's a material, there could be a status in there, in this case there's a quality block on this one, we have the bin and the stock. So what you could do though, is select one, jump straight, if you click this transfer order for quant, that's where you're going to get your additional research. So in this case, you had your TO numbers associated to that. So if you just click on the TO number it jumps you straight there. So now you can see that it's in this interim trying to be put away from here. You don't want to do this just blindly, again you want to do your research because it will confirm it to this bin because you do have the option to do so here. You can confirm, you can cancel straight to this bin. In this case, what I would do I'll go to the header details, find the user, say what's going on, really you want to understand why these have exceeded that time parameter and why these are negative. So as we are working these, you have the option, just like the other reports, you can notate anything that's going on with these, but ultimately you want to balance these because these are all a negative, these are all issues that have exceeded that time parameter. So, in summary, we have covered. How negative stocks or supply chain disruptions push through the warehouse activity monitor and have surpassed the time allotment. These negative stocks are late and need to be quickly corrected. Thanks, Steve. I can certainly see why it is imperative to move as quickly as you can on these overdue negative stocks. Folks, if you want to learn more about WM and other areas within SAP and see how you can get the most out of it, please check out our other videos and of course if you have any questions please submit them below.

Warehouse Management

OTC; WM

VL10G; VL10BATCH; VL01N; VA02; VL10A-E

Greetings supply chain professionals. I am Martin, and today, we're on a mission to uncover the hidden value in your SAP system. So let's get started. In this video, we're going to explore one of the gateways from planning into execution. It's called the delivery due list. The delivery due list helps us to know what orders are ready to be moved into delivery so we can stay on time with execution and deal with any exception that may crop up. So Dave, I know we're all eager to know more. Tell us more what we need to know about a delivery due list. Hi Martin. Today's walkthrough, we're going to go over a few key things. First, we'll pull up a delivery due list so we all know where it is in SAP. And I'll also speak to where it falls into the process. Second, we'll talk about what it is or the purpose. And lastly, we'll highlight how it can be used to make the transition into logistics execution more effective. I think it's best we go and take a look. What is the delivery due list? Delivery due list is where we take sales orders that have a delivery date on them and we use the transaction to convert them into delivery document, which is the instruction for a warehouse to go and pick the product and ship it out to the customer. Deliveries can be created in a number of different ways, we can create them directly from a sales order VA02, and then use the delivery create button. We can create them manually using VL01N, and we have a number of alternatives to create a collective number of deliveries for a number of sales orders, and those options are VL10A for the header items, VL10C for the items, and VL10E for schedule line details. Likewise, we can create deliveries for STOs, for stock transport orders. In the same way, we have VL01N, or VL10B, or VL10D, and VL10F. These are all used to create the deliveries for stock transport orders. In addition to all of these options, we create deliveries via background jobs, and these can be set up in VL10BATCH. When we create delivery documents, the important parameters we need to know where we're shipping from, or for a range of shipping points. We need to know which plant we're shipping from? Are we going to create deliveries specific to a customer? Do we include overdue orders? Do we include documents not blocked for delivery, which are due today or possibly in the future. These are all decisions that the delivery create transaction can manage for us. Typically, the delivery is created on the date that the system calculates the material availability date. We derive the material availability date on a sales order through the process of ATP checks, and also MRP calculations. We have a number of recordings which speak specifically about how ATP works and what these MRP calculations are. For this demo, let's schedule a manual delivery create using the VL10G which does sales orders, and purchase orders, really stock transfer orders, right? We can do those simultaneously. I am showing you a list of the VL10 transactions, as you can see, there is a number. We're going to use Documents due for Delivery, which is the VL10G. This transaction covers all of the variations we have for STO's and purchase orders simultaneously. I have a variant that I've created. I'm going to pull up my variant, which is called VL10G, and in this variant, I have set up a delivery create range, which is automatically loaded. The delivery create range is doing dynamic dates for me, so I can eventually just put this into a background job and then let this run on a daily basis at its pre-determined time. If I run it here, you'll see that this runs quickly. I'm getting a really quick picture, everything in red is overdue, everything in yellow is almost overdue, everything in green means I'm creating it ahead of its delivery due date. These are important factors. We can modify the screen. We can add additional fields and columns to give you more details about the delivery create. I want to quickly take you through the batch job, the automating of this task, and we do that through the VL10BATCH transaction. VL10BATCH is pretty neat. I can take the variant I've just shown you, I can schedule it. I can set it periodic scheduling. I can say I want to run this on a daily basis and I'm done. This is going to run every day at the same time, 2200, 26 minutes, and it will run every day at this particular time. So what happens in the morning, I come in, I've got my deliveries they're being distributed to the correct location to the warehouse and they can go ahead and pick and schedule what needs to be picked for that particular day? Let's talk about the so what. Timing is everything. We want to make sure that we are making all of our hand offs from one functional area to the next on time so that we can then be on time to our customers. When we run the delivery due list, we get one last chance for review. Now, hopefully over time, we don't have to have that manual intervention and we can start to automate. But if we're early on in our journey to quality ATP, or if the master data is not quite right yet, there is a good opportunity to verify everything looks good and is ready to execute. Thank you, Dave. There's nothing worse than getting the inventory in the place only to fall down at the last moment when handing off to shipping. Timely, accurate and complete hand offs are essential. If you want to learn more about this video and other topics related to this, please check out our video catalog, and of course, if you have a burning question, please submit it below.

Warehouse Management

WM

LL01

Hi, Martin here and welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. In this video we're going to focus on the open posting changes within the warehouse activity monitor. Hey, Steve and as you know the best way to learn is by doing so please tell us more about this particular feature. Not a problem, Martin. Open posting changes within the warehouse activity monitor have surpassed the time allotment and are now deemed as critical and are creating a supply chain disruption. In this video we will demonstrate. How to analyze this portion of the monitor. An review strategies to manage and take action on. So first we will go into LL01 which is the warehouse activity monitor. The default is you're going to enter your warehouse number, mine populated already so I'm going to click execute. You can see open posting changes is going to be the third thing down, so we have some options here where we can actually select and specify movement types for those open posting changes. So again, as I've mentioned in previous videos, you could save a variance if you would like, or you could just run right through the report here and we have five open posting changes. You can click the subfolder and it breaks down the actual movement type, so of the five, four of them are in the quality bucket and one is just posted, that 309 movement, to a general posting change movement. So, we'll collapse this and go back into them. Here you could see the ones that are in that quality hold right away because they have that queue that are represented right there. You also get additional information with the movement types, the storage types and then there's our one that we have that is not of quality hold. So, posting changes, as we know, there's something within the characteristic of this material that is changing. So in this bottom one, let's click in number 31, in this case, the material, the 309 movement is your general posting change. It's moving from this batch to a general batch. So the characteristic of this batch is going to change or needs to change, that's what's holding it up. So, it hadn't done so within the specific time parameter, which is why it's on the warehouse activity monitor. So within here too, as I mentioned in previous videos, you could click notes and really identify what is going on with these open posting changes. You want to absolutely investigate why are, they are still delayed, what is going on with them? Because from here too, just like the other videos and the transfer requirements, you can actually create a TO or the actual movement to clear this up and really confirm this transfer order straight from this posting change. So great functionality, great power here in that you can do this in mass, but really these have exceeded that time parameter, they need to be addressed because they're causing potential supply chain service disruptions. So, in summary we have covered how open posting changes are supply chain disruptions pushed through the warehouse activity monitor and have surpassed the time allotment. These posting changes are late. And need to be researched and quickly corrected. Thanks again, Steve, great information. Those are certainly some great pointers and strategies to quickly take action on those open posting changes. If you want to learn more about this and any other topic about how to maximize the use of SAP please check out our video catalog and of course, if you have a specific question please post them below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

MCP1

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we are going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's operational analytics. When used correctly operation analysis reports can provide real-time information about operations which enable organizations to better analyze operational data. Eacliffe, how about you take us into the bowels of this. My pleasure Martin. Operation analysis is a powerful feature when used correctly identifies how well a production order operation is performing against the scheduled commitments. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. Provide an understanding of what insight the report provides at a production order operational level. How it goes about providing this insight on production order operation. And how to evaluate the production order operation performance. The intent here is to use transaction MCP1 to perform operation analysis of production orders. In this report the data is captured at a plant work center material order and operation level. This differs on the work center analysis because the fact that a work center can be used in more than one operation, the point is by using this LIS report we can say, okay, for this work center which operation are we seeing some form of deviation or data that's outside expectations. So let me run this transaction and what I'm going to do is quickly do a switch drill down and I'm actually going to bring it down to a work center level. So from here I'm going to take this target, target is how much execution time we expected versus actual, this is what came through confirmation. By sorting this in descending order I can see the worst contributing work center to this evaluation. In this case, because all these entries here are 0 it's telling me that a confirmation has not taken place as yet but we do have this one entry where confirmation was done and we will focus on this. So one thing that should be aware of these reports when we are working in unit of measure of days sometimes it doesn't make sense to add up the days and therefore what SAP does is it performs some averaging. So in this case we saw 10.1 days yet it only comes up to 0.2 on the header level and the question is why? Like I said SAP does averaging, we have multiple entries here, so we would take this number and divided by the number of work centers and that's what is being presented as an average on tap. So this really tells you to be somewhat cautious around the range of data that you do retrieve. So lets come here, I'm going to do a drill down by which means I'm going to ignore all these other work centers and just focus on this one here. So I select the line item, what I'm going to do is drill line by and then from network center I want to see which orders are involved with this entry or this particular work center. So green check and we can see we have several orders which is involved with this particular work center. I'm going to take this and I am now going to again, sort in descending order and now we see that dealing with some averaging and so forth, we can now see what's truly contributing and the averaging is decreasing. So what I'm now going to do is pick this particular order so from this work center we came to this one order. Only one order is contributing to this significant difference it should be one day yet in terms of execution time yet the actual is reflecting 7 26. So this would imply somehow we happened to pick an old order and did some recent posting against it which sends up a red flag to say, hey what's going on, did a user make an error or so forth in terms of how we managed to achieve this. But the key point is that we were able to identify that we did have an issue. We know exactly which order it belongs to. I'm going to do a drill down again and I'm going bring it down to an operation level. So from an operational level we could see that it was operation 10 within this order and that's where something was not done correctly and therefore we can now proceed and take corrective measure. Of course the key or the primary reason we actually go through this exercise is to say where do we have a breakdown in our supply chain process from a manufacturing perspective? The question would be is the one day correct versus the actuals, if we're getting actuals and it's completely different from the target that implies that we are not planning our production floor properly. Ideally what we would like to see is for any one of these key figures, be it execution time, queue time, etcera, they all should be aligned or closely aligned and only when they're closely aligned can we truly say that we're able to schedule our production, our floor properly and minimize the risk of any kind of disruption due to some kind of variance happening in terms of this is what I'm telling you to do versus this is what actually happened. So in summary we have covered how operational analysis allows you to. Appreciate the feedback the report is providing at an operation level of a production order. Identify which key figures to focus on in this report. And how to evaluate the production order operation performance. I can see when working on improving and optimizing the operations within the manufacturing process how these reports can be super helpful. If you'd like to know more about these kind of operational reports or other features within your SAP system please check out our other videos and of course if you have a specific question feel free to submit it at any time.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD

VA01; VA02; VA03; CO09

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we'll focus on options for how to confirm availability in a sales order. Pretty awesome right? I like the options and it's so common in SAP that we use the same business rules for all occasions even though our business behaviors may be completely different. Options give us the opportunity to use the right tool for the right job. So, let's get into it. Kristie, tell us about the options that we have to get this right. Certainly, Martin. I like options too, but I like them best when I've got a good idea of what to choose and when. So today we're going to take a dive into just a single screen in SAP and walk through. The results of an availability check. And which confirmation scenario we might choose. And for what reason and when. I'm excited, so let's jump into SAP. Okay, so now let's go in and take a look at what happens when your customer calls or emails and they are working with you on availability situation for an order. So you're in there and you're interactively running it, or maybe you have seen through some sales order monitoring that you maybe have a problem with an order and you want to go in and either prioritize or just run ATP in an interactive fashion and see what is going on. So I'm going to do that, I'm going to choose this order here and I'm going to go ahead and double click and come into it. Now this is using a very generous ATP check, it's assuming really good quality information around this material and when you're getting started you're probably going to do this with a little bit more reservation. Meaning you're not going to be checking all the way out against planned orders. But for the purposes of this demonstration, this is going to let us go in and take a look at whatever different options are. Now, if you're curious about how to get started with ATP, there's some other great videos that walk you through good starting places around checking against inventory and also against your scheduled production and scheduled inbound procurement. So, make sure you go take a look at those if you're trying to figure out where the best place is to get started. But here I want to focus with you on the confirmation screen, so I'm going to go ahead and choose this line item here. This is the 110. And I'm going to go ahead and run the availability check. And when this comes back, it's going to pop me into the availability control. So, these are my ATP results for this particular line item and here is where you really want to have either the rules for that customer well known or you're in with a conversation and you're trying to manage an exception. So you run the ATP check, it's happened in an interactive fashion, meaning I am in the sales order and I run it. Now I have a couple of different options that have come back. The first is if we were to have this available for the customer on the day that they are looking for, what quantity could we confirm, and we can see that we have nothing available. So if for that particular customer the date is the most important thing and if we do not have it by the date they are looking for we would need to cancel the order, or reject that particular line item in this case. Then, this is the option that we would choose. Hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully you've got some flexibility there or you can work with supply in order to meet their needs. So what would end up happening is that until the line item is rejected, that line item would remain open, it would just be unconfirmed, so it's going to show up as an abnormal condition. And then you would work that with the supply side of the house to see if you could meet that customer's needs. Now down below that is if the quantity is the most important thing and you need to know what the best date is in order to deliver all 14 of these pieces, then you would choose this one. It says we can have all 14 pieces delivered or available to ship, depending on what your conditions are, by the 22nd of December. And I can see that we may have another option, we might be allowed to do partial deliveries, so maybe we have multiple line items on the order that are going to ship at different times, or we may even be able to break that particular line item into multiple shipments. And if so, then we have the option to have 11 available on the 15th and then 3 additional available on the 22nd. And if that's the case, the customer will take whatever the quantity is that you can get for them as early and as soon as you can possibly get it, then this would be the delivery proposal. So you're proposing two different shipments. Now you could even make a decision to split that quantity in a different way and still be able to confirm it, so long as you didn't go above 11 in the first shipment and 3 in the second. So, here I can choose these by clicking on the green tick boxes, or I can come up here and choose complete delivery, which is this guy right here, the delivery proposal down here, or if I'm going to wait and see if I can get some more available by the date that they originally requested, then I would just simply hit continue and we'll try that availability check again, allow something like backorder processing or rescheduling to pick up and try to make that order happen based on the customer's need. So once I've chosen my option in this case I'm going to go ahead and say 11 and 3 on the 15th and the 22nd I'm going to go ahead and click on this green tick box, and I'm going to go ahead and save yes please and then the next thing I want to do, I'm not going to see any changes here watch me refresh the stock requirements list I won't see any changes here still shows up for me, I'm still trying to meet that very best date of the 4th. If we wanted to hold those dates that we just selected we would use something called the fixed date and quantity flag, which we'll cover off in another video but let's assume we're going to continue to try and improve those dates for the customer, then we're still going to work towards that December 4th date. What I'm going to do here is just flip over so that you can now see the availability overview and what you're going to see here is the 14 pieces for this particular custom order are showing up here. Okay, so 14 pieces required. 0 confirmed and we're at a negative 8 in terms of what it is that we need on the 4th of December. And if I double click here you can see the order that is referenced. Let's scroll down just a little bit and I just want to show you how it breaks apart and you'll see it here. So then on the 15th you can see we're actually confirming 23 pieces, but there was a sales order that was already previously confirmed for that date, so it's in line first. So 12 of those pieces are going to 14805, because that was confirmed before this guy was, this availability check was run after. Then 14710 gets 11 of those pieces. Now, if you're looking at that and going, well hang on, 14710 is an older order, we'll talk about that when we get into our rescheduling videos of how we actually can control and make sure that those documents get their shipments first. Then down below here you'll see the 3 pieces that are additional. Now if you saw this situation and you needed to clean it up for whatever reason, there's also other tools that will help you to do that, but we've chosen to split the shipment here, so 11 pieces on the 15th, 3 on the 22nd, and I can still see up here that I have 14 pieces that are not being satisfied on the date that they are originally intended. So, what's great about this is I can see I'm behind, I can see what my current proposal and recovery plan is like, and I can make some decisions on which order should get that quantity in when. So really good and powerful information here that lead on to additional actions and activities, but the most important part is making sure that you know what the best options are to satisfy that particular customer's needs by having that conversation with them or knowing what their rules are for how they like to receive inventory from you. Is it most important to get it all at one time? Is it most important that you hit the date? And if not, then it's not going to ship on that order or is it most important that you get as much to them as quickly as you possibly can and then ship the remaining balance as soon as it's available, and they will wait for it. Alright, so in summary, we have taken a tour through the confirmation screen on a sales order. And we have discussed several different options for managing the outcome of that check. We've discussed some use cases for each to paint a picture of how we might think about the customer experience and the flow of materials. And we've also discussed how different scenarios might change the supply side and how they work their magic, and how we would retain the right to revisit the situation if it does change and if the customer will allow it. So back over to you Martin, bring us home. Thanks a lot, Kristie. I imagine these choices may have been new to many people. It's good to know that we have these options to choose from and try to meet the customer needs and that there are rules or expectations that we can consider driving the right choices in that particular situation. So, if you want to learn more about this and other topics related to using SAP as effectively as possible, please check out our video catalog and of course if you have particular questions please submit it below.

Scheduling & Shop Floor

PP; PTM

MCP3

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we are going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's production order analysis reporting. In essence, this is how we manage the performance of our production orders, plan versus schedule versus actual. When used correctly order analysis can really help organizations make more informed decisions about their sales and operations strategies. Eacliffe, tell us more about that. Sure Martin. Order analysis is a powerful feature when used correctly to identify how well production orders are performing in keeping its commitment to the schedule. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. Provide an understanding of what insight this report provides for the entire production order. How it goes about providing this insight on the production order performance. And how to evaluate the production order performance itself. The intent here is to use transaction MCP3 to perform production order analysis. The data in this report basically lies at a level of plant material order month. So let's go ahead and execute this transaction and by default we come in at a plant level. What we can then do is a switch drill down to determine things from a material perspective or an order perspective, probably makes more sense to go from a material perspective. So here we have the different materials that we manufacture, and the goal is to then say, okay, for these materials, let's take a look at some of the variances from a scheduling perspective. So we have T versus A, which is target versus actual, where the target is coming from a production order, actual would come from a confirmation. Just to double click on one of these rows or even the total, what you get is a listing of all the different options which are available within this report. We have plan versus actual P/A for deliveries, lead time, et cetera, we also have target versus actual. So the difference between plan and target is the fact that the dates or quantities associated with the plan is coming from a plan order versus the T, it means that timing, dates, quantities is coming from a production order while the actuals, the A in both circumstances is related to a confirmation. Someone did a confirmation, it could be the start of an order, et cetera. So here I put more emphasis on the target only because I know when I have a production order, it is scheduled and the question is, how well are we doing against a schedule, in terms of if we have like a positive numbers in terms of number of days, it basically implies that the production order has started early versus if there was a negative entry like for example here in this case, this is a quantity, it means that we assured, but if we have a negative entry in terms of days, it means that the production order has started late. So the goal is that we can take these reports or these key figures, we can sort them in ascending or descending to see, look who's starting really early, who's starting really late, why do we have a big variance in terms of plan versus target or plan versus actual, or more so target versus actual. When it's plan versus target, we recognize that we get the plan orders, we need to schedule it by scheduling it, we're changing the date, hence ideally we are producing that inventory earlier to meet the plan. If we are scheduling it after the planed dates, it means, hey, you are not providing that inventory in time. So again, this is some of the insight we can get from looking at these key figures to appreciate what is going on at an order level recognizing that we have other reports that can take these orders and break it down to a lower level, which would be at an operational level. For each operation are they starting on time, finishing on time, are we losing time from queue time and so forth? So it's good to start at an order level, get this kind of insight, and if we need to dig further, recognize we have other LIS reports to to use to aid with our analysis. So in summary we have covered order analysis which allows you to. Appreciate the feedback this report provides at a production order level. Identify which key figures to focus on when looking at this report. And to evaluate the production order performance itself. Thanks Eacliffe. Evaluating our production performance is critical in establishing how well we are doing in meeting the plan. Each variation to the plan is an opportunity to either improve our planning or our execution. If you'd like to learn more about how to get the most out of your SAP system please check our other videos and of course if you have a specific burning question please submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

P2P

ME5A; MD04; ME53N; ME38; MCBZ

Hey there procurement professionals, I am Martin, and we're thrilled to have you join us as we work with you to help you set up your suppliers for success. In today's video, we're seeking to provide clarity around how you might provide a forecast to your supplier. Now I'll start by saying this, when you share information with your suppliers for the purposes of planning, it's very important that everyone's on the same page with how that information will be used and what your commercial obligations are or not. This is very important piece of conversation to have with them. Okay, folks, so let's hand this over to our ever diligent, Rutul. Rutul I'd love for you to walk our viewers through specifically how to use some of these tools and techniques that will actually allow them to successfully provide a forecast to one or two of their suppliers. Hello everyone. This is a common request and fortunately we have a few options to achieve the outcome we are looking for. Let's start with clarity on what sending a forecast really means. First things first, are you providing your supplier with your forecasted demand or their forecasted supply? These are two very different things. Most of the time, we would recommend sending their forecasted supply or your expected goods receipts. The good news is that we have a few options to get to this information and I'll walk you through three of those options today. Let's go in and take a look. All right, we talked about multiple ways where we can share the information with our suppliers about forecasted supplies or demand. Let's take a look at a few ways that we can see this information in SAP. First one we will go to is called transaction ME5A. This is a list of all purchase requisitions, they are not firm, by nature purchase requisitions are only a pre step for firm purchase orders. So we're going to take a look at this here in this transaction, where you can see all the different purchase requisitions for different criterias. We can put in purchase material, specific selection criteria, the vendor number. But what we are going to look at here right now is everything in the plant and then I am going to change the scope of list as a layout for ALV. I want to see this list in a little bit better format. So I'm going to put the plant as 1000, one of the plants that you want to look for and the scope of list. And when you click on execute, you have all of your purchase requisitions by material, sorted out that you can see and perhaps communicate to vendors in terms of forecasting. Please be careful here that purchase requisitions again are not firm requirements yet. Another way you can look at the purchase acquisitions is also through MD04. So we're going to go there. We have this material, we are looking for, 100-130. And then the material requirements list, stock requirements list shows everything from all the exceptions and the purchase requisitions, sales orders, reservations, those things. We can easily filter the information in this requirements list to say I only want to see receipts. So you click on this display filter and that standard display filter is showing only receipt. So you click on the SAP only receipts and here it tells you what your purchase requisitions are. You can see the number and you can see the date that is coming in. We can also navigate from here to purchase requisition itself and you can see the information about when it's supposed to be coming in, delivery date of July 8th 2024. That's when it's supposed to come in. So that's a couple of ways that you can see and communicate with your vendors on the forecasted supplies. Another way you can do if you have scheduling agreements in place, then you can see that information at the delivery schedule level. So we will go ahead and look at that. For that, we will navigate to transaction ME38 and enter the scheduling agreement number. Here it shows what the material number we are scheduling agreements for and then when you select the line and click on delivery schedule it will show you all the different delivery schedule for this material that is agreed upon with the vendor. Now you'll see one of the things that you want to see here in the scheduling agreements additional feature is in scheduling agreement is what they call the firm zone and trade off zone. What the firm zone means is that vendor can ship against those schedule lines and delivery lines that is communicated with them. Firm zone falls within certain time frame that vendors can without any further communication, it's ready to go, ready to be shipped versus there is also called trade off zone. And if the scheduled delivery lines fall under and mark as a trade off zone, that means there may still be room for changes to the delivery schedule for that. So that means vendor should not ship against that request yet until it goes into the firm zone. How do you know, or how does the system let you know which is firm zone versus the trade off zone? You'll see that each of these delivery lines has this indicator called firm zone versus trade off zone. Let's take a look at that. You'll notice that when the delivery line is indicated with 1, that indicator means firm zone, which means the suppliers can ship against this quantity requested for that material. If the delivery schedule line was marked with 2, that means they cannot, and they should not, ship against that request yet. All right. Now, there is another, scenario and another way that we can look at the past and even future goods receipt and goods issue information. For that, we will go to transaction MCBZ. You can put in the plant information and we will look at this material again We are going to expand the date period, that we are looking the data for so that we can see goods receipts and goods issues in the past or in the future. So we will go a couple months back and we will go all the way out to the next year. We're going to look from March of 2024 till August of 2025. We'll see what the goods receipt and goods issue picture looks like for this material. Now by default, it does not bring in that information. So we will bring in that additional information and we will look at goods issues, MRP, and goods receipt, MRP, and we will bring them over. Now standard SAP functionality, you can select this line and we can drill down by, and then we look at them by month and now you are looking at what your total goods receipt, and goods issue, projected goods issue and projected goods receipt for this material from March 2024 till August 2025. These are the projected goods issues that's already assigned, which is these are the projected goods receipt assigned and projected for this material. We can look at this graphically, we can select the two goods issue and goods receipt information that we want to look at and we can expand this view a little bit, and we can certainly also look at the options, configure the 2D options as lines and you can see the projected goods receipts and goods issue for this material. This will help you communicate with your vendors or for you to know how much is going to be issued and received and then contractually contact your vendors to make any adjustments that they need Excellent. So to wrap up our time together today, a few key reminders. First, sharing a forecast of your anticipated goods receipt plan with your supplier is meant to help them with the pre planning. Second, there needs to be upfront conversation and clarity around which signals you are sharing with them, and for what purposes? This leads us to the third and very important point, and Martin highlighted this earlier. It is very important that you align with your suppliers on what the commercial implications of acting on that signal in advance of a firm PO or a delivery schedule really means. Hey, thank you Rutul. Always a pleasure to hear your perspective on things, and walking through the options with you. I feel like there will be many more discussions to come out of this video. And I kind of look forward to part two. So once again, thank you. Hey folks, you're going to learn more about this topic or others and even part two, please feel free to check out the video catalog we have. If you have a specific question for us, feel free to submit it below.

Procurement & MRP

DM; P2P; PTM

MD07; MD04; MIGO; ME01; MC$G; ME2N; ME33L; MEQ3

Hey folks, Martin here, and we are here today to talk about a real life supply chain challenge that one of our viewers submitted. What can SAP do when we are over capacity at a supplier? We are managing this currently with blanket orders in Excel today, and it's getting out of hand. What are the options in standard SAP? Wow, what a great question. If you are over capacity at a supplier, you're in a very risky situation, and that's made worse if you're manually managing it. Let's address this. The good news is we have a lot of tools in our toolkit to help us with this, and Steven is with me in the studio today to specifically answer some of these particular questions you have. How would you use SAP to help and over capacity at a supplier situation? Take it away, Steven. Well, that's no fun, Martin, as you say, that's never happy news, but I can take you through some practical blocking and tackling that I would do and explain how we could put SAP to work instead of relying on Excel. First, I've got some ideas on how SAP can help us if we're going over the capacity threshold at our supplier and how to identify the uncovered demand. Then I've got an interesting idea on how to identify other potential sources. Lastly, I'd like to highlight the difference in approach for a temporary versus persistent constraint at that supplier. Let's take a dive into SAP and take a look. We're headed to communication central in SAP MD07. This is where planning related exception messages live. This is one of the places where we can start to identify and unpack when we're falling short on supply. There are several exception messages that are designed to help us quickly get our arms around the materials that require attention. We can see a few examples in this list. An exception message 30 lets us know that we've uncovered demand within the lead time and we're already behind. An exception message 10 lets us know that our supply is coming in too late, and we need to see what we can do to fill that gap. An exception message 96 lets us know that we're under our safety stock target. Red lights let us know that we don't have sufficient supply for today's demand. These are some of the usual suspects, but let's take a look at a few more. Exception message 70 lets us know that we've exceeded the max release quantity on the quote arrangement. Did you know that you can control how much volume is released to a supplier over a particular period of time? We've got some great walkthroughs on how to work with quota arrangements. And when you're in here working with a materials planning situation, you may also see a warning message letting you know that you've exceeded the target quantity on the scheduling agreement if you have allocations in place, these are two really helpful messages to help manage those situations. So what do we do if we know we're struggling to keep up with the demand that a particular supplier? Well, first we'd want to check our source list for any additional qualified sources. Then I have a more interesting idea for you. How about using SAP spend analysis to find other potential sources? We could run the report for a longer term horizon, and then switch our drill down to the material group. What other suppliers are supporting similar materials? Are there other potential sources where we have existing relationships? Or is there an alternate source applying to a different plant in your network? SAP provides a ton of ways to slice and dice information from this single report. The next thing to consider is if this is a temporary or a persistent challenge. If it's temporary, you may be able to set up a contract for a fixed period of time to call off of. MRP will automatically record the purchasing volume for you if the master data is properly set up, allowing for ease of maintenance. You could also consider the use of scheduling agreements that reflect what the supplier has committed to you. This will invoke the aforementioned warning if the target quantity is exceeded in the MRP run. The tendency of many organizations that are experiencing a capacity constraint at a supplier is to issue a blanket PO. Blanket PO's are not a good solution. They limit the help MRP can give us in aligning the supply plan. We want to use these other tools in the toolkit to commercially commit to our suppliers and then set them up for success while still keeping our plans reasonable and realistic to our demand. Then of course, there's the quote arrangement and the ability to throttle how many units a single source can provide over a period of time. And then let us know with an exception message when that quota is exceeded. A challenging situation is even more difficult when you're forced to manage it offline. Let's move these rules into SAP and address the situation with clarity, precision, and support. All right people. We got our hands on some tools. Most of them aren't new, but applying them in the right way to the right situation is where the magic sometimes happens. And I think we had some of those good conversations today. As a reminder, we touched on contracts to support a shorter term allocation of volume to an alternate source. Contract acceptable in most cases, blanket order bad, almost always. Then we looked at scheduling agreements to provide better mid to long-term visibility to the constrained supplier with a firm zone to represent specific commitments. Lastly, we hit on quota arrangements and MRP to help us balance the volume. We've got videos on all of these tools individually that I'd love to encourage you to go and check out. Hey, Steven, much appreciated, that's awesome. You know, and the reality guys is that if the more visibility we have of our constraints and the alternatives we have to deal with them, the better. We just become more proficient. Hey folks, we have quite a few topics in this particular area, and if you can find the video in a video catalog, please use the AI chatbot, it'll recommend some for you.

Procurement & MRP

P2P

MD04; ME22N; MD62

Hey there Reveal TV community. Welcome back, Martin here. Are you ready to tackle the noise and churn in your supply chain? If it feels like things are just changing and changing and changing again, it's time to stop that madness. I promise it's costing you. You're paying in customer satisfaction, supplier collaboration, and your team members are just fatigued. When this fully manifests, a common phrase you'll hear is "just tell me what you want me to do". That's the first sign that we're in real trouble. In this studio with me today, hailing all the way from the UK is Liam. Liam is on the front lines helping clients work through this churn every single day, so I'm sure he is got some ideas to share with us. Take it away, buddy. Thanks, Martin. No one enjoys constantly shifting dates, ever changing prices, and just general repeated adjustments to the POs. Most of the time we don't even know how bad it is. We make changes to POs for loads of reasons, but a common one is when we want to cancel, but we delay instead, and we do this over and over again. We also may have shifting priorities and has this ever happened to you? You end up rescheduling out only to reschedule in and then may be to reschedule out again. And we're probably getting really frustrated with MRP. So let's see where it hurts. Let's go jump into SAP. So we're going to look at this material right here as an example. Now first things to call out in terms of the planning scenario, we've got some quantity of inventory available, we have a higher safety stock than we have available, so we're already negative and we also have some forecast sitting at the beginning of the month. Now further on, MRP has generated some supply proposals and they've been converted into purchase orders. We have one satisfying, some near term demand. And with another out in early September to generate and look at the 1st of August requirements. Now what we can see here is we already have an exception message on it, which is saying, and that's the system telling us, Hey, can you please bring it in, in line with the requirement on the 1st of August? Now, here's the dilemma as a planner. We know we are towards the end of August already, it's now the 25th, and with the forecast sitting at the beginning of the month, we need to toss up whether or not that forecast is going to be consumed or realized in the remaining six days. What's the alternative? We spend a lot of time working with the supplier to try and expedite only for that material to not be required in these same quantities. So let's play that scenario out. If we handle this exception message exactly as it says right now, okay reschedule into the 1st, we can't bring material in in the past, so let's bring it in as quickly as we can and say maybe we can expedite it to the 27th. So let's add that in as a confirmation right here. It is an inbound delivery, we're going to do a thousand and the delivery date's going to be the 27th of the month. Continue through the warning messages and get to my main screen. Now, I've successfully rescheduled that in as early as we can. I've worked back and forth with the supplier. It's still giving me that same exception message because MRP wants it on the 1st, but we know that can't happen. Now, let's play my proposed scenario out. Now we're getting towards the end of the month and as expected, the forecast drops away because our demand team realize that it's not going to be hit. So if we make that change now, I'm going to take out that entry. Let's go ahead and save that and refresh the planning position. Now we've worked tirelessly to bring that through and we've actually got no exception message in the end. So if this was a true scenario to play out, we've worked back and forth with our supplier to try and manage that exception as best as we can, but in the end, it didn't matter because the forecast was there. This happens day in, day out with our procurement proposals based on those exception messages, and so that is the ongoing challenge of having to work backwards and forwards using those exception messages and balance the supply chain with our exceptions generated from MRP. If this seems crazy on our side, imagine what it feels like to our suppliers. We have to stop the churn of change. We have to stop the madness. Yes, POs will need updates. We need to make a meaningful change where it matters, but not just change for change sake. There's only so many times that supply can accommodate us, and if they don't trust our orders, we may not get the best service or our big asks answered. But most importantly, we need to look at why. What is going on in our planning situation that's causing this constant churn, and what can we do to create the stability we're all looking for? Thanks, Liam. You mentioned that the process fatigue of constant changes creates numbness or a lack of awareness of how many touches are required to get through the order cycle, that is worth reflecting on. So again, thanks for the insights. Hey folks, if you want to learn about how to deal with churn and other processes, please check out our video catalog, and if you're struggling to find something, our AI chatbot will be able to help.