SAP Optimization

QM; PTM; P2P; OTC; WM

MD04; MM03; MIGO; BMBC

Hey folks, Martin here. So good to see you guys again. Are you ready to dive into SAP and put it to good use? Well, let's get going. Is your organization challenging itself with ESG performance goals? Well, the good news is that there are many, many ways SAP can actually be a helpful vehicle of enabling achieving these goals. Today, we're going to explore a simple but effective example. We'll be dialing in on SLED and BBD. This is one of the many tools to support making the best use of our available inventory, keeping us and our customers safe and reducing waste. Our guide today is Ed, and he's going to introduce us to SLED, or S L E D and BBD, and show us where and how they are determined. Ed, what would you like to tell our audience today? Thanks, Martin. A lot of good can come from a simple concept, and the SLED and BBD dates are just that. The SLED, or the Specified Limited Expiration Date, and the BBD, or Best By Date, can be tracked at the material and batch level. Tracking these dates in SAP also produces another very important piece of information called the Remaining Shelf Life. This requires a few simple settings, which we'll review today. With these key pieces of data in hand, we now have a few of the foundational building blocks to ensure that we're rotating and moving through our inventory efficiently. We're able to meet customer specific requirements through batch search strategies. And, we can monitor, prioritize, and make usage decisions with our list displays. Let's dive in and go find the places where SLED and BBD live and review how the remaining shelf life is calculated. Where is that shelf limited expiration date, or SLED date? How is it calculated? What does it mean to us? Well, we can answer two of those questions with a look inside the Material Master. These settings live on a tab you may not visit very often. We're headed to the Plant Data Storage Location 1 tab. You can see a bunch of settings at the top around rules for storage. Let's say you're not running full warehouse management, and you need some basic things in place at the storage location level to manage the storage of that inventory. This is where that data lives. Now, if we look a little further down, we have a section on shelf life data. Let's walk through some of these fields. The first one we want to concern ourselves with is the total shelf life. This is the total time the product can expect to be of best quality and eligible for use without restriction. This is measured from the date of manufacture, and that could be our own production, or in this case, it's our supplier's date of manufacture. The next field we would want to consider is the minimum remaining shelf life. This is the rule the system will follow when receiving the goods. A supplier may have shipped us a lot from a while ago. That's okay, so long as we have the designated amount of time remaining. This would also apply if we transferred goods if the information was set appropriately in the receiving plant. Another important field is the period indicator. Here, we can set days, weeks, months, or even years, depending on the nature of the expiration and the associated storage requirements. We can also set a max storage period, restricting the amount of time that we would want to let the material age from goods receipt without review. Interestingly, the time period for the max storage period can get quite finite, down to minutes, seconds, even microseconds. Okay, let's see how this is applied. Let's go into MIGO and go through the receiving process. So here, we'll enter the manufacturing date and tick the item, check it. Okay, and now let's try to violate the rules and change the date. It's not within the allowable time, so we get the message and can work with that. We have several clients in the food and beverage industry that work with the byproducts of other processes. When the milk is coming, ready or not, or the harvest is coming, ready or not, you have to be very smart in what you choose to do with those products to maximize shelf life and meet different requirements for different customers. I'd say no one likes moldy cheese except for when they do. All right, now that we know where these settings are set and referenced, we have some of the foundational building blocks to reduce waste, prioritize use, and support customer specific requirements. Simply tracking this information and reviewing it consistently gives us a jump start, which opens up options and opportunities that we would not have without this additional visibility. SLED and BBD are useful for both procured material and manufactured goods. And through regular monitoring, which we'll explain in another video, we can proactively work to review expiring material and reduce the number of decisions required around disposition of expired materials. Thanks for joining us and I appreciate your time today. As do I. Thank you, Ed. There's no time like the present to put additional focus in this area and explore how SAP can help us meet our ESG performance objectives. This is but one of many pieces of functionality that can help set us apart and set us up for success. Thanks again, Ed. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about these particular topics or other ESG performance goals, please check out our videos or submit your questions below.

P2P

MD04; MD03

Hey, welcome back Reveal TV fans, Martin here, and I really hope you're thriving. Although I suspect that if you're watching this particular video, you have either trouble on the horizon or in the thick of it right now. If so, we're here to help. And you know that if you're dealing with constrained materials and facing being put on allocation is not a new challenge. Although, the cyclical nature certainly makes us feel like we're running an ultramarathon. As soon as we get one sector of the regional supply chain stabilized, it seems like we just have another one firing up. Now some of that is just normal supply chain life. But notice of allocation is certainly at the more extreme end of the spectrum. It's not fun for anyone. But there are some great tools to help us deal with the situation. And here to help us navigate the world of allocation today is Kelly. Kelly, you're quite the negotiator, I'm really interested to hear how you can introduce these tools to all of us. Thanks, Martin. No one likes to be told they can't have something, or that they are limited in what they can have, even if it's the best, most fair approach for the market served. For a lot of us, our response to the constraint of allocation has been alternate sources, often at a premium. Sometimes we've had to hedge our purchases and work with the burden of inventory carrying costs. Potentially expiring materials if we hedge too much or purchase from a less strategic source. And loads of other fun stuff. You're right. It's no fun. Even for someone who enjoys problem solving through negotiations like me. So here's a few things to know. We're on allocation when a supplier is managing priorities across customers in a limited or constrained environment. This can then limit sales potential to our customers and also result in a much higher cost to serve. I think in difficult situations like this, it is important to know that you're not alone. There are a lot of organizations going through this and comparing notes may be very helpful. For our demo today, I'm going to explain how three tools can work together to help you navigate the challenge of being on allocation. Let's go in and take a look. Sometimes it helps to bring the big picture together. I'm starting here in the stock requirements list. And if you look in the lower right corner of my screen, you'll see that I've asked SAP to show you the transaction code I'm in. This should help you as we go along. This is the current planning situation for a material that I've been told will be on allocation for the "foreseeable future". If you can't tell, I used air quotes for the foreseeable future part. I don't like that. I want a date. So here's what we're going to do. It's August right now, and my lead time is 90 days. I'm going to put a restricted plan in place for the next six months, and we're going to revisit this with the supplier monthly. My normal supplier has told me that to maintain the maximum allocation of X units per month, I need to guarantee a certain volume. I've pushed them, and we've agreed on a target quantity of the units you see here over the next 66 months. I've told them we will pull based on demand, but at a rate of no more than this many units per month. In addition, I am introducing a second source that will take my remaining volume, but at a price that makes us say, yikes. I'm going to have to chat with the sales, customer experience, and product management to see if we will weather the increase or pass some on. We hate to do that, but we may need to have that tough conversation to achieve customer tolerance time. To make this work, we're using several techniques. First, is a scheduling agreement that provides a forecast outlook for our supplier that has us on allocation. They have an idea of the pace of our demand and also an agreement that shows the total target quantity. In this document, I can also work with alternate master data related to lead time or pricing. I can update my source list to see this as the relevant source for the next six months, with a return to normal after that. I am also using firm and trade off zones for the commercial obligation of the information I'm sharing with them. Firm, they are cleared to produce and ship. Trade off, we will take it, but timing is not guaranteed and we've got a generous time horizon to meet our obligation. Second is a contract for my secondary supplier with specific information on the terms of the agreement. We've been eyeing this supplier for quite some time now. This may be an opportunity, if we can get them to give us better pricing and terms. I've asked for scaled pricing, which I will reflect in the price scales of the contract. This contract will also go into the source list as a valid source. Last but not least, I have a quota arrangement in place that's managing the split for me and restricting the volume that can go to my primary supplier. The one that has issued the allocation notice per month. I could base this on all kinds of different periods, but this month is good for now. The final product is in the system rules. That produces a balanced plan within the constraints. We have right now and a relatively easy exit to normal if normal arrives again. I can work with this. Today you were introduced to a few tools that can work together to help you manage the challenge of allocation. We have several other videos that go deeper into these tools and can help you get started. Without a doubt difficult situations require creative solutions. Sometimes people have great ideas for how to navigate rough waters, but the practicality of executing the plan can be daunting. I'm here to say that it can be made manageable. If you have an idea, let's explore how to get SAP to empower you to deliver it. Things change and when it's time, all of these tools we're talking about can be expired or discontinued , offering you a way out and back to business as usual or better. I love a good negotiation. Thank you, Kelly. Great insight. I too love a good negotiation and trying to turn what starts as a seemingly losing situation Into something good for the future. Out of a crisis comes innovation. So navigating tricky waters is a great time to see what you have to work with. This is a good starting point for a conversation. Well, folks, if you want to learn more about how to use some of these tools to be able to deal with suppliers and customer allocations, please check out our other videos as well.

DM; P2P; PTM; OTC; WM

MD62; MD04; CM01

Martin: Hey, rock Stars Martin here. It's time for a chat around what happens when the integration starts breaking down. There's an inescapable truth about being a supply chain practitioner. The supply chain relies on integration and so does SAP. It is the beauty, the power, and the challenge. Getting it right isn't easy and it has both to do with people and a system. Here with the story to further explain is Steven. Take it away, buddy. Steven: Yes, Martin. Uh, the story has trials, uh, it has tribulations, it has people trying to do the right thing and a system that desperately wants to empower them to do those right things. The story revolves around the critical alignment of plan, schedule, and actual. We will seek to describe a scenario where the baton pass is, well, let's just say less than seamless. There's some confusion as to who's on first, and as we move through the process we have so much localized decision making. That we could definitely benefit from less. In short, we're not integrated, we're not aligned, and we can see that in SAP. So what should we do? Well, let's go in and take a look. The story I'm about to tell you is one that we've heard over and over again. It's a story about several individuals doing the best they can within the sphere of what they can control. It's also the story about frustration, confusion, and loss of value. Unfortunately, it's far more common than we'd like to believe. Our story starts with Rachel. Rachel's a demand planner who is the challenging job of painting a picture of what the company expects to sell over the next 18 months. She's a key player in the sales and operations process. She works with sales, marketing, product management to build an unconstrained consensus based plan. She keeps the system up to date with the best information she has and has a good process for monitoring the performance of her plan. Rachel also works with Chris. Chris is her planning counterpart. Chris provides feedback on whether it's feasible to supply the plan and attends the sales and operations planning meetings, and stays engaged with Rachel throughout the month. Now Chris knows that the demand plan is flawed and when product is not available, he feels like it's him and not Rachel that feels the heat. He constantly is fighting fires and he is rewarded for his finesse in crisis management. He works hard to align the schedule with what he sees as the priority needs of the customer, and sees Rachel's plan as information but doesn't really believe it's real. So he makes a plan based on what he thinks will actually happen. He also builds his plan in consideration of a balance of efficiency, service levels, and inventory investment. Not easy, especially since he has to redo Rachel's work in a spreadsheet, but he delivers quality plans to the shop floor every time. Now Dumebi is the recipient of the schedule. She's the supervisor for the first shift and sets up the other shifts as well. Chris's schedule is always changing and sometimes he even has scheduled downtime. He doesn't understand that her goals are all around OEE and absorption, and a lot of times his schedule doesn't prioritize those things. Plus customer service as a direct line to Dumebi and frequently asks her to intervene. Dumebi resequences a schedule and adjusts the quantities for more efficient runs based on what she knows they will need. Now meet Brent. Brent is the sorry soul who's making sure material is available to production. His suppliers think he's impossible. He is constantly making changes and asking for expedites . The things he expedites, production isn't running. Then there's unplanned consumption. For some reason, material planned for a particular run has gone elsewhere. Can't manufacturing make what they're just supposed to make? This team is actually a bunch of individuals. They're each doing the best that they can do, but when the baton is passed, they're looking at it and changing it and passing an entirely different baton onto the next person. What happens when this happens? Let's set the operational and business pieces aside. Each person, each well-intended individual is eroding the confidence of the prior person's work. There is no team, integration is broken down. We have to fix this. We have to get people engaged in conversations. We have to commit to a plan and collectively course correct. We can no longer make localized decisions the norm. We simply cannot win with that strategy. So let's engage as leaders and start making it possible for our individual superstars to become a well-functioning team. Imagine the possibilities. I wish I could tell you that this is a ridiculous overdramatized caricature of an integration breakdown. Unfortunately, it's not and examples like this are found throughout the functional areas of the supply chain. So what are our heroes meant to do? Well, first, if you see something, say something. Don't just go on your own way. But tell the person you take in the baton pass from what you're thinking and why. Let them challenge you and mutually agree on how to move forward. Second, inform SAP. Don't let the person receiving your baton pass wonder what's going on, or they'll come up with their own path forward. Thirdly, after you have a healthy debate, trust in your newly integrated approach and follow the plan until such time that another conversation is needed. Martin: Hey, thanks, Steven. Integration breakdowns are tough, and this is a good example of what happens when we let the problem fester and simply go our own way. We need to have a healthy conflict and figure out how to get back to the same page. Thanks again for the story and of course, the recommendations. Hey folks, if you want to know more about some of these Leadership Digest stories and videos, please check out our video catalog. And of course, if you're not sure or have a specific question, please submit it below.

DM; OTC; 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, my name is Martin and in this video we are going to focus on where to find SAP exception messages. When used correctly. Exception messages can alert organizations to potential issues with the MRP results or other processes within the SAP. But where are they? Kristie, help us discover where they are. I think I can show you where Martin. Let's talk about where to find this powerful feature. As a buyer or planner, this is the feature that should be helping us most with our day-to-day work. Yet, for many of us, we struggle on how to get started, and in this demonstration, we're going to focus on three key things. First of all, what transactions will lead us to find these exception messages? Second, where the exception messages will actually appear. And third, how we should think about getting started when evaluating and resolving materials with exception messages. Let's learn about exception messages together. So this is a great question. Where do we find exception messages for demand? Have you ever noticed that when you look at where your exception messages are placed that they are not placed against your demand elements, they are only placed against your supply elements. The only one that's a little confusing is safety stock, because safety stock is a demand element, but it's letting you know that the stock is fallen below safety stock level, so it's related to your ability to supply it. So if you think about the purpose of MRP and our purpose as planners is to supply the demand and as buyers to supply the demand. It's our whole, our whole goal is to make sure that we have the right material in the right place, at the right time, the right cost, and the right quality, but our exceptions, because it's communicating to us as folks who are on the supply side of the house, only fall on our supply elements. You can see right here I have this scheduling agreement for this customer. It's actually in the past. Today is the 14th of February. We don't have enough inventory for it. There's no exception message. Where's the exception message? It's on the purchase order that is intended to provide the supply to supply that demand. Interesting, right? There is a lot of exception monitoring available though, for demand side elements. So the first is what I'm going to show you today, which is how we monitor our forecast to see how we're doing there. The second is, a good example would be VA06 for those of you who are on ECC or some of the Fiori apps, for those of you who have migrated to S/4, that let us know what is happening with our sales orders and gives us a lot of exception monitoring and insight into those arenas. Another good example for how we would find some exceptions would be around housekeeping. So we can always look for overdue MRP elements, in our exception monitor related to demand side items. But let's look at one of the exception monitors for managing our forecast, and I'm going to come in here first, and I just want to sum this up. So sometimes it's nice to be able to look at things summed up by periods, so days, weeks, or months, and in this case we happen to be forecasting in monthly buckets, so I want to come in here and take a look, this column here for planned independent requirements. So this is what we have, we can think of it as our open remaining to sell. So if we had planned for the month, this is the balance that we do not currently have a sales order or scheduling agreement pegged against. Our requirements are what we have sold for the month, and then the balance of that is the plans receipts. You can see we're planning perfectly in balance for these items. We're planning to replenish to the total demand, and we're not planning to keep any additional stock. Okay, so then the question becomes if we are starting to see exception messages like request to expedite what caused us to be outside of plan, did we place our purchase orders on time is definitely something we could look at. The other thing we can look at is we can see how we are balancing against our current forecast, and so to do that I'm going to come up to environment and I'm going to go look at this thing called total requirements display. So in the interest of full disclosure, I have a background in demand planning, so this is not blaming the forecast for all of our supply chain woes. I wish that that was the case or blaming the customer, if only the customer would place that order with the lead time that they were promised, if only, you know, the forecasting team would get it together on the demand plan. No, we, we work in supply chain our purpose in life is dealing with the variability and the volatility and the mixed issues that occur. So this is our world and what we're good at working through, but we can get some exception monitoring on how we're performing to the forecast. You can see here all the pieces that are out here, so what we have consumed and where we are able to balance against that forecast and it's easier to do this if we actually go in and we look at the customer view. You'll actually get a red, yellow, and green light here. So these items that are in red at the top, this is demand that does not currently have any forecast that it's able to consume against, and that's why we don't have any information over here to the right. Further down from that we have items that do have forecasts they're able to consume against, so a hundred and this is what's been assigned to it, and we can work our way through until we get out into the future, where we've got greens where there's plenty for us to peg against. So this is our planned quantity, what we're currently pegging against and then based on our consumption rules, how much of that forecast we're able to consume, and so in this case we can see that these sales orders don't have anything, they don't have a forecast that's within their consumption window and so this demand is actually in addition to our forecast. Now this happens in the current period so there's other considerations in terms of how we might be dropping or reorganizing that forecast for the current month, but this is very helpful in determining whether we're ahead or behind. The other piece of this around just rolling it up to these totals is if you can think about the planned independent requirements as you're remaining open to sell. When you exhaust those and the requirements, quantity starts to climb. If you are within your firm zone, your lead time for your suppliers, your firm zone for manufacturing, this is where we'll start to see those exception messages pop up because we aren't in position to be able to supply, so we are overselling plan. The opposite can also happen and we'd be able to see that here if we are underselling the plan. There's lots of plan that is open and we don't have anything currently pegged against it. You know, you can get a look out across the horizons. You can see here for October, we've already consumed the totality of our forecast, we have requirements of 210 pieces, in fact that may be larger than what the original forecast quantity was, and so we can use that customer view for help to determine that and then to be able to have good conversations with our counterparts in the sales and operations planning process, the IPP process, or just in demand planning to work through and resolve any of those exceptions as they occur. So really nice to be able to go through and see how the customer orders are stacking up against that demand and then be able to adjust accordingly and that's how we might be able to detect some of the exceptions that are occurring in our planning process. That and housekeeping are our two main ways to be able to do that because we housekeep both for supply and demand, and we have to push back on the demand in order to resolve the supply. So if we go through and we cancel something, or we delete something, which we should never do, we should close out. If we're doing those types of activities and there's still open demand, then all that will happen is the next time MRP runs, it's just going to regenerate for us, so getting a line of sight on some of these daily views and being able to have those housekeeping conversations with our counterparts definitely helps us to get this cleaned up. So that's where we find our exceptions for demand. So in summary we have covered how exception messages. Show up in key transactions. Highlight areas where our supply is misaligned to our demand. And become a critical daily habit for managing the overall supply chain. Super exciting! Thank you Kristie. We know that exceptions are the lifeblood of buyers and planners daily activities but finding exception messages is important because they highlight potential issues and this allows planners and buyers to proactively work to resolve them before they become larger and time consuming and more impactful into the business. If you'd like to know more about exceptions, finding exceptions and exception management in general, of course plus any other features and function SAP please check out our video catalog and of course if you've got some suggestions we are happy to listen please submit them below.

QM; P2P; PTM

QA33; MD07; MD04

Hey there Reveal TV community, Martin here. And today I believe we have a quality topic for you. One of my favorite things to see when we're out walking the floor is what's happening to the world of quality inspection. It's such a critical function and often so overlooked. Many of the times the challenge we see in quality isn't the actual defects. It's the efficient movement of material through the inspection process and having the right people, equipment and partners, et cetera, to keep it up. It actually turns into a physical backup on the shop floor, often exploding into exception messages, status confusion, and queue shuffling. Hey Jason, I know this is a tough topic, but such an important one. Tell us more. I completely agree that while quality is central to our processes and while everyone understands that it's a critical step, we really do struggle to keep tabs, keep up, and remain sufficiently resourced. So I can't wait to get into this. Today, we're going to explore how we as planners and buyers and MRP controllers can support our quality colleagues in prioritizing the inspection backlog. In today's video, we will. Identify some past due usage decisions and lock closeouts. Figure out which items have red lights by generating a work list. And use days of forward coverage in our exception messages to help prioritize a list to discuss with our partners in quality. Let's go in and take a look. You'll hear us talk a lot about integration and learning how to work collaboratively across the supply chain using exception messages to direct our actions to the most critical items. It often seems, though, that the quality team gets left behind a bit in this effort. They're off in their own little world, trying to figure out which inspections are most critical, often just taking them in order of start date without really knowing which ones are the most critical to keep the flow of production happening. Other than maybe getting an angry email or phone call when things go off the rails, they're pretty much on their own. Well, out of sight, out of mind is never a good approach to managing critical supply chain functions. So I'm going to share a couple of simple ways that we can help the quality team have better visibility to where they should focus their efforts. Here, you see the selection screen for QA33, which allows us to view inspection lots. We have a number of selection options here to choose from on the main screen, but I want to share a little inside pro tip to expand options. At the top left, you can see a red, green, and blue button. I thought surely this must be someone's flag, however my search proved to be frustrating and I was not able to find it. So, if someone knows out there, I'm curious. Can you send me an email and just let me know which country this belongs to? Or town, or county, I don't know. Whatever. Anyway, this is called dynamic selection options and, when I pop it up, you can see here that I get a bunch of different options that weren't there before. So for example, maybe I want to search QM Lots based on a specific purchase order number or specific purchase org. Those are options that I can use just by clicking here and then I can put my document in and run the list by that. So just a cool little tip that maybe a lot of people don't know about. You can explore this and take note that that button's available in a number of other transactions, so keep an eye out for it, and you might find it can help you refine your searches. Okay, enough of that, for this demo, I'm just going to keep it simple, I'm going to look at plant 1710, and I'm going to use only inspection lots without a usage decision. Now, this can sometimes run a little bit long, so I've already brought the information up on a different screen , and so here we go. First off, I have sorted these on the start date, earliest to latest. Now this is a perfectly logical way to prioritize the list and is often the approach when we're not collaborating as effectively across the supply chain as we possibly could. But how might we use other information in SAP to find out if there's a better sequence to support critical cases? So in this case, I'm going to use the old CTRL Y trick and highlight these guys and then I'm going to CTRL C to copy it to the clipboard and I'm going to pop over to MD07 and upload that list of materials. So I'm only looking at exceptions for those specific materials that I pulled from the QM monitor. So let's run that , and this is a pretty short list, but there's still some good info to be discovered here. If we just went by the dates in QA33, we would inspect one of the lots for QM001, then all four of the lots for this EWMS4-03 material. And then finally, FG129 and the final lots for QM001. But is that really the right approach? Take a look at the three columns that show here the stock days supply, the first receipt days of supply, and second receipt days of supply. What we can see here is that both QM001 and FG129 have red lights over here on the traffic lights, which means that they have a negative supply situation. While the third item is green, meaning that it basically has unlimited coverage. So in this case, if we just follow the dates from QA33, we'd be inspecting four lots of this material here that has no supply disruption and no current demand, while these guys that are having a critical supply situation wait. So that's most likely holding up production and could delay shipping to a customer, which is probably not the best plan. You can do this check very quickly in a daily stand up meeting and provide clear guidance to the quality team on what is most critical for them to complete right now to keep the process flowing. And this is even more crucial if, as we often find, quality is a bottleneck where optimizing the flow is vitally important. So there you have it. A simple way to use the red lights and days of coverage information in the MRP Exception Monitor to better prioritize quality inspections. And I am very serious about figuring out which country that flag belongs to. So help me out, send me an email, let me know what you find out. If it's not obvious, I am passionate about this topic. We so often see quality departments with good procedures that are just struggling to keep up. We need to partner well to provide some perspective on prioritization when there is a backlog. So a few points to take with you. First, Cadence keeps the chaos at bay. Trademark. Regularly review and help your colleagues to review delayed usage decisions or critical incoming inspections. Second, there are all kinds of work lists for status monitoring and QM. Make sure the team knows where to look so that all lots are appropriately addressed. And third, and I can't emphasize this enough, identify and feed your bottlenecks, but don't overfeed them. Work the constraint, look for the pacing that's possible, and adjust your inspection times to reflect reality, then improve that reality. That's what we do to make things better. Hey, thank you Jason. I knew that would get you fired up. Quality both feeds the processes on incoming inspections, and is the last leg in the relay before a product is ready for our customer. We focus on so many of the surrounding processes, but often quality inspection and how we work is prioritized and process is underserved. I'm really glad we're discussing it today. So thank you. Hey folks, you want to learn more about quality management just generally speaking or specifically, check out our chatbot, it will help recommend some videos for you.

SD; MM; PP

MD04; VA03

The best way to learn is by doing so. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. Martin here, and today we've got a good one, in this video we're going to explore a material availability date, otherwise known as the MAD date. SAP has such a wide variety of dates which all have specific purposes and lead to a flow of information that drives our supply chain. The material availability date is no exception, as is what drives the required on hand date for MRP, traffic light, stock on hand, and exceptions. It's pretty important. We don't want to miss out on what exactly it is. So, Kristie, why don't you tell us exactly why the material availability date is called the MAD date? Because Martin, it's the date that the customers get mad if we don't have material available, and that might be our external customers, or our sister facilities, or even the manufacturing floor. Okay, before I jump into SAP for this demo, did you at least chuckle? That's it, folks. That's as funny as she gets. Yeah, okay. So what will we see in the demo today? We will explore how the MAD date gets determined. And some very important and often overlooked lead time considerations. How it shows up in the stock requirements list and what the impact is on the MRP run and exception monitoring. Off we go! All right, let's go in and see what this MAD date is all about. So, as we previously said, the MAD date is the date that the customer gets MAD if we don't have the product available. It's the date that the product is needed to be on the shelf so that all the other subsequent activities that are required in order to get it out the door to the customer on time based on when we made and are now trying to keep that promise. So, if you go into a sales order, and I'm going to show you an example of what I would call a flat schedule. I'll explain how this is actually working. You may see this a lot on your sales orders and what I want to do is explain what maybe should be happening instead. So let's just go in and we're going to grab the second item and I'm going to go in and I can see that there's a schedule line. So we ran an availability check. There's a schedule line in place and I can see the first date is the 2nd of December, that's when they're looking to get this product from us. And right now we can see that it was not able to be fully confirmed for the 2nd of December but instead has been confirmed partially for the 2nd and partially for the 4th. So this customer is allowing us to do two shipments. So multiple, partial shipments in this case, it happens to be two. Now, if we go in here, though, to the shipping tab, this is what allows us to get to that mandate, and this is so important because this is what drives the supply chain, right? This is the date that we're transferring over because it's the date we've committed to the customer and we're driving our supply chain to be able to meet this date. And if you look here, we have the delivery date of 12/2 and everything else is sitting flat to that date, right? So there's no additional time that is allotted for any of these additional pieces of the puzzle, and SAP has loads of dates and they're all based on lead time offsets. Lead time becomes very, very important, and the really nice thing about SAP is that it allows us all of these different lead time buckets so we can go through and figure out how much time we realistically need in order to accomplish each of these activities in order to be able to make sure that we get this to the customer on time. And so think about it as, you know, your quality inspection time, or your goods receipt processing, or dock to stocks time on the supply side, your planned delivery time, or in house production time, or the time on your routings. Same thing applies for a customer, so we've got a bunch of different things that we have to do. So we're shipping from a particular shipping point, we may have a route and a route schedule involved. The customer may have a receiving calendar that dictates when they're able to receive goods. Let's say it takes five days to ship to the customer and we're responsible for coordinating that delivery. So if the delivery date was 12/2 and we need five days for it to move and make its way to the customer, probably we're going to have a material availability date that is at least five days, if not longer before that in order to be able to make sure that that happens. So if you go into your sales order and you notice that this is really just a flat schedule, think about what kind of time buckets you need in order to be able to set yourself up for success because what you're trying to get to is that material availability date. So the delivery date offset by whatever time is necessary to get that product to the customer, so when do we need to issue those goods in order for it to hit that delivery date. Now for some of us, that delivery date represents the date it's leaving our facility, for others of us that will represent the date it is actually going to be reaching the customer. So you got to know your particular terms with your customer. Based on the date that you want to issue it, when do you need to start pick, packing, and staging for loading? That might be another day offset. If it's export and you have paperwork to do, it may be several days or even a week or two beforehand that's required. All of those things, calculating backwards, the delivery date minus the lead time for your route and transportation time minus the amount of time it takes to pick, pack, and load is what gets you to the material availability date or when that product would be required. And so as you run your ATP check and it's looking to see when inventory can be available, then you're flipping the schedule and scheduling from that material availability date forward for when it actually is ultimately going to get to the customer based on how much time you need to pick, pack, and stage, and load, and when you're going to actually goods issue and then the amount of time it will take in transportation. In addition to that, we have this transportation planning date and this is able to run in parallel, but what it does is it buys us additional time for things like the administrative work of setting up a shipment, going through the process of getting that booked and ready to go so you're able to actually start that process working on that transportation planning, assuming that you're going to hit that material availability date, which again, all has to do with how predictable and stable that supply is and how well aligned the ATP rules are to what it is that you can make and keep a promise against. So again, if you go into your sales order and you go to the schedule line, you look at the shipping tab and you notice that you have a flat schedule here, I really would like to challenge you to think through these different buckets of activities and make sure that you're setting yourself up for success so that customer is less likely to get mad because we will have the correct date in order to allow for all those other activities to occur in this material availability date or the MAD date. That's what's going to drive the supply chain, that's what you're expediting towards, that's what you're working your supply chain to try to achieve, is that material availability date because that's the date that we need to hit in order to make sure that we get the product to the customer on time. Welcome back from the demo, to summarize. The MAD date is the date that the customer gets mad if material is not available. We explored several lead time components that drive the correct date and the importance of getting this right. And lastly, we looked at how the state is driving MRP and exception messages. The date is the entry point for driving the supply chain. It drives all other dates and decisions related to how to best get that supply for the demand. And if we did all the other upfront work on lead time, so long as we meet this date, we have a really good chance of fulfilling our promise to the customer. Good stuff, Kristie. Thank you, once again. If we go to the trouble to really understand how the MAD date is determined, and then work hard to hit that date or manage the client's expectations, we'll be setting ourselves up for success. You know what I've learned today, Kristie? Most of us should not have flat delivery schedules in our sales orders. We really need to think about those lead times. SAP has a lead time bucket for all the different pieces of the process. So getting this right, neither too short nor too long, makes a big difference in efficiency of the flow of material to our customer. Well, I think that's a wrap today. Folks, if you want to learn more about MAD dates please check out our other videos and of course if you have a burning question please submit it below.

PP; PTM

MCP7

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 the advantage of SAP work center analysis. When used correctly, work center analysis can help organizations gain insight to how well we're able to run the schedule on the floor and identify where the bottlenecks might lay. It's a valuable way to improve performance and uncover opportunities for improved throughput. So Eacliffe, tell us a little bit more about work center analysis. Sure Martin. Work center analysis is a powerful feature when used correctly, how well a work center is performing and keeping its commitment to its schedule. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. Provide an understanding of what insight this report provides from a work center perspective. How it goes about providing this insight on work center performance. And how to evaluate each work center performance. The intent here is the use transaction MCP7 to perform work center analysis. In this report the data is primarily captured by plant, work center, and month. So let's get into this transaction, and what I'm going to do is, because it's a test system, I'm going to run it for a couple of years. So let me execute this, I'm going to bring up all work centers within this plant that has information. Okay and here we can see that we got information currently sitting at the plant level. So basically we specified the amount of historical information we want to take a look at hence the amount of history was driven by that date range. Ideally we should have zero variances and when I mean zero variances just looking at my screen here, what we can see is we have target lead time, we have actual lead time. So based on our master data, this is how much late time we expect versus based on the production confirmation. The variance is then reflected in this column. In terms of execution time I don't have a variance, but we could see what the target is versus actual. If we want to see what the difference is we can do the quick calculation or you can select this column, come here to comparison to key figures, going to compare the target execution time, I'm going to compare that to the actual execution time. Okay, and here we can see the difference. So we'd spent just over 39 days difference between the two. So the question is, hey, is this something I need to take a look at? Okay. And then even queue time again, we have target queue time, actual queue time. This is the amount of wait we expected based on our master data, we're expecting only one day of queue time, we ended up with 23 days of queue time, so deviation of 24 days. So again, what's going on? And this is sitting at the plant level. So what I'm going to do is do a switch drill down, and I'm going to bring it down to a work center. Let's see what this information looks like. So we have the totals still sitting like before on top, but now we can see who's contributing to the variance perspective, so let's look at this the deviation. So I'm going to sort this. I don't see any negatives. So let's do this, we could see the biggest contributor is coming from this particular work center where we said, yeah, it should take us 9 days when in fact it took us only 1.4 days to fulfill that particular operation for that work center. So this is great, but recognize that, look any kind of deviation, positive or negative that could have a significant risk to our operation. if we are running too fast, like this is implying we may not have other components in a timely manner resulting in a shutdown vice versa, if we are not completing orders in time without operation in time we also run risk to the business. So ideally, our goal is to really bring these lead times into alignment. The other thing I'm going to call out is, notice we see these big numbers here, it's like, wow, this is a big deviation, I mean, the difference is 144 days. So how can this only be 14.4 days at the total level? And we have to recognize that the system is actually averaging these numbers at a total level, so because we are dealing with time we just can't simply add it up, so what SAP has opted to do is to take these number of days and just average them by the number of entries or in this case work centers that we have here. So this can be a bit misleading looking at it, and hence it's definitely good to come down to this work center view and actually look at the information at the work center level. And then just to take this one level further here we can see we had a big deviation the question is, okay, when did this happen? I can pick this single line item, I can then do what is called drill down by, which is this icon here, and we'll dive into that specific work center. I'm going to pick months and we could see we have 4 months listed here and for the most part, things were looking pretty good until we came into 2023. So in this case because there's just one entry we will try and get an answer for what's going on, but it definitely looks like an anomoly and for that reason there's a high probability we don't need to take any action, but still, we don't want to second guess this, we want to determinethe root cause of this. You know, was it a matter of something posted incorrectly, in this case did this order linger around for a couple of years, for example given the number of days, et cetera. So at the end of the day, yes we use this transaction, we focus on columns like lead time deviation, we can compare processing time between the two, like what's going on, actual queue time, and of course we can also take further information to consideration like operation data and so forth. Okay, so this is the type of insight that you can gain from doing a work center analysis to help determine which data set you should be going to, to improve the quality of your master data. So in summary we have covered how work center analysis allows you to. Appreciate the feedback that this report provides by work center. Identify which key figures to focus on in this report. And evaluate each work center performance. Thanks Eacliffe. Using this feature allows real-time information on work center utilization and performance allowing the business to improve production planning, optimize resource utilization, and enhance cost control. If you want to learn more about this topic and others in your SAP features and functions please feel free to check out our video catalog and if you have any specific questions feel free to submit them below.

PTM

CR31; CR32; CR33; CRC1; CRC2; CRC3; CM01

Martin: 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, my name is Martin and in this particular video we'll focus on using SAP's work center hierarchy to perform capacity evaluation for a group of liked work centers. A debate may take place to define one work center to represent a multiple like machines, or create a work center for each physical like machine and use a group center hierarchy with a superior work center to perform capacity evaluation. So let's get into this. Eacliffe tell us more about how do we do this specifically in this grouping of evaluations of work centers, specifically in a hierarchy. Eacliffe: Hey, thanks Martin. I have set up a demonstration to. Illustrate the functionality of a work center hierarchy and a superior work center. So while it be easier to generate a single work center, or let it represent multiple work centers, this approach can sometimes be challenging when assigning a particular manufacturing order to a specific work center, for example. Regardless of the reason for having a one-to-one definition between a work center in SAP versus the physical, uh, machine on the production floor. By defining a work center hierarchy, capacity evaluation can be done for both the individual work centers and the superior work center. So let's get into SAP and look at how this functionality works. So this is a demonstration on how to aggregate production capacity information for resources or work centers. So you have the situation where you have like multiple, resources or work centers, and the whole point is you want to see, if I combine the capacity information for more than one resource am I able to do so? So the answer is yes, and you have the ability to do this either under discreet production and with production you would use a combination of work center master data setup along with hierarchy information or master data setup, as well as under the PPPI, you would use resources and also the hierarchy master data setup. So I've set up some data to illustrate exactly how this works. First, let's take a look at the resource that I created that basically represents the superior resource. I'll come into change mode, I called it this name here, and let's just walk through some of the views. So on the basic view it's a very light version of a resource. Basically what I'm doing is really creating this object to say, look, this resource represents a superior resource. And you could see that I don't need to maintain any kind of standard value information for this particular resource. Likewise, if I come to the capacity tab, yes I maintain the capacity category because I want to see information from a machine perspective. If I want to see labor, I would create a second entry here for labor category. But again, I would not maintain any kind of formulas. The whole point is that we would obtain the information from the, call it the children resources or work center. And finally, coming here to the scheduling tab, again, there's nothing maintained because again, the information that's needed or that is used by the system would be derived, from the, resources that’s actually doing the production. So with that said let's come back out and now I’m going to come to the hierarchy. So let's look at it in change mode, I gave it the same name as I did the superior resource, the names do not have to match. Okay? So it's your prerogative in terms of what name and convention works for you. You can use the same names or you can use different names. It all depends on what works for you. So with that said, I'm going to come and click on this icon. And it's basically saying, hey, I have this superior resource, you could see the first entry here, and then we have the, what I've been calling the children resource. So we have these two packing lines, 1 and 2. The thinking is that the materials which I produce on, let's say line 1, the majority, if not all of the materials on line one can also run on line 2. So it makes sense to do an evaluation with the two of them combined, just in case I have insufficient capacity on one line, then I can say, okayoverall, do I still have sufficient capacity? And if I do, then I'm not going to worry about it. I'll just move some of the production from line 2 to line 1. So what I'm going to do next is let's take a look at the capacity evaluation itself. So here I am in CM01 and I'm going to come in here. I maintain my plan, and on the planning I'm going to go to work center and I'm going to click on this icon to work with the hierarchy rather then the individual resources. So this is the hierarchy name. I'm going to do a green check here. It gives you a illustration of what the hierarchy looks like. So here's the superior resource, and then I have the individual. I'm not aware of any limitations of how many resources or work centers you can have attached to a superior resource. And of course you can also do multilevel. So I can have SP2, and SP2 could be something, you know, let's call packing line 4 and 5, and then you could have it all roll up into, hey, give me an overall SP network. Okay, so it could be multilayers from top to bottom, and I've got multi resources work centers. With that said I’m going to green arrow back and from here you could see the superior resource as well as the individual resources sitting here as part of the selection criteria. Here, I'm going to do a standard overview. You could see that right now I am sharing that there's 0 capacity required at the superior level and as well as available everything is sitting at 0. If I scroll down we can see that hey, we have a little bit of capacity requirements sitting down here. And then if I come further down, we could see, hey, this resource it does have capacity requirements, and the red lines indicate that I am over capacity. So what I can do from this point is then come here, click on settings general, and you can see in my case, the hierarchy ID, popped in here. And I'm just going to say, okay, you know what show me the capacity, the requirements only at this point. I mean ideally we’d look at two but I want to show the fact that just by turning this on I'm going to do a green check and we can see that, all the requirements capacity required is now sitting up here in the superior. Of course, everything is red because of the fact that we did not turn on the indicator for available capacity. So of course, all entries are over capacity of each week. So what I'm going to do is come back up here and I'm going to come back and let's go back to settings, general, I'm going to turn on the accumulation of capacity. This is the available capacity now we're looking at, I'm going to green check, and you can see that, suddenly everything is white. So the available capacity for the superiors, 32 hours for the first week because of the fact that we got 16 hours coming from packing line 1. And if I come into parking line 2, we expect to see 16 hours also. So you can see, look, still looking at the individual resources, I'm over capacity. But looking at it from a superior perspective or hierarchy perspective, I have more than sufficient capacity week after week. So this tells me quickly that I can move production from one line to the next. Hey, welcome back. In this demo, we covered. What capacity evaluation looks like when we use a work center hierarchy solution in the capacity evaluation. With this approach, a finite production schedule is done to a specific work center. Hence, we would schedule to that specific work center rather than a generic one. Plus, you can specify downtime to a specific work center instead of reducing the number of individual capacities with that generic work center. Of course, the work center hierarchy would pick up all these business scenarios I just identified. Martin: Thank you, Eacliffe, that's actually brilliant. It's good to know that these kind of options exist, right? When it comes to how to set up work centers in SAP, it's not uncommon to implement a solution that works for many business scenarios, but when it comes to finite scheduling, for example, the production planner or operations requires a lower level of detail that may be required creating additional work centers. Regardless of the need for the additional work centers, using a work center hierarchy could be the compromise to bridge the gap. So folks, if you want to learn more about capacity planning, generally speaking, or in the hierarchies, there are other videos for you to check out as well. And of course, if you do have a particular question for us, feel free to submit it below.

DM

MM02; MD04

Hey folks, Martin here. Are you ready to tackle uncertainty and challenge? Are you comfortable with confronting the level of risk and uncertainty in your forecast head on? Well, today's the day. Today we're talking about forecast error and bias, and how to put the consumption horizon to work for you in managing your way through the risk that is inherent in your forecast. If this is a challenge for your business, you're in good company. Predicting customer behavior is a challenge for most organizations, and it's a topic that we're going to continue to build upon over time on this channel. In fact, if you search, you'll find other videos on monitoring forecast performance, working with consumption modes, and choosing a planning strategy that addresses different kinds of variability, volatility, and risk tolerance. Check them out. But specifically for this topic, we're going to be talking about forecast bias. To help us today on this topic of forecast bias, we have Kristie. Kristie, I know this is something that you love tremendously. This is something you deal with all the time. You may get even excited about this. So take us away. Yes, it's true. I do love a good demand planning puzzle. And while we may hit temporary plateaus in improving the quality of our forecast on some of our individual materials or products and in some of our segments. What we can do is get really great at managing the risk. And that is what I want to chat with you about today. I remember exactly when the shift in perspective hit me. I was in an IBP meeting that was well on its way to becoming a post mortem on forecast quality, and I remember hurting for my team as they tried to explain all the things that they were doing to try to get the forecast "right". And all the blame that was coming their way for our failures as an organization to deliver to the customer. Our cost to serve is ridiculous and our suppliers are tired of it. Forecast. The shipment was late and the customer is upset again. Forecast. Precious time, materials, and capacity gone because. Forecast. Now I'm a manufacturing gal at heart that also happens to love demand planning. So you know what? I know that SAP and supply chains salute all too well. It looks like this. And it's not helpful. So let's stop doing that. Baby steps are a good place to start. So let's focus the conversation. Supply chains are made up of quantity and time. So today, we're going to focus on time as an ally in dealing with the volatility in quantities. We'll also address our bias. Are we dealing with a bull or a bear? And then we're going to talk about the importance of differentiating where it matters and setting the appropriate rules in place as we consider our plan for every part. One of the tools that we have that can really help us is to understand the bias in our forecast and that is if we are consistently under or over predicting. What the demand will be for a particular item, and this is for those of us who are working on the supply side. We look at this at the material, the plant and potentially even the MRP area level. So it's very granular in terms of how we are observing that forecast. There are a ton of videos to help us to understand and unpack the different tools. I want to bring a couple of them together, though, today in the context of bias. And I'm going to talk specifically about consumption and the way that we can manage our consumption parameters to help protect us against some of the risks that's inherent in our forecast process. Here are a couple of other tools, though, before we go there. The first is we can take our average daily consumption. So that is what we have been using over the last X number of periods and compare it to our projections, our average daily requirement where those are wildly different, that gives us a great way to have a conversation with our counterparts. In demand planning and they can help us to understand the reasons for why that may be different. We want to make sure that we do respect the demand plan, just like when we say that we can't get production done by a particular date or we can't get supply in by a particular date the demand planning team the customer experience team has to trust that we are doing everything in our power to get it there when we see the demand plan and we have the conversation we ask the question at some point we have to say we've done everything in our power to get the best prediction that we can on this particular item. And it's good to ask the questions and certainly if you see something to say something. But at some point I do want to emphasize it is important that we start to work the process and commit. What we're talking about today can help us to manage through the inherent variability and volatility that we're going to experience with demand over time. One of the other things that we can get a quick line of sight on is how our forecast that is in the now is performing. So here's a good example. This is our remaining balance open to sell. It is December right now. We have nothing left and we have requirements for 45 units. Looks like that is a pretty typical demand. You can see November has 48 pieces remaining open. Looks like we might have had a timing issue there. The demand came in in a different time bucket than what we were expecting and we have 36 pieces projected for January. Looking like that's a little less than what we are seeing in the months that follow. So this is where we start to say, okay, what's going on? Are we over under forecasting? Is there some predictability to that? And if so, how can we set our consumption rules in place to help set us up for success? So, let's go in there and take a look. I'm going to go into the material master. This all lives on the MRP3 tab. Now my colleague and friend Patrick has put out a couple of great videos around consumption mode and forward consumption period and backward consumption periods. He's gone through and he's demoed as you change those settings what happens. So I will let him speak with you about that. What I want to address is the consumption based on bias. So how do you think about that depending on if you tend to over or under forecast? Now it's important to note that your consumption mode and the way you're consuming your forecast and what's eligible for consuming your forecast does tie back to your planning strategy. So there is a tight connection there and that is a big topic to explore. But when we're talking about consumption mode, think about it like this. So your sales orders, for example, are coming in and they're eating away at the forecast that is out there, the demand plan that's in the system. I think about them like Pac Man. It makes me less angry when things are wrong. So I think about it like Pac Man. We are coming in, that sales order is eating away at the demand plan. Now sometimes, that Pac Man gets too full and it just stops eating and then we end up with extra forecasts out there that's just hanging out like that November forecast we just saw. Sometimes, in a particular period, it may overeat. So, for example, the December time period that we saw that was completely consumed and now we're moving into January. When we know that we are maybe not right in terms of timing, but we are roughly right in terms of quantity, that is where the consumption mode can really help us. And really that's what it's saying. This is how much or how far out I am allowed to consume that forecast. So at some point, if I tend to under forecast, my demand plan is not high enough. I may want to allow those additional sales orders to sit on top of the forecast that we've put in. So it's going to stop eating away, it is additional incremental demand on top of the forecast. If I tend to under forecast, backward consumption and then controlling or not allowing, or controlling the horizon of forward consumption becomes my friend. So I don't continue to add to the problem. I'm not in a position where I allow it to continue to consume forward to January or February when I know I'm already over my forecast in December. I don't allow that problem to continue because I restrict how far forward I'm allowed to consume that forecast. If I am, over forecasting, so I am in a position where I am planning too much, this is where I really want to lean into that backwards and then that forwards consumption and I might allow myself to go a little bit further back and a little bit further forward in order to smooth that out because that might mean that I am a little bit off in terms of when that forecast is hitting. But if I'm roughly right and I'm confident that I'm going to consume it within the next couple of periods, then I might allow those days to go further out. Your consumption periods are in work days, they are subject to your factory calendar. So make sure that you're aware of that. A lot of times people come in, they put 30 days, they assume it's a month. Depending on your factory calendar, that may not be the case. So that's something really important to be aware of as you're going in and you're adjusting those dates, so you really want to think about whether you tend to under or over predict that demand and then use that to help you to choose the correct consumption mode and the period that you need for being able to smooth out that forecast. So look at your risk buckets and figure out what those bands look like and then adjust the timing so that you're getting the smoothest demand signal to your supply partners. Very, very helpful to be able to come in and fine tune this and make sure that we have the right rules in place so that we don't compile or add on or complicate the situation by allowing that forecast consumption to go too far out and allowing those sales orders to overeat into future periods when we really want to restrict that in if we do tend to under forecast. So whether you're overly optimistic or if you're pessimistic with your forecast, there is help for you here and it really surrounds the consumption mode and the consumption periods and how far out you allow that Pac Man or those sales orders to eat that forecast. You know what all good demand planners have in common? Radical candor, excellent storytelling, and intense curiosity. They live in a world where the good jobs are rare and the criticism is high. So to get better at all this, the first step is to know thyself as a person. As a collective that builds a consensus plan and as products, product families, customer and customer groups, whatever is the right level for you to get to a roughly right picture of demand. We have to be champions of risk and attack it heads on. If we can acknowledge and address where we're most likely to be wrong and historically how wrong without outliers and in which direction we tend to be wrong in, we can evaluate what we need to borrow from and how much time we need. Most importantly, the bias doesn't go away if we ignore it. So we need to work with it, rather than against it, and have SAP help us make it work. We are supply chain stewards, and good ones make it work with the cards that we have, while we are working on getting to a better hand. Much more to come on this particular topic. Okay, wow, Kristie. I mean, you were off to the races on that one. I can't imagine where this is going to go next. Hey folks, I'm sure there'll be plenty more videos to come if you're looking for those other videos we mentioned earlier use the chatbot, it will recommend them for you. If you have a specific question for us, please submit it below.

P2P

ME5A; MD04; ME53N

Hey, welcome back fellow SAP explorers, Martin here. And today we're going to be looking and exploring a feature in SAP that has a strong value proposition, but is often overlooked. What we're chatting about today is the importance of the release date in driving the procurement process. What drives your PO placement today? Do you run off the release date or the delivery date? So today, Kristie is with us, and I know you love the process cadence, so have at it. Tell us more about the value of release date in procurement. Cadence keeps the chaos at bay, Martin and yes, the release date is one of the many dates in the procurement process. And it is one that is often overlooked. But it really represents a critical milestone. It is what helps ensure we're setting our suppliers and ourselves up for success by smoothly running through key process steps with the right amount of time to get them done. Today I want to show you how the release date is calculated and where we can find it. Let's go in and take a look. I love making a Reveal TV video on something that I have done wrong in the past and have found so much value in once I learned what it was for. And I remember in the early days of setting all of this up not knowing exactly when I need to get a purchase order to my supplier and being really worried that I could be past you and passing that ball to them and then not set them up for success and not get what we need when we needed it. So enter math on the part of SAP and enter this lovely field called the start or the release date. The start date if it's production, it is the release date if it is purchase orders or purchase requisitions that need to be converted into purchase orders. It is the starting line for the procurement process. It lets us know when we need to start moving that purchase requisition onto the next stage in order to be able to get that purchase order delivered on time based on all the master data that we have maintained in the system. So if you cannot see this column right now in your stock requirements list, it is hiding from you. And there are a number of columns here that are sometimes missing. Sometimes you'll be missing opening date. Sometimes you'll miss start and release date, and sometimes you'll miss rescheduling date. It's fiddly, but you just have to hover over the fields until you can see you'll see actually a double line arrow appear and then you have to drag that out in order to be able to get theparticular column exposed But this is a good one. And so it lets us know when we need to release. So in order to have this purchase order here on time, we have to start the process or get that purchase requisition converted into a purchase order no later than 08/27/2024 in order for it to get here on September 23rd. Okay, and if I double click in here I can even get a little bit more information without even having to leave my stock requirements list. So I can see the goods receipt processing time for this is 3 days, so the date that it is planned to be available. So the material availability date is the 23rd of September. That means we have to receive it from the supplier so that it can go through all of its stock to stock activities, receiving, quality inspection, etc. We have to have it by the 18th of September, okay? So that means that we have a weekend in there because those are our working days, subject to our factory calendar, and in order to make all of that magic happen so that the supplier can be set up to deliver on time, in order to start our process and get through it, get the purchase order out the door and over to them on time, we have to release this by the 27th of August. And if we go into the purchase requisition, we can further look at those details and see the planned delivery time. Okay, so all of that math is happening for us, we don't have to look at a calendar, it's right here and then all along the way it's letting us know if we have any exception messages. So you can see this is some old housekeeping that needs to be taken care of because not only is my start date in the past, but also my finish date is in the past too. So we really missed the boat on that. So how do you make sure that that doesn't happen? Well, you go to List Display of Purchase Requisition. So you might be using any of the ME57, ME58, ME59 transactions to move through your procurement process. You may be working in ME21N and pulling a list of requisitions. This is another great place to look. This is ME5A, you can see right down here. And when I was coming in here previous life, I would run this based on delivery dates and then try to estimate my lead time offset. Don't need to do that. Come in here, put in the release date. This is everything that you would want to go and work on. So your release date up to whatever the date is that you're working with. So you know, today, tomorrow, if you're about to be out of the office for the holiday break, you might reach out a little bit further than that, but it should be very, very near term. And then you would go in and pull a list of purchase requisitions that were standing out there that needed to go through, be released, and converted into a purchase order. This should not be reaching far out into the future. When we release things to our suppliers early, we can no longer get a good read on their performance or their ability to deliver on time and in full. Because we've released it to them early, we're giving them more lead time than what they asked for. And we also are limiting our flexibility. So the one thing we know about demand is that it changes. And so if we have trouble being correct in terms of time or quantity, we want to make sure that we maintain that flexibility for as long as possible. If you're struggling with that and you're trying to give your supplier more visibility, so maybe you're releasing really early, like this case, this is way out into the future. We don't want to do that. We want to have our dates be nice and tight to what we should be working on today, tomorrow, this week. If you find that you're needing to do that, then chances are you need to explore other options in sourcing such as scheduling agreements or other ways to get a good forecast to your supplier. So make sure you check out some of those other Reveal TV videos and they'll help guide you through that. But this release date is here and it's present in many of our purchase requisition related transactions. Extremely helpful for helping us to produce a list of purchase requisitions that we need to go through and work and get out to our suppliers in purchase orders. So, release date. It's a very, very helpful field available to you in SAP. Welcome back from the demo. As we highlighted today, Release dates represent the date we need to act to give our suppliers the time they need to successfully deliver to us. They can be a leading indicator of process adherence, improvement, or challenge. We can work with them in variants and we can use them to select our requisitions and convert them into POs. And we no longer have to do the math around lead time to determine if it's time to cut that PO or not. And I totally used to do this. I had a calendar at my desk and I was figuring out if it was 63 or 91 days of lead time and what date I needed to release it. Now we even have Google and other tools to help us get better, but why use those when SAP is already doing this work for us? Time marches on Kristie, thank you so much. The release date sounds like an asset to the process that gets us the right signal at the right time. Win win. Thanks again. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about other particular topics related to procurement, we have a whole section on procurement that you can look into. And if you're struggling to find a video, feel free to use the AI chatbot.