Order Fulfillment & ATP

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; P2P; PTM; WM

MM03

Are you interested in creating a more seamless customer experience with less churn and manual intervention? Okay, good, me too. Martin here. And are you equally interested to hear about three fields in the material master that might be helpful? Whenever we have an opportunity to set a rule in place, and that rule matches the behavior that's real, we're in business for improvement. So Kristie, I only have really one question for you today. Actually, three questions. What are the three fields in the Material Master that we need to know so much about? Take it away. That's all I have today. We've got loads of opportunity to leverage master data to make the process flow better. Make it easier and less disjointed when it comes to serving our customers. Today I wanted to just offer up three possible fields. That's three of the many. Today we're going to walk through the value opportunities around sales MOQ, delivery unit, and wait for it, sales unit of measure. And you know what? Since you gave me such a hard time, I'll throw in not one, but two bonus fields. And I'll pick really, really good ones. Let's go in and take a look. I love a good challenge and I love some tips and tricks. So let's get right into it and see if we can't locate a couple of fields that can really help us in making sure that we're getting the behavior we would like out of SAP and maybe simplify some of the things that we are currently doing when we have to go in and manually intervene with our sales documents. So I'm here in the sales org. 1 view, which means I had to specify my material, my sales org, and my distribution channel. And this is MM03, you can see the transaction code here in the lower right hand corner. And a couple of the fields I wanted to point out today that we tend to find very useful in troubleshooting and problem solving. So the first one here is the sales unit. So your base unit of measure, in this case, is pieces. When we sell to the customer, we've decided we would like to sell in palettes, and we are able to specify this based on the material, the sales org, and the distribution channel. So the other thing we can do is we want to make sure that that is consistent, or the same across all sales documents. We can choose the sales unit, not variable. Now, if we wanted the flexibility of having that to be different, then we simply would not choose to tick that tick box. But that can be very helpful if you're trying to make sure that things are the same across all of your sales documents. You may have a compelling business case why that should not be true. And in that case, we would not want to tick that tick box. Now let's come down here a little bit more. We have another field here called the delivering plant. So if we want to default a particular plant onto our sales orders, this is where we can come to do that. Now maybe we have a couple of plants that we could choose from and we want to go in and specify this based on the sales org and distribution channel. We can come in and maintain that field accordingly, and that can help to direct where we are landing that demand. And we can also choose it to help us inherit if we have materials that are available at a couple of different DCs, and we really want to direct those sales orders to a particular delivering plant. There are other places we can also maintain this master data with more specificity. So the lowest level we can maintain it here is at that material sales org and distribution channel. Another one that is really important. See, I'm already up to three. I'm going for bonuses now. Material group and just a comment on this. Material group is a cross functional field. So this is one where we really want to make sure that we are aligned with our friends in finance, and with our friends on the supply side, and particularly our friends in procurement, and how we are categorizing these materials and make sure we have a good understanding of where that is landing. Now, often overlooked, because you do have to scroll down to find it, we have a couple of other quantity stipulations that can really help us. We can specify a minimum order quantity, in this case we chose 12 pieces, a minimum delivery quantity, which could be the same, or it could be less, so let's say you allow for partial deliveries, maybe your minimum order quantity is 12, and your minimum delivery quantity is some multiplier that is less than that, so 8 or 6 or something like that. We can also specify our delivery unit just like we do above for the sales order units. One last thing here if we aren't sure what that conversion is from pieces to pallet or we'd like to see that information in a different way. We can come in here to additional data and simply move to the units of measure. This is where we can see that quantity conversion from pieces to pallet or any other unit of measure that may be helpful to have maintained. So in this case , we have four pieces per pallet, so perhaps on our delivery, we allow for eight, if we allow for partial deliveries, whereas on the sales order itself, we may be requiring a higher quantity. So those are some of the things that we can do to help make that sales order entry a little bit easier and a little bit more consistent to help us to differentiate where the business rules should be different based on the distribution channel and the sales org versus where we want it to be consistent across all of the distribution channels and the sales work. So a couple of different alternatives there. And again, most of this data can also be maintained more finitely or with more specificity as we get into the customer master data. But from materials management perspective, what we can maintain within the material master, this is some governing master data that we can have in place to help ensure consistency and lessen the load of that manual maintenance. Okay, whew, I think I made it with some bonus ones, and I think we hit five fields. So today we had the opportunity to explore some of the key master data fields that live in the material master and support sales order management. Much like our procurement or production related fields, there may be more specific records that take precedence over the material master. A basic principle in SAP is that it loves specificity. And in at least most of the cases. The business rules we looked at today were chosen because they are often options that come up and become useful as a part of problem solving. And that's how we learn how to best put them to use. And remember, as we're exploring and changing and evolving, we must make sure that we have a coordinated approach, especially if what we're working on directly impacts our partners. This is very important. Ah, I can't believe you caved to the pressure, Kristie, and added two more fields. Okay, seriously, five? Okay. We can work on it. But Kristie's right. There are so many more to explore. Taking the time to explore the definitions and the use cases for key master data fields is central to being able to deliver real and lasting value out of SAP. So again, thank you, Kristie. Hey folks, if you're looking more to maximize other features and functions in your SAP system, please check out our video catalogs. And of course, feel free to use the chatbot if you can't find something.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD; MM; PP

MD04; 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. In this video, we will be discussing the close relationship between ATP, MRP, and exception management. So often when we talk with clients, the focus is fixing ATP, but the only thing that fixes ATP is getting our supply in order. Our ability to quickly accurately provide available dates to our customers is essential. So Kristie, how do we make a promise and keep a promise? Well Martin, what can I say? It's easy peasy, one two threezy. If only. We know the accuracy of this information can be a clear competitive differentiator. We train our customers by our own actions, and in some cases they also have ERP solutions that respond to our performance. In this demo, we will walk through. Some common changes that might occur. And how it impacts the ATP check, including inventory counts, changes in dates. And conflicting business rules and behaviors. So often we hear clients talk about the idea that if only they could get ATP right, it would help to solve all of their supply side woes. And I'm here, unfortunately, to break some hearts, it's really about ATP being the customer of predictable and stable supply. So our ability to make and keep a promise to the customer is entirely reliant on our ability to have stable supply and to make that promise at a time when we can actually keep it. So what we're going to do today is actually go back through and revisit a common screen where we spend a lot of our time as planners and that is our stock requirements list. So, if you are working in customer service or sales support, my guess is you also have some familiarity with this screen, and depending on how reliable ATP is for you, tends to go hand in hand with how familiar you are with the screen. So when ATP is less reliable, you spend a lot of time here maybe even getting expertise that rivals your planning counterparts. So, it all starts with our ability to know what we have in stock and on hand, and in future videos we're going to go through this in great detail, but for right now, I just want to point out to you, if you see these little golden cubes here, the first place we want to start is, can we count on the inventory we actually have? And so some of the things that we would look at here, are things like, how often are we cycle counting? How often are we making significant adjustments to our inventory? Are we able to see things move through the quality inspection process and return to stock in a reasonable amount of time that's predictable and in line with when that quality inspection is supposed to be complete? So, for example, here you can see that we have 15 pieces in total that are in unrestricted use stock, that means on the shelf, ready to be available for customer orders. And then you can see we have 3 that is in block stock. And in SAP's world, block stock is stock that is not expected to be returned to unrestricted use stock and made available for the customer, whether that's external customer, sister facility where you're transferring goods, or even the manufacturing floor. It's assumed that something has to be done to that in order for it to be made back into unrestricted use stock. The likelihood of being able to use it is not good. We don't want to plan for it and we don't want to promise against it. And then we also have in quality inspection, so inventory that has come in, it's in the process of being reviewed, it is expected to return to unrestricted use stock and be good for use in manufacturing for the customer. And then you also see we have 15 pieces that are in returns, which also need to be inspected and brought back in. So overall, we have 41 pieces that we're planning on shipping out versus 15 pieces that we have available today and ready to go. So this is a good example of how we have to go through and look at the parts and understand what their status is. So if you know that you're getting good cycle counts, you're doing that regularly, the accuracy is good on a particular subset of parts, then we're in a place where we can start to really make and keep a promise. Now let's look at a different material. Let's look at this guy here. So the other thing we might be doing is we might be thinking about production that we have out there. So, you know, how reliable is our production schedule? For example, if we had orders that were in the past and needed attention, then we would want to make sure that we were making the MRP controller or the planner for that aware that we wanted to start to be able to promise against that production that is on the schedule. And so knowing that that schedule is able to be completed on time, or giving a reasonable, realistic, and actionable schedule to the manufacturing floor, is important before we can start to make a promise to the customer. And then if we were really good, and we had very, very accurate forecasts, or customer provided forecasts, we might even be able to go a little further out and start counting against things that are planned. But it's all a journey and it's a progression, and it's most important to understand is that ATP is reliant on predictable and stable supply, it is the customer of the supply plan. What are we trying to do with MRP? We are trying to supply the demand. What are we trying to do with capacity evaluation and leveling? Making sure that we have a schedule that's reasonable, realistic, and actionable. What are we doing with material availability check for manufacturing? Making sure the shop floor is set up for success and being able to produce that product and have it available to the customer. So all of these different pieces are integration points that come together in order to make sure that we are able to make and keep the promise. Making a promise or thinking about our reliability. So are we reliable or capable to serve? Are we capable based on the customer's requested date, and are we reliable once we make that promise and being able to keep it? And the more reliable we become, the better positioned we are to become capable for meeting the request date and the better positioned we are to be able to be successful for that customer and being able to meet their needs. So, ATP, available to promise, is reliant on predictable and stable supply. Being able to go through, group, and prioritize your materials and understanding what the reliability is of each of those different elements from what you actually have on hand, out through your schedule, and then ultimately what is planned. And knowing that, knowing the details of how that material or group of materials is performing is half the battle in terms of being able to set the right business rules that match our business behaviors with fewer exceptions and less manual intervention. Well that was a quick tour, but there's several other videos releasing on this topic. Let's summarize. ATP is a journey, and like most business rules in SAP, it's not one size fits all. Because ATP is the customer of predictable and stable supply. We will have differences across the product portfolio, and today we explored some common situations that can make getting ATP completely right every time, just a little bit challenging. And we also explored how to detect the exceptions and address them. If there's one message here, it's this. Don't give up. Focus on stabilizing your supply, start small, and manage the exceptions. Thank you Kristie. That is a huge topic. And I know we've got much more to discuss. The simple principle that ATP is reliant on predictable and stable supply is often overlooked. It takes a lot of the mystery out of the recipe for success and puts us back in the driver's seat. Focusing on supply and accurate ATP will follow. If you want to know more about this particular topic, this big topic, or any other topic that relates to MRP and ATP, please feel free to look at our other videos around.

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.

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.

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.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD

V_V2

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. Martin here, and in this video we're going to focus on analyzing the results of SAP's rescheduling tool. This powerful feature in SAP keeps sales order confirmations in alignment with updated availability based on go to market strategies, prioritizations and rules. With great power comes great responsibility. So Kristie, tell us a little bit about how do we actually apply these rescheduling tools and make sure that we can keep our promises. Well, Martin, it's actually pretty neat. When the rescheduling results are in, we can go in and see which orders improved, which ones declined, and which were unaffected. We can also navigate directly into the sales order and review more details there. The best part is that when we run rescheduling like this, interactively and in simulation mode, we gain a deeper understanding of what's happening and why, and we can validate the results. Are our rules working? Let's dive in and check it out. All right, so we're back in here taking a look at rescheduling. And again, this is something that may be running in the background for you. You're not even aware of it and you may or may not have access to it. First things first, I always recommend using this tool carefully and is an exception management tool, meaning you're really in here using this in an interactive fashion using simulations so you can go through and review the results and really making sure that you're fine tuning the way that you're placing your inventory onto your order. So this is really all about making the best match between the inventory that is available or coming available soon and is part of your ATP scope of check. And in marriage with how it is that you want to serve the customer or the market overall. So this is a very strategic tool and it's very tied to the way that you want to represent your products or services. So one of the things that we want to do here is once we've run it is we want to learn how to go in and analyze the results. Now we could spend days on this topic but what I'm going to do is just give you just a little basic orientation, so if this is running in the background, maybe being able to go in and take a look and see how it's prioritizing. I'm going to go ahead and just run it for one material and what this is going to do is this is going to pick all the sales orders that are out there that have this material on it and it's going to bring all the line items back, right? It's going to go through and evaluate the entire sales order. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to choose this guy right here, which we've been working on in a bunch of the video series, and I'm going to go ahead and click execute. Now this is running, it's running in simulation mode and you can see here it has brought back some results for me for this particular item. So this is P-110 and it's grabbed the sales orders that currently have unconfirmed quantities on them. Meaning we haven't been able to completely fulfill them, so these are the ones that need love and attention. And you can see here, this is the order quantity, so you're always going to see that first, this is the line item, sales document, line item, here's the quantity, and then this is the old date. You can see this guy is really, really, really old. And this is going to be the date that we have the first schedule line. So the promise date that we were able to give our last committed promise was on the 22nd of December, and we were able to confirm for 12 pieces. Now we have some new dates, we actually are able to improve this a little bit. If the customer is willing to take 2 shipments, we can actually get them 8 pieces on the 11th of December, so that's an improvement, and 4 pieces on the 22nd. Now, that means that this allows partial deliveries, our master data tells the system that that's okay, and so that's what it's proposing. So this is also a good example of needing to make sure that your rules are in a good spot, and we are able to be able to facilitate it. Now, some of you may be very lucky and you may have the ability to present this in an ALV grid, in which case you get some nice color coding that shows you either in pink or green what has improved or deteriorated. You can see that the reason we're able to get this improvement here is actually because we had some inventory that was previously confirmed against this particular sales order, and we have actually taken it away and reapplied it. So now we're actually moving these confirmations out. So these have gotten a little bit worse and they moved out to the 18th of December. So the system's gone through and it's reprioritized all of this information to try to give us some better dates here based on the priority or the rules that we have given it and this may be based on the date that the order was entered or the earliest schedule line date. It could be based on document number. It could be based on delivery priority. So, all other things being equal who has the better delivery priority? Who's supposed to get this first? And that might be based on the customer, or the region, or the tier of the market, or the industry, or any number of things that would help us. But yeah, this is the way you read it, so this is kind of learning to read through the top here. All of these different header rows which correspond to the different line items that you're seeing. And from here I can do a variety of things, I can actually go right into the sales order so I can double click on it. I can go to change documents. I can also navigate to VA05 to take a look and see what the sales order list looks like. And if I want to focus on improvements, I can click this button and it's going to show me just the improvements. And if I want to focus on the deterioration, I can click this and I'll see just the items that were deteriorated. So I've got the ability to come in here and really focus. So I may have a really large list that I'm working through and that will allow me to go in and take a look. Just a couple of other things here in terms of what is available to you up in the menu, because you're really able to go through and take a look. You can come in here and then say, go back to complete. Take you see back to the complete list, under edit, you can see that you can actually go in and take a look at the change document or any errors that were associated with the run, you can then go to environment and it will take you directly into the list of sales orders. So lots of things and places that you can navigate to from here, but really what you want to pay attention to is whether you like the results or not. So in this case I maybe don't like these results, and I'm not satisfied, with what it is that we're seeing here. So I may go back and say, nope, I don't want to apply that, or I want to change my rules, I think that it's not doing what I want it to do. It's not thinking about it the way I would want to think about it. So I want to go in and actually make an adjustment here. And you're able to do that. And again, you can run this for many materials at the same time, or you can run it wide open, just depends on what your rules are. Bear in mind though, if you have a material that is on delivery complete order, that as you go through and you rerun this, it could push the dates for the entire order as you're going through and making that change. So just make sure that you've got eyes on that, and you're really paying attention. But this is a great tool for making sure that your strategy is executed the way that you would like it to, and also for ensuring that as more inventory is available through that ATP scope of check, whether that is inventory that is incoming through scheduled production, or for stock transfer orders, or from procurement, or whether that inventory is restricted purely to what you physically have on hand, or in quality inspection, or your safety stock. As there's more quantity available, this is allowing you to rematch that supply and demand together in order to be able to make the best use of that inventory, okay? And if you don't want it to reschedule, then you're going to set your fixed date and quantity flag. There are some power and responsibility pieces that go with that as well. So if you're interested in that, we have another video around fixed date and quantity. So this is just a little teeny tiny taste of what's available in the rescheduling. If you've ever been wondering what's happening in the background, again, it's all about the strategy. So take a look at the strategy video to walk you through that. Give you a few ideas on how you prioritize, but you can go right back out, rerun this, and reprioritize that strategy to see what the results would be. It might help you to fine tune overall, but really encourage you to run this in interactive mode. Run it with the simulation turned on, see if you like it, and then make decisions based on that information. Really make sure you go through and understand. You know what, Martin? This topic is so deep, we could spend hours on it. Let me summarize what we've just walked through. The rules that govern rescheduling. Please see our other rescheduling content for more on this topic. We need to be very carefully thought through. The purpose of rescheduling is to make the best use of our available supply. So we want to make sure SAP is thinking a little bit more like we do. But we know that we will always need to take a look and refine. So running an interactive simulation lets us verify the results, adjust our rules, and understand the why and what SAP is doing. Pretty cool. Wow, that is actually pretty cool, Kristie. Thank you. I like the notion of spending the time up front to understand and adjust the rules, and continue to refine until satisfied with the results. A lot of times people think of engines like rescheduling as a something of a black box, but spending some time with the results and the interaction with the information takes a lot of the mystery away and builds confidence. So folks, if you want to know more about this topic or other standard SAP functionality please feel free to check out the videos above and if you have a question submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD

V_V2

Hey, folks, the best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value. My name is Martin, and I want to focus on this video specifically on SAP's rescheduling tool. This is a great example of a rules based engine that is often underutilized and rarely optimized. It's meant to support the strategy of how we want to prioritize customer accounts, regions, tiers, and other go to market strategies. So Kristie, I know this is a massive topic, feel free to shed some light for us. Well, it's hard to know where to start here. I'm just kidding. We should start with the rules set. This is where we set our strategy in place. Now, the strategy and all the different ways we might think about it is a very deep into the pool situation. But what I'm going to do today is introduce everyone to some of the levers and toggles that can help us to dial in the results. Let's jump in and take a look at a few of the key settings. Okay. Big topic. Let's see if we can just get a little bit of information to get started. So this is rescheduling, it's V as in Victor underscore V as in Victor, 2. Very powerful transaction. Many of you may not have access to it, and oftentimes it's actually running in the background and you may not even be aware of it. But it is one of the most strategically oriented, sales order management tools that we have, and it is immensely powerful because it controls how we apply inventory to the sales order in conjunction with our ATP rules. So how we determine that scope of check and the particular checking rule for that particular stage in the sales order process. Okay, so this is really for sales orders and stock transfer orders, and it could include other documents that are part of your ATP check. You have the option to control it by material, and certainly when you are getting started with availability checking, and you're getting started with how to work through getting inventory onto your sales orders as more inventory becomes available or enters into that ATP check, so whether it's scheduled production or confirmed product in transfer or inventory or quality inspection or safety stock, wherever you are in your ATP journey. Every day as things happen and more inventory becomes available, you need a mechanism to help you to manage through those backorder situations where it wasn't able to confirm immediately, or in cases where you're trying to continuously improve those dates. And so this is the strategic tool for doing that and there is a lot to it. We could talk for days on this topic but let me give you just a brief overview and plant some seeds in terms of the types of things that you would want to think about. So first of all, you can run this by material. That is really important to know. Now when you select it by material, you're working all of the sales orders related to that material. So, all of those sales orders are going to go through, all of the availability situation for those items unless there's a fixed state and quantity flag set, are going to be re evaluated and you're going to work on trying to improve your delivery situation or availability situation for those sales documents as a whole. Now we also have the opportunity to include our stock transfers. So if promising to your sister facilities is very important to you, if you're conducting ATP checks on your stock transfers, which you do want to consider doing that as you start to get more mature with your availability checking process, because otherwise those documents get left behind. And then you have the opportunity to choose whether you're going to look at that at the line item level or at the schedule line level. So depending on if you're taking multiple shipments against those different transfer documents and what the kind of promising is that you're looking to do for them. So prioritizing either at the item level or the schedule line level. And then this next tick box is really important. This is around, do you want to look at Unconfirmed documents only, so basically saying I want to leave the things that are fully confirmed and happy alone and I'm going to look at things that are unconfirmed and bring them through and then lastly am I going to use a simulation so I can interact, which is highly recommended as you're getting started and you're trying to understand what this rule set does. Now, down here is really the big chunk of our rules. So, we want to prioritize how the system is going to bring these results back to us. So, are we going to prioritize the document category? So, what kind of sales document is this? Am I prioritizing sales documents first or stock transfer documents? So, facilitate, maybe you have product that's used in manufacturing and it's used at a sister facility, you've got a vertically oriented supply chain and it's also sold out the door to the customer, then maybe stock transfers become more important. It really just depends on the nature of your business, and these are all very important decisions to make. The next one is, where does delivery priority fit in? So if you have customer tiering, or you have regional priorities, where it's most important that you have good market representation across all the regions that you supply into. There could be any number of strategies for how you set your delivery priority. Maybe that is the most important thing, and then we go on from there. It could be by date, so it might be the date of creation, or it might be the date of the earliest schedule line. So a lot of times folks are doing this exclusively by date of creation, and one of the big conversations we have is around considering the use of the date of earliest schedule line. And it really depends on the overall hygiene of your sales order documents and how you view the promises that you're making to your customer. Then we have some considerations for document number and document item. So these again become kind of the tiebreaker. So assuming your document number, maybe the different number ranges have different meanings to you. Perhaps your document numbers is indicative of your oldest order, you always want to make sure that you are handling that first. Remember that you also have the sort by date of creation. So really, this delivery priority and the date piece, whether it's date of creation or earliest schedule line, oftentimes become the most overlooked and the most important pieces of information that we want to go after. And so it's really important for us to go through and set these priorities in place so that we know how to sort the documents and then that's the sequence in which we would conduct the availability check in order to try to get the best service to the customer. And by the way, this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is not necessarily how we would envision setting this up. You really have to go through and have some robust conversations and really think through how you would like to service the customer. It's not as simple as just going and choosing the top radio button and sending it 1 through 5. These are really important conversations around how you want the system to prioritize this. And if this is happening purely for you in the background, if it's happening multiple times a day, remember that when you run this, it's almost like shuffling the deck, right? It's going to go through and reapply all this stuff. So if you're in there and you're interacting with the sales order and you go through and maybe your customer service or your sales support team says , hey, I keep going in and setting this and then it keeps happening and it's shuffled and it's different from what I was expecting. Check to see if rescheduling is running in the background, it may be prioritizing things in a very different way from how you're going about it. And it's really important to go through and have those conversations and set this in place. This is usually a lot of effort to get this right, it's a lot of discussing where you want to go strategically, how you want to represent to the market , to your different customers, and ultimately this is a big question about how you want to serve overall. So in summary, we've reviewed. Some of the key decisions that drive the rules that then drive this rescheduling engine. We've talked about timing and cadence, and perhaps most importantly, that this is not a set it and forget it rule set. As the business changes and as our strategy evolves, we need to continue to revisit the rules and monitor the results to make sure that we're getting the best use of our inventory to meet our strategy. Thanks Kristie. Once again a big topic for sure. So the question that comes to mind is who do we want to be to the marketplace you serve? I think rescheduling really works best when we have clarity around articulating that answer. So again folks, if you want to learn more about this topic and others check out the rest of our video catalog and if you have a burning question please submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; PTM; WM

MM02; VA02; MD04

Hello fellow SAP explorers Martin here, and I'm looking forward to exploring a feature in SAP that has a strong value proposition, but also comes with some recommendations to avoid potential pitfalls. We are going to be introducing rounding profiles for SAP orders. This can be a highly effective tool for efficiencies, policy adherence, and outbound logistics management. However, like many other features that adjust an order from original entry, there are some cautions, particularly when it comes to customer schedule agreements and orders sent via EDI. The good news is that we have Jake here to tell us more about it. He is the perfect candidate to explain exactly what rounding profiles might be able to do for our organization and help us manage ourselves orders more efficiently, specifically up and downstream impacts. Jake, take it away. Thank you, Martin. I would like to start with some of the whys. What are some examples of business challenges that might necessitate the use of a rounding profile at sales order entry? And then I'll walk through the definition. What are rounding profiles and how do they work? We'll also see in how they're maintained in SAP while we're walking through the system, I also point out some of the watch outs so that our audience is informed and ready to think through how and where rounding profiles might be useful to them. So let's go in and take a look. Alright, so let's dive in. What are some of the reasons why you might consider the use of rounding profiles? Well, a recent client use case was related to outbound logistics. They were responsible for delivering the goods to their customers, and for the larger customers, it made sense to invoke rounding profile to round to the next logical unit of delivery. So in their case, it was the next tier or layer in the pallet. For another business, it was alignment with the way they set their pricing to their customer. There could be any number of good qualifying use cases. Like most good rules in SAP, the business needs to carefully consider and clearly define them. A rounding profile requires configuration, so you don't want to go too crazy and bombard IT with requests, but rather start small and differentiate where it matters. Now one of the nice things about a rounding profile for customer orders is they can be quite specific. In fact, as you can see here. It can actually be defined in the CMIR, so you could in fact have different rules applied or not applied to different customers depending on the business need, so long as rounding is allowed in the customer master, or if you wanted to apply it to everyone except those who don't allow rounding via the tick box in the customer master, you could simply maintain the profile in the material master. If you're using a dynamic rounding profile, then you may be referencing additional master data, like alternative units of measure, so those will need to be in place and accurate. Let's say for now that we do not want to use a dynamic rounding profile, we'll keep it simple and round up to the next threshold here. We enter the sales order at whatever value the customer initially requests. When we hit enter, see here, the rounding profile's invoked and we get a dialogue box with information on the adjustment that's just occurred. Now, let's change the value again and see it adjust the rounding. This is great when you're directly interacting with a customer or you have a portal that's capable of sharing this information. However, proceed with caution on EDI orders to make sure that there are not errors or discrepancies. If we do have EDI customers for which this would not be appropriate, then flagging them as ineligible for rounding and the customer master may help. Then make sure they're meeting the agreed thresholds by putting the correct rules in place on their end. It's possible to make this work and have it work well, but it does require extra collaboration, some testing and error handling for EDI customers. Still a nice tool that can provide strong value. So welcome back from the demo as we highlighted today, rounding profiles at sales order entry can be very helpful in managing through several common business challenges. We also highlighted that while sometimes helpful. They like any feature that changes key order data after order entry require clear communication and expectations with our customers and our business partners. If there are differences between the PO, the sales order, the invoice, we have to work to resolve those differences efficiently. And lastly, we want to make sure the system's up to date with our latest agreements and that we're keeping SAP well-informed and clean. Much appreciate that, Jake. There's some really important advantages and key considerations in the tidy execution of this process. I really look forward to hearing from the business community what they think about how they can be able to use this specifically in their space. We've had a few good success stories recently on this topic, and I'm so glad to be continuing this conversation. So folks, if you have more stories on this particular use of this particular feature, please submit it below, we'd love to hear about it. Or if you just have a question, feel free to submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; WM; P2P; PTM; DM

MD04; VA03

Hello there SAP aficionados, Martin here. I'm coming to you today with another topic that we hope will help move you closer to your business objectives around service levels, making and keeping a promise and delivering on time and in full. SAP provides us with loads of opportunities to effectively plan for the time it takes to execute certain activities and shipping time to our customers or between facilities is no exception. This is efficiently managed through a function called route determination. Today, we are fortunate to have Jason with us in the studio, ready to help us and understand more about this key piece of functionality. Jason, tell us more about what we need to know about route determination. Hey Martin, like many topics, this is one I expect we'll see featured in more than one installment of Reveal TV. Today, I hope to provide the basics and get everyone thinking about how to further leverage this key feature in today's demo. I'm going to cover three things. First, we need to cover off on the definition so we're all speaking the same language. Then I want to show you where we see the route determination and a sales order or stock transport order. And lastly, I want you to see the results. Let's put SAP to work and see what happens when we apply the route to the order. Let's go in and take a look. You know what? Sometimes we just don't set ourselves up for success. We miss opportunities to let SAP in on how we conduct our business, and the result is we end up working harder than we need to and feel like we're serving SAP rather than the other way around. Here we are in a stock requirements list. See this sales order here? The date that we see is the MAD date, or the material availability date, also known as the date that we're shooting for so that our customer doesn't get MAD at us. This also applies to the components we need to manufacture and stock transfers that we're sending to other facilities. It's an important date. It's basically the sales order gateway into the supply chain. The MAD date is fed by the PGI date, plus some other get ready to ship times. That PGI time is fed by our logistics arrangement with our customer. If we're planning the shipping, then we can invoke the feature we're here to discuss today. To make sure that we have the right PGI, otherwise known as post goods issue date, or the date that it leaves our facility. When we're planning and prioritizing and expediting and carrying inventory, every day counts. And when we're there trying to achieve excellent reliability with our customers, every day matters. To get those dates roughly right, we need to know our mode of transportation and where we're shipping to. Based on the options we have, SAP can determine a route for our sales order or stock transfer orders and get the rest of the dates in alignment. Let's look a little closer on this sales order. On the shipping tab here, we can see that it has a route and if I drill down a little further, into the schedule lines, I can bring up this shipping tab. So the route has driven many of these things. For today, you can see how we plan this order, and we can see our transit time driving the PGI time, and then the pick, pack, and load driving material availability date, or the date that we're trying to hit an MD04. Now, if we weren't accounting for this shipping time, guess what would happen? We'd lose two days of our lead time and already be behind in our planning. We may need to manually intervene, which would cause a lot of churn, but with route determination in place, we're able to properly account for that time and give ourselves a fighting chance in reliably making and keeping that promise. I really hope this was helpful for you. Today was the basics and I look forward to coming back to this topic and taking it to the next level. Here's a couple of reminders before we go. Route determination benefits the customer by setting the appropriate timeline of activities up for the order to reach its destination on time. This is key to getting us to the correct PGI date. Which takes us to the correct MAD date, which is truly the gateway into supply planning. Lastly, when planning your routes, we recommend starting simply with a few different transportation modes and geographic zones that allow you to differentiate where it matters most. Hey, thank you Jason. Supply chains operate based on dates and quantities. With improved clarity of signal, it helps all of us improve and promise with integrity. Appreciate the walkthrough. Thank you, Jason. Hey folks, if you want to know more about route determination or other ways to improve your customer service to your clients and customers, hey, please check out our video catalogs. If you have a specific question that relates to this topic or others, feel free to submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD; MM; PP

MD04; CO09

Hey folks the best way to learn is by doing so. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. Hi, my name is Martin, in this video, we're going to focus on SAP's available to promise scope of check, and we're starting with what the requirements are to promise against what you have. I'd imagine I'd be preaching to the choir if I rattled off a stats related to being able to provide a quality promise to our customer. Being able to make a reliable and keep a promise to the customer in some areas is a right play and a competitive differentiator. So Kristie, without further ado how would you take us there? Thanks Martin. Today's topic might be a little bit controversial. Why of course you should be able to promise against what you have. Why would you not be able to do that? Sadly, the reason is that some of us do not have reliable inventory, let alone confirmed schedules for replenishment. If you are in this boat, not to worry. We're going to walk through what you need to do about it. So let's get into SAP. Let's explore the setup for the scope of check. Let's talk through the qualifiers for extending it, and let's understand the impacts. The most important thing is to be very honest about where you are, where you want to go, and why. This will lead you to the how and that's the doing that needs to be done before moving along. So today we're going to go in and look at some of the details around what we call a stage one scope of check. And what this is, the rules that we are putting in place to do our availability check to be able to make that promise to the customer and in this case the very starting stage of that is being able to promise against what we have. So that would be our inventory and you may be sitting there going, why are we even talking about whether we can promise against inventory or not, and that's because in order to be able to make a promise against inventory you have to have a degree of confidence that what the system says that you have is indeed what you have. So, if you don't have timely transactions, if you are not passing your cycle counts, or you're not doing them at all, there may be some cases where you have material that's just ineligible for even checking against what it says that you have, and that would be the first place to start to be on your journey to being able to get quality ATP is just simply starting with being able to promise against the inventory that you have. And, if you think about it, as we go through and we're making these promises, it's really the gateway to all the subsequent processes in the supply chain, right? Once we've made that promise to the customer, we want to make sure that we are moving towards trying to achieve it. And so, we've got a variety of videos in this series that talk through different stages of ATP and what the different requirements are and how we get further along in that journey. And so think about this as the very first one, so if you're getting started your ability to be able to promise against the inventory that you do have. Now, it's also really important to note that as you go through the process of making promises to your customer, that there are going to be a variety of times that you are going through and you're conducting that availability check. So sales orders first entered as you're going through, you're making changes to that order, if you're running rescheduling, in the background as a batch job, if you are going to move that sales order from sales order into delivery, then you're checking and potentially with a different rule set all together because there's two things that work together, it's the scope of check, which is what we're going to take a look at today and then the checking role which says based on what stage we are in the process, we would want to have different rules that apply. So let me give you the most simple example, so let's say that you're moving from sales order into a delivery. At the time that you're checking your sales order, you may allow it to check against something like production orders. That would be against scheduled, that would be a stage 2 check. If you were moving into delivery, you might say, Okay, well now that I'm moving into delivery, I want to make sure that I actually have that inventory on hand. So, you're actually restricting that check further because you're starting to put more things in motion. So, the first piece of information to your customer was a commitment, but it was data and information. The second time, you're actually coordinating physical activities. So, now you really want to make sure that before you start to commit that inventory fully to that delivery, that it is in fact on hand and ready to go. So, different process steps, different availability checks as you go through. So, if you're wondering where the availability check lives, a couple of different places in the material master, but we'll focus here today on MRP3, and you'll see that this lives in the same place where you're setting your planning strategy, which we know is how the system is going to react and respond to the demand signal, as well as your availability check down at the bottom. So this is the type of availability check that is in place. And what we're going to do here is we're going to go in and do the availability overview. So I also could have gotten to that right from the stock requirements list, I simply could have gone up and gone into the availability overview and I can get to that under the environment menu. But I can also just go directly in here to CO09, and in this case for my checking rule, I'm going to look at it based on the sales document, and I'm going to go ahead and pop in here, and so what this is going to tell me is what we have currently out there, and then what has been confirmed. And I can go in here and I can look at my scope of check and start to understand what we're checking against. And in this case, this is a very broad scope of check. It's very, very mature. And I'm going to break it down now for you into what this would look like if you were doing a stage one or kind of an inventory only. This means that I trust the inventory that I have on hand, but I'm a little less confident with anything that might be beyond that horizon. And you can see that our end of lead time here is 12/11, today is 11/27, so just about two weeks out into the future is what we're seeing, and you can see we have a total of 25 pieces coming in based on the production orders that we have out there with 19 pieces going out, but we also have zero stock on hand. So let me show you what it would look like if we were doing a scope of check that considered just inventory only. Okay, so if we think about this, so if you've not seen this before, these are the rules that apply to your scope of check, and you'll see the availability check up here. This is related to the scope of check that we're pulling, this is what we're seeing here, it's a rule set that is going to create the inclusions and exclusions for what we are going to account for in the ATP check. And then the checking rule, so when this is applied, in this case for a sales order versus a delivery, or if it was on the production side at the time that we do a planned order versus a production order create versus a production order release. As we move further and further along that cycle, we're going to want to restrict those rules a little bit more. So if we were counting only on our inventory, what we're going to see is a lot of population over here in the stock overview, and what these tick boxes are for the things that we want to include or exclude. For example, if we had high degree of confidence that our inventory was in pretty good shape, then we're going to allow for checking against inventory, and we might include our safety stock, we would generally recommend that, and then we can start to consider if it's stock in transfer, so maybe you have a sister facility that's really close by, inventory counts are pretty good, you can count on that coming in on time, and you might include stock in transfer, or you might include your quality inspection stock. So if you've got a good amount of reliability in your quality inspection process, and you know that those things are releasing timely, and everybody is going through and reviewing them, then you might be able to include quality inspection stock. Now, think about these as being in order, so for example, if you didn't include quality inspection stock and that was part of your process after goods receipt, then you wouldn't want to include anything in the scheduled horizon, like a production order or a purchase order that was coming in. So that's just a side note, it's very, very important. And then these next two include block stock or include restricted use stock. Just as a reminder, block stock in SAP terms is anticipated to not be available for use, so it's generally not going to be included. Okay, and so these are the things that fall into kind of the inventory that we have on hand, and then as we come over here, we see a combination of in and outward movements, and so in our next video about stage two, I'm going to talk through the incoming pieces, but we also want to consider outgoing, so for example, if you have a sales order, we're doing a sales order availability check. We definitely want to include deliveries because they already have stock that's associated with them and likely also sales requirements, so anything that is out there we've already promised against another sales document, we don't want to double dip on that. So those are the kinds of things that you would include, so if you're starting with the stage one, you're likely going to see include safety stock, possibly include quality inspection stock, that's the one you really want to consider, and then over here, you would likely include sales requirements and deliveries in order to make sure that you're fully accounting for what you have outbound as well. So the screen is a little confusing if you're not used to it because it is both in and outward movements but if you really think through the different descriptions here, or if you go any further explore the field, you will see additional information. We'll also have another video that will walk through the replenishment lead time, so stay tuned on that, but that is if you are making a promise against your replenishment lead time, let's say for example, you were in an environment where you really couldn't count on your stock, lead time was the better information for you, that was your only option that might be something that you consider if you're on an extended lead time situation where you've got a particular bottleneck or capacity constraint that you're working through and you're on an extended lead time, then that may also come into play for you as well. So, couple of different options there, but again, starting with what you actually have is the first step in trying to be able to make that and keep that promise. So when that order comes in, you might be accepting the requested delivery date. You might have an estimated ship date in mind based on your overall market stated lead time and then you're actually making that confirmation for go ahead as soon as that inventory is either in quality inspection or has been fully released into unrestricted stock. Welcome back. In this demo, we covered a few important things. First, the difference between making and keeping a promise. Second, what the ATP scope of check looks like. And third, a few of the variations on the most basic scope of check options and how the system reacts to them. It's a journey, and this is simply Step 1. Thanks, Kristie. ATP is an exercise of honesty, integrity, and commitment. It's also an ongoing journey that needs to begin with basics and then grow from there. There's no question this is a hot topic with a lot of differential considerations. Thank you for getting the conversation going, Kristie. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about this topic, ATP, or any other topic related to your customer service, please check out our other videos and of course if you have a particular question, feel free to submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

SD; MM; PP

MD04; CO09

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. Hi, my name is Martin and we know the best way to learn is by doing so let's get into it. This video, we're going to focus on SAP's available to promise or ATP scope of check. So Kristie, we have introduced Step 1 already. If we were to sum it up, it was about promising against material you already have. Are you now going to explain to us the next step, which is promising against what we have scheduled? Why, yes I am, Martin. In this demo we're going to go back to the scope of check and look at some examples. Of what we would consider scheduled items. We're going to discuss whether we should or should not include them. And also how the system will react if we do. The integrity here is essential, we don't want to just make a promise we want to feel confident that we can keep it. Alright, I think we're ready for step 2 in our availability check. So if we think about available to promise as being the gateway into all the subsequent things that we try to do in the supply chain in order to satisfy that customer demand, what comes together to allow us to make a quality ATP check are all of these different pieces of this integrated diagram, right? So we have the requirements that we may be pre planning to so things like our forecast or orders, and then we are constantly getting new orders, and when we do that we're going out based on a rule set making a determination on what kind of promise we can provide to the customer. And it's not only what, but it's when, right? So we have to be at a certain point in our supply process before we're going to make that promise to the customer. So they may get some sort of estimated confirmation or acknowledgement up front, and then eventually they're going to get the actual full confirmation once we've hit that point. So just like if you were to go and try to place an order with Amazon and maybe they don't have enough units in stock, and so it gives you an estimated date or it acknowledges your order and then later fulfills the remaining information about when you're going to receive it. So in step one or stage one, we talk through inventory. So being able to promise against what you actually have. So that means that you have timely transactions, you've got good quality, robust cycle counting programs, you've looked at these materials and they're in pretty good shape, so you're ready to promise against what you have. Now we're going to talk about going a little bit further out into what we would consider some of the scheduled horizons, so things that we have on schedule. So that might be things that are externally procured and you're in a buy sell situation, these may be items from your supplier that have either been acknowledged by them or are in transit or on purchase order, it could be stock transfer orders or confirmed stock transfer orders, and it can be production, so it might be your production orders that are ready to rock and roll out on the manufacturing floor. So those are some of the things that we start to consider once we're into step 2 or stage 2. Now this is a big deal, getting there is an enormous accomplishment, it means your exception messages are relatively under control, you've got good housekeeping, you've got a good segment of materials we can go through and you can start to promise a little further out. You're doing capacity evaluation and leveling, you've got a finite schedule that's moving to the manufacturing floor. It's been through its pre flight checks so you know that you have material available, labor and capacity, and you're planning that really well and you're also sequencing it in a way that allows the manufacturing floor to go out and actually execute that schedule. So it's reasonable, realistic, and actionable. And at that point, when you have good schedule adherence and those activities are working harmoniously together, now we're at a good place where we can start to make those promises. And a lot of that is making sure also that you have the correct data or business rules in the system that match your business behaviors. So when we think about the anatomy of an availability check and we spoke a little bit about this in our last video. So if you haven't watched it yet, go back and watch the step one video where we talk about promising against inventory, we talk about the progression. So as you move from sales order into delivery, you will have a different level of finiteness in terms of what it is that you might want to consider. So once you get into deliveries you probably are at a place where you're checking to make sure you actually have that inventory on hand, you got stock and transfer from another facility, it's through quality inspection, whatever the case may be. But based on that level of confidence, because you're physically doing things with that product you're going to have a more stringent availability check versus a sales order. You still want to be really careful you're making a promise that you can keep and you're not making the promise until you're at a good level of confidence that you can keep it. But you have a little bit more room because really what you're flowing is information you're preparing to be able to execute that shipment versus the actual physical movement of the loading and pickpack process and transportation planning. And so there's a couple of different things that come together to form the scope of check, and that's the checking rule, so the stage of the process that you're in. So sales order or delivery or planned order versus production order create versus production order release and then the check in group that has been identified in the material master. Those two things, so the stage of the process and then the rule set that's been assigned, come together to build your scope of check. And in that, it's a list of inclusions and exclusions that help you to get to what is available to promise. And so that's both things that are coming in and things that are planned to go out like sales orders and deliveries that are already created and out there in existence. And so we're going to go back in and look at our availability overview here. So I switched materials on, I picked a different one this time, but I am going to go in and take another look at the scope of check and give you a little bit more explanation. Now, again, the scope of check I'm about to show you is very, very broad, it's assuming a very high level of maturity in the process and what I'm going to highlight for you here are some examples of what we would consider to be the scheduled horizon and how you should think about that. So, this particular material, so the end of lead time, it goes all the way out to the 25th of January, so that's almost two months out. You can see that we're planning on receiving 39 pieces between what we have already in place and what we have coming in on our next couple of planned orders. We also have 41 pieces that are expected to go out, 23 of those have been confirmed, so you can see we have a deficit here that we're trying to accommodate. So there's a portion of our total demand that we don't have any supply in place to cover that, that is going to pass the availability check. So you can see whether it's been confirmed or not right here. So this first order, all 15 pieces, the second order of the 5, only 2 have been confirmed and on the third order of the 21 only 6 have been confirmed. And we'll go through why that is in another video where we talk about the different options for confirmation. But what I'm going to do here is just pop into the scope of checks, if you've never taken a look at this, great opportunity for you to do that, and you'll see here there's all of these different considerations. And so when we were talking last time about inventory, we were talking over here on the stock overview, and we said typically you're going to include safety stock in that and then the next one to really consider are these two right here, stock and transfer. So if you have a high degree of confidence that those transactions are happening on a timely basis, that once something shows as in transfer, it's going to arrive at your facility in good time and in good accuracy. Same thing with quality inspection. If something is going into quality inspection, do you have a great deal of confidence that it's typically going to go off of quality inspection at the time you're expecting it to do so, and that the result of that quality inspection is generally pretty good. So those are some of the things that you would think through on the inventory side. That was a very quick recap of a longer conversation from a previous video. Once we come over here, now we're in more of the proposal stage, and I'm going to talk through some of the elements around schedules. So these are both your inward and your outward movements, and so if you come down here to this little section, reservations, dependent requirements, sales requirements, deliveries. For example, these are things that are other commitments that you might be making. So at the time of sales order create, you might do things like include delivery and sales requirements, depending on your environment that might also include reservations. When you get further along and you're in delivery, you may drop the sales requirements because that might span a very long period of time, maybe you've got sales orders out there for the next three months and deliveries out there for the next two weeks. So you want to be able to prioritize those requirements. You might drop sales requirements and just count deliveries. So considerations for what counts against your available balance for your outbound goods movements. And then we also have the piece where we want to start to think through what kinds of inbound we would want to include. And so this is going to be things like our purchase orders. It's going to be things like our production orders. And you'll see that there are different options for these based on the different level of firmness. So if we look here, you have the option. to either exclude production orders altogether, to take all production orders into account regardless of whether they're in create or release status, or to take only released production orders into account. So for example, a released production order is one that has been pre flight checked. So it has material, capacity, and labor available. It's been finitely scheduled, so it's been sequenced appropriately, and you have good schedule adherence, meaning that the production is likely to finish on time and move through the process at a quantity that is what the production order was requiring. So, those are the things that you would think about if you want to think about release. Now, if you're a little bit more confident, you could trust that the production order that was out there that had not been through all those processes, maybe it's in created status, but you've got really good adherence to the schedule, and even before you hit release status, you know that you're setting yourself up for success. You've got some materials that would be eligible there, then you can go a little bit further out and think about those production orders for inclusion. So similar thought process comes with purchase orders. So, what level of firmness does your purchase order need to be at before you would consider including it in your ATP check, and so you're going to want to look at what is going on with those suppliers and then be able to make a determination on how confident you are whether those purchase orders are going to arrive on time. So, really important to think through the different releases, levels of your production, and then also to think through how reliable those suppliers are for your procurement and whether you've accounted for lead times in all the right places. And the more your confidence builds in that, then the more likely you are to be able to go past just the inventory that you have on hand and now out into the schedule horizon where we really start to think through what it is that we have confidence in. And again, like all of our other master data settings, this is really around grouping and prioritizing, understanding how well that supply is under control, and how well our daily habits are working in terms of being able to use that cadence to keep the crazy chaos at bay and make sure that we're moving through the process in a good fashion. So step one with ATP, promising against what you have. Step two is being able to take a look at some of your scheduled elements like purchase orders that are out there with suppliers, the good deal of accuracy, stock transfers across facilities where you have a high degree of confidence, and production orders either in create or release status starting with release first and then working your way back into created. And if you can do that you're well on your way to a quality availability check where you can make and keep a promise. Whew! Okay, that was a challenging one to wrap up because there is so much to talk about, but the most important thing is being really honest on how predictable and stable the supply is. Today we explored a little bit of the scope of check. Got a good picture of what's considered scheduled. And discussed how we can be sure of whether we've got a fighting chance of including these items in the scope of check to make a promise that we can keep. Yeah, amazing, Kristie, thank you so much. Every client wants to know how to get here and be confident in what they are promising. So folks, if you want to learn more about ATP, scope of check, or be able to improve your customer service, check out our other videos and of course if you have a particular question submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; PTM; DM

MM03; CO09

[00:00:00] Hey folks, Martin here. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your system. And as we know, the best way to learn is by doing so let's jump straight in. In this video, we're going to be defining what the checking group is. Kristie, tell us more specifically about this checking group. It seems complicated. But I feel like you got a better shot at helping us understand this. I will give it my best shot, Martin. A checking group lives in the material master and that, in combination with the checking rule, defines the scope of check for ATP. And whether that material is even eligible for ATP or not. In today's session. We're going to go in and look at where it lives and what it impacts. This is a grouping technique for materials with like behaviors that should follow the same logic. It's a very important rule and requires good cross functional support and alignment. Let's go in and take a look. There are a couple of definitions that are really important for us to understand because they're the building blocks of how we get to that particular material availability check. [00:01:00] One of those, I would say that there's three we really want to make sure that we understand because they work well together. You've got scope of check, you have your checking group, and you have your checking rule. Today, we're exploring checking group. And if you found yourself on your ATP journey and really struggling with where to apply availability checks or how to apply your availability checks, this checking group, this concept of grouping materials under a particular set of availability rules is one of the key things that we should consider and that's really at the material and plant level So I'll show you when somebody refers to the checking group really where you're seeing that is where you would see it in the availability check field. So if we're on the planning and buying and scheduling and material management side of the house we are used to seeing that right here in the MRP 3 view. Now if we're in the customer experience or sales order management side of the house, we are used to seeing it here under sales, [00:02:00] general and plants. And I can come in here, I need to drop in my sales org and I will need to drop in my distribution channel. I'm saying this for my supply side friends who maybe aren't hanging out here as much and we will see our availability check right here. We can see this one is assigned to a 02, that's an SAP standard availability check. That is for individual requirements. And when we think about our materials, our materials have different behaviors, which would cause us to assign a different checking group to them. For example, if you had materials where batch determination was in play, you may have them assigned with a CH availability check. This all works in conjunction as well with your planning strategies and with other elements of configuration and rules that come into play. One other thing to be mindful of is if you have ever felt like when you go to run your confirmations on your sales orders, all of a sudden something goes hinky and the material that you thought was available is suddenly not [00:03:00] for that sales order. There are a couple of key reasons why that can happen. One we've seen quite a lot recently at clients is that your accumulation settings may be incorrect. So if you don't have accumulation set, there's no accumulation going on, that can cause challenges when your supply plan shifts around, it can cause your sales orders to lose their place in line and you would see that you might be promising inventory that was destined for one sales order to another. Other places where this can happen are really related to your checking groups and to manual behaviors and interventions that come into play when we're doing things like rescheduling or robbing from Peter to pay Paul. So we will have little discussions on each of these topics, but in terms of your checking group and the configuration associated with it, this is another place to call out. Remember on your journey to ATP, you are making those assignments at the material and plant level. So think about your checking group and the assignment of those rules based on a grouping of [00:04:00] materials that are all going to be validated or verified in the same way as you're going through the confirmation process. So in summary. A checking group is assigned in the material master, and it reflects a group of materials that is subject to the same flow of rules for ATP. A checking group works in conjunction with a checking rule to make up a scope of check, and this is one of those master data settings where cross functional consideration and collaboration is essential. Not only does this apply to materials sold to our customers or transferred to our sister facilities, but is also applicable to manufactured parts that need a pre flight check on material availability prior to scheduling or release to the shop floor. Over to you, Martin. Okay, roger that, Kristie. Appreciate it. Sometimes it is helpful to get a clear definition on some of these critical data settings, and also to get a good sense of how they can be applied. I'm sure we've got many more and many more to review. So thank you. Folks, once again, if you're looking [00:05:00] for more data on this particular topic or others, there is a whole video catalog on this website. And of course, if you have a particular burning question, please suggest it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; PTM; DM

CO09

[00:00:00] 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 will be discussing checking rules as a part of ATP scope of check. Now, this is a definition video on focusing on one key term within ATP process that holds a lot of power and is often misunderstood. This can lead to a lot of chaos and confusion as organizations work hard to begin their ATP journey. And understanding or believing in those results actually. Kristie, I know this is a really hot topic. But checking rules, kind of the basics of ATP, take it away. Wait. Who said this was important? I'm only kidding. Yes, checking rules are very important. As we progress through time and march closer to physical execution of the process, it's critically important that we find the right check for the stage it is applied. So for example, in a sales order versus a delivery or created production order versus a production order that's ready for takeoff. [00:01:00] These are important stages in the process and our promise or pre flight checks will likely change as we move through them. What I'd like to do with our demo time today is to. Show you the difference as I apply different checking rules without changing the checking group. I'll show you where you can see this. And some of the common examples of what might change as we go. A couple of key definitions in the background that help us to understand how ATP is functioning circle around the scope of check or what we are allowed to include, what we are not allowed to include in terms of supply, and what we should consider or not consider in terms of demand. Our checking group, which is really the availability check that we're choosing to assign to a grouping of materials, and then what we're exploring today, which is the checking rule. And you can see I'm here in CO09. This is the availability overview. And in this [00:02:00] screen, I can actually go through and look at a material from different perspectives, so different checking rules. So think about this in terms of how we are flowing through our sales order or our production planning cycle. And especially when we have competing demands for manufacturing, for stock transfer, for sales orders out to customers. We can have kind of a collision of rules that can come into play here. And so if you think about it, something like a sales order may be allowed to go through and look at things like confirm production. So production that is out there that's in the scheduled horizon has been released. You may have purchase orders that have been confirmed and on their way and that you would want to consider. But by the time that sales order is going into delivery, or in the case of production, before that production order is being released to the floor, we may narrow down [00:03:00] what we are allowed to consider as relevant supply. That's how we get to the scope of check. So our checking rule helps us to invoke the right scope of check for where we are in the process. And so if we choose one here, we'll go ahead and here just choose sales orders. I just want to show you one thing. We can come in here and we see the availability. We can see our quantity that we have on hand, less what we have for a sales order that's going out, adding to that the production and then reducing that further with the next sales order that is going out after that production is planned to be received. So if we look at that in conjunction with our scope of check, that's going to tie back to the rules for what we are allowed to include or consider at that stage in the order cycle, so for a sales order. If we do something like this, watch, these are all going to disappear here. I'm going to change to a different checking rule, and this is going to be for a delivery. Now I'm going to change this, [00:04:00] I'll do the drop downs that you can see. I'm going to change this to a B for a sales order delivery. I'll go ahead and come in here and you'll see we no longer see the sales orders because in our scope of check for delivery, for our outbound deliveries, we are not including our sales orders that we have confirmed in that scope of check. Now we are competing only with the other deliveries that are out there and we are only including very specific things. You'll see here the production order that we were counting on to promise our sales order against is no longer here. We are only considering the stock that we have on hand. So as we go through and we start to get more real about the physical activities and the cost incurred with moving a sales order either into manufacturing, out the door on a stock transfer order, or out the door on a delivery for a customer, we may narrow what it is that we are choosing to include in that scope of check based on where we are in the process. And the checking rule is what makes that connection for [00:05:00] us. In today's demo. We illustrated the stated definition of a checking rule and demonstrated where to find it and how to see the results. We chatted through some of the common evolutions that may happen as you march forward in time with different activities, getting different levels of commitment . And we discussed some of the most common pitfalls that relate to checking rules. Okay, great. Thank you, Kristie, much appreciated. This makes a lot of sense if you're thinking about it. We have different expectations for the state of our supply chain, depending on where we are in the process. We should have different levels of firmness and commitment and flexibility. So again, thank you for that, I appreciate that a lot. You know, a picture is worth a thousand words and the best way to learn is truly by doing. So folks, if you want to learn more about ATP and checking rules, please check out other videos related to this topic. And of course, if you have a specific question, please feel free to submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

OTC; P2P; PTM

MD04; CO09

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 discussing checking rules as a part of ATP scope of check. Now this is a definition video on focusing on one key term within ATP process that holds a lot of power and is often misunderstood. This can lead to a lot of chaos and confusion as organizations work hard to begin their ATP journey, and understanding or believing in those results actually. Kristie, I know this is a really hot topic but checking rules, kind of the basics of ATP, take it away. Kristie: Hey, Martin, so great question. Sometimes it's good to take a step back to basics and make sure we're all on the same page with these different definitions. Today, I'm going to use SAP to bring the definition to light and walk through what exactly a scope of check is. What it influences, and how to check and see what scope of check is in [00:01:00] play. I'll also highlight some things that can cause hiccups in the process. Let's go take the tour. Alright, let's use SAP to help give this definition a little bit more life. ~Um,~ I am in CO09, ~um,~ which is the Availability Overview, and I really love this ~list.~ transaction because what it allows us to do is to go through and actually see what is available based on the checking group and the checking rule and it also lets us know ~kind of~ what the end of the lead time is for this item so we know that we should see the situation for planning if we're not running terribly behind we should start to see that even out and we should start to see recovery that should be the next available time to start to take in a customer order. So here's how I got to this transaction. I actually got here from MD04. So I'm going to go ahead and just navigate back and show you how I got here. So I went to Environment and I went to ATP [00:02:00] Quantities. So if you think about MD04 as being the place to be for our planners and buyers and our MRP controllers our schedulers, this is the place to be if you're checking availability, and that might be availability for sales documents, it might be availability for ~um,~ delivery, so customer orders versus deliveries versus stock transfer orders, or even for material that needs to be available for use in manufacturing. And the picture, the rule set that we're going to see is defined by the scope of check and that scope of check is the combination of the checking group and the checking rule. We will have a video that goes through the definition of the checking group and the checking rule, which makes up the scope of check. Now, if you're not sure how you got this particular checking group or checking rule as you were coming into this transaction, let me go back to MD04 and just show you one other thing, this is one of the hidden gems of the stock requirements list [00:03:00] that we highlighted in that video by the same name. So under Settings and Settings, if you come over here on General Settings this is what is controlling the checking rule that you are coming into that transaction, also for when you are doing your order report. So typically for an MRP controller, ~if it,~ if you're buying raw materials, your checking rule is going to be something related to production planning. I've modified that here because this is a finished good, and I want to take a look at it from the sales perspective to see what is going to be available and when. ~So,~ That's how it knew what to pull through, and the other thing I can do is, if you are on the ~um,~ customer service ~or,~ or customer excellence side of the house, you probably are coming directly into this transaction. So I'm just going to do a slash in CO09 and you'll see that it's actually going to prompt me for which checking rule I want to use. We'll talk more about the [00:04:00] definitions, but if you think about this, this is the progression through the process. So planned order versus production order, ~so~ a dependent requirement versus an order reservation, customer orders, a sales order versus delivery, so there's a progression there and that's how it knows what to bring in. And this is important because the combination of these two is what sets the rule for checking availability, so what is allowed to be included versus excluded. And you can see over here in your stock overview, this is the type of stock. This is the kind of stock that is eligible for consideration in the process. It tells us whether we're considering replenishment lead time, so if it's 15 days and we don't have any stock on hand, we know that we can make it and we will have it reliably in 15 days, so we're going to be able to go out and make that promise without any type of capacity constraint or consideration on material availability. We can go in and look at the storage location level information. And then also over here on inwards and outward movement, so [00:05:00] what other types of demand are competing with this particular requirement? And what do I need to factor in as I'm going through and seeing what is left over for this particular item? And then what am I allowed to include in terms of inbound inventory that's on its way in, as well as my certainty, the quality of my housekeeping, and the reliability of my information on what may be over and past due. And this is one where we do want to be really cautious, we want to be able to include receipts from the past and future. We want to be able to get our housekeeping in order and make sure that things are neat and tidy, we've got the correct over and under delivery tolerances. As soon as you start to exclude this, you really do have a significant chance of over planning. So only in very specific business situations should this rule be changed. And the other one that's really big is the replenishment lead time. So if you'd like to know more [00:06:00] about the checking groups and the checking rules that get us to this little playbook that tells us how we're going to determine whether inventory or inbound goods are going to be available for this order, how much we have available to promise, there will be other videos that go through specifically those definitions as well as the requirements for what you should or should not include. But the definition for today, for today's scope of check is the combination of your checking group and your checking rule gives us the rules for what can be included or not in your ATP quantity. Alrighty, thanks for exploring that with me. Being able to clearly articulate a definition can really help to ensure everyone is on the same page and talking about the same thing. One of the things we hope Reveal TV will do is promote a common framework of understanding, which enables critical thinking and excellent conversations. Understanding definitions for the big ticket terms [00:07:00] is essential for getting there. Today we learned. The definition of the scope of check. How we can figure out what scope of check is in play. And lastly, when and what some of the common hiccups may look like. Over to you Martin. Martin: Okay, great, thank you Kristie, much appreciated. This makes a lot of sense if you're thinking about it. We have different expectations for the state of our supply chain, depending on where we are in the process. We should have different levels of firmness and commitment and flexibility. So again, thank you for that, I appreciate that a lot. You know, a picture is worth a thousand words and the best way to learn is truly by doing. So folks, if you want to learn more about ATP and checking rules, please check out other videos related to this topic. And of course, if you have a specific question please feel free to submit it below.

Order Fulfillment & ATP

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.