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MB52; MMBE; MD04; MC48; MB5B
The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we're going to be trying to discuss five ways to review inventory in SAP. Clearly keeping your finger on the pulse of what's happening with our investment in inventory is critical to the success and to our business. SAP has so many reports that allow us to see what's happening. I'm actually interested to see which ones we're going to choose today. So Kristie, why don't you show us a couple of these specific reports, and do we really have five different types? Why yes I am, Martin. Five is really just the start. There are so many great ways to look at inventory in SAP, and it really just depends on what question you're trying to answer in that particular moment, I think we all have our favorites. Today, I'm going to cover. Five of the most common transactions we look at for inventory. What information in each one is best for. And for a feature or three that folks might not yet know about or have in their daily repertoire of analytical goodness. Let's dive in and take a look. All right, five different ways to look at inventory. Let's see what we can find here. So first of all, we are in MD52 and if you're following along, the transaction code is going to be in the lower right hand corner of the screen. And we're going to go through these five transactions and get a good idea of what it is. So this is your perpetual inventory. You would run this for either a selection of materials or across an entire plant or looking at a storage location. You can see here you've got quite a lot in terms of selection criteria. You can also bring in your special stock. So in this case, I've chosen to bring in Vendor provided stock, so things that I've got out at the subcontractor, I want to include those. Making a choice not to show any type of zero stock lines, so don't show me those and then down at the bottom I have the option to set up my display and either a hierarchical representation or a non hierarchical representation. These are good to play with and understand the difference and then you can also assign a default layout here as well. So perpetual inventory is great for looking to see what your status is as of right now. It allows you to look across a lot of different materials and it will run and bring back for you a wide variety of information. So you can see you've got material number, plant storage location. This is that special stock indicator. Coming across here, if you've got the supplier attached to that in the case of choosing a vendor provided stock, your unit of measure, and then all of the different types of stock that is available to you and you're going to see this both in units as well as in dollars. So again, this layout is highly adaptable, you can see here that you're able to go in and adjust it just like you would in any other transaction. But you're also going to be able to see things like what's in transit or in transfer, what you have in block stock and quality inspection stock. This is great for where are we today? Going into a physical inventory and freezing the books, knowing where you are ending and you're cleaning up going into a physical, so making sure that you've got good line of sight on what's going on with all your in transit and in transfer items. You know what it is that you're going to do there, so you don't accidentally miss that when you go to do your account postings, you've accounted for everything, you've cleaned as much of that up as possible. Same thing with block stock and quality inspection stock. So really useful transaction that is really regarded as the number one way to view your perpetual inventory. Okay, so loads and loads and loads of different options here in terms of the layout and what you can go through and include. And remember as well that you can adjust the position by just adjusting these numbers here if you don't want to have to drag and drop, as well as the length of your fields. This is a really nice way to be able to work with your layout and then you're able also to do subtotalings and totals in which case you're going to get this line two and line three depending on the front screen if you've chosen hierarchical or versus non hierarchical display. So I'd encourage you to play with both, because they're both there for different reasons. So that is MB52. Now let's go back to our stock requirements list. Here we are. And I want to show you a couple of different things that we can see from here. So first of all, this is an inventory report unto itself, right? It's telling us what our current stock is. It is also telling us what our projected stock is. And we can even get to a graphic that is going to show us a green line of where we're expecting our stock to go. And I'm going to go ahead and just choose our available quantity and that's going to bring up a chart for us so that we can see what our anticipated inventory level looks like across time. There you are. And you can scroll out and look way out into the future to see what is going on with your planning. Another option here is if you see these golden cubes appear, this means that there is additional stock out there. So if you click on this, this is alerting you that you've got stock in some place that you're not seeing as part of this available quantity. So in this case, it's block stock. So in addition to the 1, 700 pieces, we have an unrestricted use stock that's available for planning. There's also an additional 5, 500 that is hanging out there in block stock and we want to make sure that we're aware of that and that we're asking questions around whether that is going to be returned to use or what the plan is for disposition. And block stock should be the things that we should not be counting on, so it's excluded from our planning. We also might have some other categories here as you can see, there's a bunch of other options and so those golden cubes appear when there is other stock out there, we want to make sure that when we see that it's really an exception, we want to go in and take a look at that and see what's going on. Another place that we can go from here is our current stock status. So here, let's click on just the stock line itself, and I can see down here at the bottom, that's another way to get to the same place as the golden cubes. I can go to stock overview. What this is going to do is actually pass me through to MMBE and this allows us to see for that particular material, we can see where it's sitting, all the batch information, if it was across several different MRP areas or storage locations, you'd be able to see that. In fact, let's go back and pick one where we have some of that going on. I'm just going to pick a different item from the list and go to the same place. I'm able to quickly do this so I'm going to go ahead and choose this guy here and again, I'm going to double click on stock and go to stock overview. The other way I could do this is up at the top in the drop down menu. I can use go to to get me there. And you'll see here, this is focused on units rather than dollars. So if you think about the perpetual inventory, that was our giving us our on book value. This is giving us our units, so this is much more focused from a planning point of view, or a sales operations or warehousing point of view if you're not using warehouse management. If you're using warehouse management, obviously there's much better transactions to be able to see where your inventory is sitting. But really nice to be able to go in and take a look at this. It will have your batch information and it's going to have any splits across MRP areas. It's going to break this down a little bit further for you and you can again modify the order of these columns to make that process easier. All right, let's go to another one. From here, I'm going to go ahead and actually switch a navigation profile on, and if you haven't seen that video yet, go take a look. And I'm going to go to environment and navigation profile, and I'm going to say assign, and I'm going to pick, that's going to bring up a bunch of stuff for me, and I could go to MC.9 and I actually think today, that would take me through, so if I click on that, it's going to default in all the information for me, so I can go into MC.9 and look at my inventory. But I think I'm going to keep this even simpler for today, and I'm going to go to MC48. So, let's do that. Slash N, M, MC48. Alright, and it's brought my material number over, and I'm going to choose this plant. And this is going to give me my current inventory. MC49 will give me my average inventory. And so here is my current stock value. So if I needed this rather than in units, but in dollars, I could do that and then I can get to units from here. I'm just going to click on this guy, and I'm going to go to double line, which is going to bring up more statistics for me and it will tell me that this is this dollar value is made up by these 665 pieces. I can then even go into detailed display, select my item, detailed display, and I can choose stock level, that is going to give us our famous red line graph and it would bring up that visual for us. Okay, so really good stuff there. One last one I want to show to you. This one's very helpful, stock as of a particular posting date. So I'm going to go to slash n and I am going to MB5B and in this one, now, and this is a very common question, you can actually go back and look at your stock value based on a particular selection date. So you can put in the dates that you want to look at, or the date range. So let's say you're looking for a particular end of period value. You're able to put that in, and what it's going to show you if you put a range, is it's going to show you how many issued, how many receipts, and then what your value was on those particular periods. So really nice to be able to go in and say, hey, what was my stock value the same date or the end of month, the same period last year? And you're able to quickly go in and there is a ton of selection opportunities here. So storage locations, so if you want to see things in units, your evaluated stock, special stock, and then evaluated stock if you're in a consignment environment that's particularly helpful, and then you've got all kinds of scope of lists and settings here for what it is that you can see and then you can assign layouts. So, this one we could spend a couple videos on just going through the different selection criteria, but I just want you to be aware that it's here, MB5B, and this is what allows you to see your stock as of a particular period. So let's quickly recap. MB52, perpetual inventory, that's the first one we looked at and probably one that you're very familiar with. This is where we can see our value and our units based on a plant or other organizational object. Really, really helpful for getting snapshots of inventory when we're going into the end of period, or if we're going through a process where we're expecting to see some changes and you need to get it before and after screenshot. MMBE is where we're able to go in and see the details of a particular material, break all that down to batch level. We can do that in MB52 as well, but MMBE displays that in a little nicer way when we're looking at a particular material and we're really deep diving into the details. MC48 allows us to run our current stock value. We can run this across an entire plant or for material across multiple plants. This is going to allow us to see dollars and units. We have to go to the double line display to see the units. It's also where we can get our red line graph. MD04, we can get a green line graph representing our future forecasted inventory position. We can look at the gold box to see if we have stock that is in a non planable location or in other places other than unrestricted. And then lastly, MB5B, the transaction we're on right now, and this is the one where we can see, based on a particular date, what our stocking position was, or look at a range and see the puts and takes from point A to point B. Lots of different selection criteria here. Welcome back! I really enjoyed putting together this overview. There is so much untapped potential in SAP when it comes to reviewing our inventory investments. Today we focused on. Some of the basics as a jumping off point. And tried to offer a better context on where these staple report's best feature in our quest to efficiently balance supply to demand. And lastly, we pointed out a few tips that have made life easier when we've used these particular transactions in our own supply chain lives. I can't wait to hit some more. This has really been the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, I agree, Kristie. So much to explore here. But we have to start somewhere and understand where these common use reports fit into our ability to review our inventory investment. The accuracy and the placement is vitally important. Good stuff. So if you want to know more about this particular topic or any other topic related to SAP and inventory, there are so many videos in our catalog please check them out and if you have a burning question, please submit it below.