Watched

Quality & Batch Management

P2P; PTM

MD04; ME22N; MIGO; MMBE

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

Intercompany Transfers

A clear walkthrough of the intercompany sales process and where complexity emerges

Hey folks, Martin here, and today I'm ready to tackle a challenge alongside you. Do you find that the intercompany transfer process just doesn't seem to flow as well and easy as it should? Do you find that service is a struggle and you're competing for priority? We know how frustrating this can be, and it's a common business scenario, so I think we should work it out. Okay, when we need clarity and common ground. Jake is our man today. He will walk us through an example of a basic process so we can be all aligned to how it is expected to flow. Jake, where do we start? The only place to start is at the beginning Martin. Definitions are key. Let me ask you something. Does anyone struggle with intercompany transfers versus intracompany transfers? We're all familiar with intracompany transfers. These are our normal stock transport orders going from plant to plant within the same company code. What we're talking about today are intercompany transfers. These transfers are happening when you're transferring from one company code to another. So today I'll walk through the process and I'll highlight where it often breaks down. So let's dive in and take a look. Alright, so you know, we have to start in the stock requirements list, right? Planning central. It's where all the good stuff lives. Let's level set. This intercompany transfer process is a purchase. Now the terms of that purchase will be unique to your organization. It may be a discrete price or it may be some sort of cost plus model. Whatever makes sense for your organization. In any case, this process starts with a purchase requisition or a schedule line that's generated by MRP and is informed by the rules that we've maintained in SAP. When we say rules for MRP, let's think about how MRP will know where to get it, how many to order and when the purchase order needs to be placed by. If we look at our MRP results, we can determine if we have a nice planning situation or if we need to adjust. If you think, I'm going to change that date or quantity, take a moment. Can we fix a rule or get a better result? Less work for better outcomes is what we're after. But I digress. So back to the process. Let's convert this requisition into a PO by double clicking on the MRP element and choosing convert to purchase order. We'll get all of that good quality data right into our purchase order. We save and now let's go to see what it looks like for the supplying plant. For the supplying plant, we're going to see a sales order. They'll be able to clearly see that this sales order is for one of their sister facilities. They'll be able to acknowledge the order, run ATP, and confirm the order, and adjust the dates or priority as we get closer to that shipment. The sales order will add additional rules like pick, pack, and load time, whether partial shipments are allowed, the delivery priority, and the route. When the product ships and outbound delivery will be created, the goods will be PGI'd, and an inbound delivery can also be created at the receiving plant so that they know the goods are on their way. Now, this all sounds simple, but let me take a moment to share where it can go wrong. First, the receiving plant doesn't respect the lead time or over orders, making it difficult for the supplying plant to deliver on time. This also erodes trust that the requirements are real, and perhaps even worse, it ties up inventory unnecessarily. The receiving plant forgets that the supplying plant has other parties that also need the goods and needs the clearest demand picture possible. Second, the supplying plant constantly changes the date or lowers the priority of the order. They prioritize end customers and production needs first. They may not know that this intercompany order is so the receiving plant can meet the needs of another end customer or one of the other manufacturing floors. And third, the rules are incorrect, which we know leads to bad planning, manual intervention, and second guessing everything. So to address those things, my suggestion is to get closer. Just open up the conversation, put your heads together, and evaluate options. There's no reason why this process can't perform. We just need to invest in understanding. Today we walk through an example of how the process is expected to work and some of the challenges that typically arise. To alleviate some of the common challenges with this process here are a few things to consider. If you're the purchaser, be sure to get your demand into the system at the standard lead time. Buy to your needs and your stocking strategy, and be a good partner to outside customers in your sister facility by negotiating dates and quantities when necessary. For those of you on the supplying plant, treat orders from your sister facility like real orders and communicate with them so they know what's going on and they can meet the needs of the end customer or the manufacturing floor. If you are going to reprioritize the order, be sure to let them know, negotiate and be fair. Thanks, Jake. I think your message there is be clear to be kind. If the message isn't great, then work the problem together. But otherwise, treat that order seriously and honor the commitment. Make a promise, keep a promise. We can do more to take care of one another. Thanks again, Jake. Hey folks, if you want to know more about this topic and others, we have an entire video catalog of items that specifically relate to this topic. And if you have a specific question, please feel free to submit it below.

P2P; PTM; OTC

MD04; MM02; ME21N; VA02

Interim Storage Stock Without Movement

Overview of interim storage stock lacking movement

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

Intracompany Transfers

Standard process for transferring stock between plants explained step by step

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

P2P; PTM; WM

MD04; MM03; ME23N

Introducing Business Partners

Explore the shift from Vendors to Business Partners and understand maintenance

Manage Business Partners; Display Business Partner; Display Customer

Hey, procurement team Martin here. You've probably heard the rumors that there's a few things that must change on our way to S/4HANA. One such change is the transition from vendor master and customer master to business partners. Don't worry, it's a good thing. I tag it under the simplification work that's being done to make life a little easier and provide us with some better insights in support of our strategic partners. We've invited Kristie into the studio with us today to provide us with an introduction to these business partners. Kristie's been helping procurement teams with the transition to S/4, so this is right up her alley. Kristie, I know this is essential for things to work well in S/4HANA. Tell us more about business partners. I feel like we could have a full on competitive trivia night. No, I'm truly just kidding, there's not enough to fill an entire trivia night, but maybe just one category. First of all, business partners aren't new. Did you know that, we actually had the option to use them in ECC? Raise your hand if you opted in. Hmm. I'm not seeing a lot of hands here. Well, right then Martin's right. The play here is part simplification. We've got one place to maintain our relationships and that's really nice. And where there's shared data across relationship roles we maintain at once. I like that. Maintenance becomes easier even when we're mapping those complex relationships. Perhaps most importantly though, we have a holistic view of all of our partners and can dial in on the different ways that we're conducting business with them. That's really quite important. Now let's head over to SAP so we can have a nice introduction to business partners. Okay, everyone, spoiler alert, this is not going to be a long demo. Business partners are an important change to understand, but showing them to you doesn't get very exciting. What I can do is show you the application. So rather than maintaining a vendor master and a customer master for a single partner, we now have one partner and then various roles or ways that we can interact with them. Let's hop into a record and take a look. This is one stop shopping at its very best. The first thing we want to observe is what I would call universal data. These are the facts that don't change regardless of the type of business that we're partnering on. Yay. No wondering if our records are in sync. Then we get into roles. We can get quite complex in the modeling of our relationships. Think about ship to parties and sold to parties and invoicing partners and customers and account groups and all of those things. Because BP's can represent a person, an entity, or an entity within an entity, the relationship mapping, is fantastic. There are loads of supporting functions that can help to monitor a business partner's data quality. You can track changes, be alerted to changes, or have SAP holler at you if there's inconsistencies in the information that it's observing. Now that you've been introduced to business partners, it might be time to start working on your data to make this transition easier. I can also promise you that you're going to see opportunities you wouldn't have anticipated, especially when it comes to reporting and analytics. Let's get ready and then let's do this. Welcome back. I love a good intro. Let's review our whys. First up, consolidation. We can see all the information related to a particular relationship in one place. Our maintenance is also consolidated and the transactions we need to access to perform that maintenance, also consolidated. Consolidation is key here. Second up, we're now very consistent because we're working from one master record that anchors us in one transaction, we've got great anchors for a streamlined, consistent approach. And last but not least, compliance, the streamlined, consistent process also has some robustness to it, and that gets us to a place where we're positioned well for audit and overall compliance requirements. There you go. That's your quick little intro into business partners. Being able to quickly map the total relationship with a particular partner is so powerful. I love the streamlined approach here. It seems we can map just about any level of complexity as the needs unfold and the relationships evolve. So again, Kristie, thank you so much and thank you for leaning into this topic for us. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about business partners and some of the other S/4HANA related changes, please check out our video catalog and if you can find what you're looking for, there is an AI chatbot that could help.

Introducing the Customer Fact Sheet

Explore account status and history beyond sales orders

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.

SD

VA03

Introducing the Sales Order Monitor

Proactive sales order monitoring across our area of responsibility for seamless efficiency

OTC

VA06; VA03

Introduction to MRP Areas

Explore MRP areas: Unveiling key features and practical use cases

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

MM

MD04; MD3

Inventory Graphs and Analysis

Material analysis: Mastering historical graphing and in-depth analysis

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

Is a Material Living Its Best Life

Boost planning quality with easy-to-access key performance indicators

10 min

MD04; MM03; MC42; MC43; MC.9

MM; PP

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

Is Early Really Good?

Discover the pros and cons of outpacing the schedule

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

PTM; P2P

MM03; MD04

I Was Told There Would Be No Math: MRP

A concise guide on how MRP calculates necessities, quantities, and deadlines

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

Leaders Digest: Competing Priorities

Guide your team through conflicting priorities to reach the best outcome

Hey there, leaders. Martin here, and I'm really glad that you've joined us today. In today's conversation, we're going to talk about one of the things we all know too well, conflicting priorities. And as leaders, how we promote clarity, eliminate confusion, and keep our teams moving in the same direction is critical. Not only do we deal with this on a strategic scale, but it permeates into our team's activities on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. To help us get to the heart of this matter, we have our friend Steven in the studio with us. Welcome, Steven. Steven is a leader, and as a leader, he can help us understand what we need to do to address what seems like conflicting priorities. Take it away. Yeah. Thank you, Martin. this is timely. We actually had this question come up at a client last week. The team was reporting confusion around what was being asked of them. They shared that they knew what their assignment was, and they knew that it was in conflict with someone else's, and who knew which one was the actual priority? The leader, on the other hand, was perfectly clear on who was asked to do what and why and how the whole thing knitted together. To paint a better picture for you, I'm going to lay out a scenario to explore in SAP. Let's pick three priorities: service levels, price including tariffs, and quality. This should be fun. Let's dive into SAP and take a look. So here we all are, gathered in our favorite planning view, the stock requirements list. Guess what? We're all staring at the same screen but seeing very different things. This particular material is what we would consider a critical material. It has a wide-ranging impact if it ever goes out of stock. It feeds several of our lines and is used broadly across our supply network. It also makes up about a third of our material cost for three of our five top sellers, which makes it not only critical but also significant. Now, the really nice thing is that this material is fairly consistent. We've dialed in the stocking strategy, we know how much coverage we need, and our supplier is a true partner. You know this type of material. Of course there's no problems with the supply situation, because if there was a problem, it would be a massive problem. So as a team, we make sure there are no problems. We can see the forward-looking plan here, it's reasonable, it's healthy, and it's a nice steady heartbeat of supply. Now, hold on to your hats, people. Things are about to change. Our resilient supply chain is about to be thrown a curveball. Meet Bob, Ellie, and Rachel. Wednesday, 10:21 AM. "Hey, Bob. Great news. Word on the street is that two of our competitors are struggling with reliable supply on the Fast Tracks product line. Their misfortune could be our fortune. I need you to increase our stock position on our favorite top five. Do it immediately and pay the expedite fees. Signed, Jack." The response comes in, "Hi, Jack. I'm on it." I've sent over large blanket POs to lock things in. Supply should be fat and happy here shortly. We won't miss on this, Jack. Signed Bob. Two days later, "Hello, Ali, Jack here. Listen, tariffs are killing us right now. I need options. Our margin erosion is getting pretty real and persistent. We've got to start making some moves. Can you look at some options to redeploy volumes to more favorable markets? See if some of our primary suppliers have a secondary location in another market and can help us out. Quick as you can, please." Signed Jack. The response comes in, "Hiya, Jack. Sure thing. I can ask those questions. I've been looking at a few of our high runners and have recently learned how we can use price scales and contracts to improve our purchase price while keeping inventory flowing at a rate we can consume it. We used to do those bulk buys, but we shouldn't have to anymore. Also, we can get some material from a secondary market with two of our suppliers, but we will sacrifice on quality and delivery dependability. I guess that's just something we're going to have to live with for a while. Let me get into it. Ali." And for the pièce de résistance, just earlier that morning, " Rachel, what is going on with the first pass yield off of lines five and seven? We cannot have this much fallout. I know we were pushing ops to get more out the door, but now I'm hearing noise about failures in the field. Sometimes we have to slow down to speed up. Stop letting bad material get to the line. Get it steady and do it now. This is completely unacceptable and downright embarrassing. Jack" Okay, you get the idea. Bob's off to the races committing to volumes based on some loose market intelligence and is giving the supplier free rein to do whatever they need to do to get this done. Ali is trying to negotiate pricing, while Bob's already placed POs and in order to get that price break, may now approve a secondary plant to avoid some of the tariff impact and keep pricing healthy for the customer. And poor Rachel already has problems, and now her one good material from a strategic partner, well, it may be coming from a different plant or under extreme cost pressure. What could possibly go wrong? Now before we get mad at Jack, we just took a few conversations out of a whole lot of conversations Jack would have been having. He's focused on the right things to be able to mobilize and gain market share, capable to serve excellent quality and competitive price. What we missed the opportunity to do here was to bring the team together and set some guardrails in place. Ali needed to own the relationship, negotiate and set up rules in SAP. Bob needed to execute to those rules and sort out options for delivery. And Rachel needed to be involved from the get-go to weigh in on the impacts to quality and what would need to be done to mitigate risk. Then Jack could provide guidance on priority and willingness depending on the options available. We forgot the power of the team here. Has this ever happened to you? Let's go back to the studio and debrief. Welcome back, people. So it didn't take long for those three priorities, each assigned to different functional areas to bump into each other. We quickly identified the challenge. As leaders, we're responsible for casting the vision, driving clarity, and eliminating confusion. This means that we need to break down silos and bring everyone in. We need to see and understand the big picture and how our seemingly conflicting priorities actually come together to help us hit our goal. Sometimes we need some additional guidelines to help with the reasoning. But if we understand the mission and we're enrolled in that mission, there's a ton we can get done. And when there is a conflict, we need to own it, fix it, and get back to the happy path as quickly as possible. Find the momentum. Communication is obviously key, so thanks again, Steven. I guess at the end of the day, if the team is confused or the message is unclear and they're not asking questions, it's a good signal that there's a problem. It's a good sign there's an opportunity to be better. So thanks again, Steven. Hey folks, if you want to learn more about different Leaders Digest topics, please feel free to check out our catalog. The AI chatbot may be able to help you as well.

OTC; DM; P2P; PTM; WM

MD04; CO03

Leaders Digest: Exception Monitoring

Discover how to break silos and uncover insights that solve real business problems

LL01; VA06; QA33; MD07

Leaders Digest: Measuring Supplier Performance

Explore SAP's powerful tools designed to elevate supplier performance management

MC$6; MC$8; ME61; FIORI

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

Leaders Digest: Policy Performance

Policy defines the guiding rules for how we operate and manage the business

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

Leaders Digest: Productive KPI's

Discover top KPIs that drive productivity and transform your team's performance

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

Leaders Digest: The Road to S/4HANA - Are You Ready?

The critical prerequisites for a successful transition to S/4HANA

DM; P2P; PTM; EAM; WM

MD07; MD04; MM03; Procurement Overview; Manage Purchase Requisitions

Hey, fellow leaders. Martin here. Every organization's journey to S/4 is uniquely their own. However, there's a host of indicators that can help us know if we're ready or not. We have to get there eventually, and when we think about it, there's only really two ways. There's a technical upgrade or the opportunity for innovation. No one enjoys expensively forced compliance, so our hope is you'll view this as a real opportunity to level up your technology enablement and achieve new levels of business performance. And of course, with us today is Sean. He is the perfect candidate to tell us more about how to think of this from a leader's perspective. Take it away, Sean. Well, Martin, there are a lot of things to consider, and I'm going to highlight a few of the basics today. First up, I'll walk through decisions around approach. Do you start anew? Do you simply upgrade? Or is a combo of the two the best for you? We could speak for a very long time on this topic alone. Next, we're going to talk about the giant elephant in the room, the things that are standing between you and the good stuff SAP has to offer. Customizations and which ones are differentiators that you really need, and data quality. Have you hijacked any fields lately? Are you clear and fit for purpose? Okay, let's dive into SAP and take a look. When you think about the journey ahead, what is it that you want for your organization? Are you looking to minimize change and keep things as close to your world today on day one? Or are you looking to capitalize on the road ahead to take you to a new place of productivity? What is your appetite for change? This conversation needs to be a very honest conversation, held in advance of the pressure of timeline. Now we know that we're all under a bit of pressure on the timeline if we're still sitting in ECC and dependent on SAP support. So this is the billboard that says now is the time for this important conversation. The decision to lift and shift leads us down one path. The decision to start new is another, and a hybrid approach is a third. All will drive you to different budgets, potentially different partners, and certainly different readiness checklists. So greenfield, brownfield or bluefield, or any other unnamed fields in between. No matter which way you're headed, there are many things to consider, and today I'll give you three of those. First of all, how is your data looking? Much like moving in real life, we need to take stock of what we have and what needs to come with us. Are our transactions up to snuff? And what I mean by this is whether we're current, all pending sales orders, purchase orders, manufacturing orders, et cetera, are all valid real documents that we expect to continue to action. If not, now is the time to roll up the sleeves and develop the daily habits that prevent us from having to put so much elbow grease to get everything sorted out and put right. Second of all, how is your master data looking? Are your rule sets well thought out, relevant, and fit for purpose? Have you by any chance gotten a bit creative and maybe kidnapped a field or two for reporting purposes or less conventional uses? Do you have a lot of custom or additional fields? And if so, do you need them? You see, every customization has a cost and a limitation, so think carefully about what you want to carry with you. So folks, as we head to S/4HANA and all the legitimately great improvements it offers, we up the ante on all our data. As we think further to the use of agentic AI, context-rich decision making, and multipurpose multi-scenario simulation, all of this becomes so much more critical, and this is where the benefit for the cost you're incurring will actually come from. Getting our teams ready requires lots of socialization and demonstration of what the milk and cookies are as they invest their time and energy in change. We all want change, but we don't all want to change, at least not all the time. This new SAP world is designed to run at pace with the business. We get out of it what we're willing to put in, so don't underestimate the involvement of the team and the need for real education on this new world. Last but not least for today, the new world assumes a clean core. It's time to look at those customizations and special processes. We strongly encourage you to carefully evaluate what you're transferring or rebuilding in the new environment. Don't paint yourself into a corner, and don't waste time and energy that could be put to learning how to run at pace with SAP rather than to run around it. So as you're thinking about what your day one looks like, take control and lessen the change curve by returning to the basics of standard functionality now. You'll certainly have value returned for that effort in the meantime. Then encourage your team to learn more and ask questions so they can have critical thinking conversations all throughout the design and the testing process. Many leaders groan and moan when it comes to their journey to S/4. We don't want that for you. We want you to see it as a road to value. Over 90% of organizations don't fully sweat their asset, that is SAP. If this is you, opportunity abounds. Thanks again for all of those details, Sean. This is a challenging journey for most people moving to S/4HANA or even when you're in S/4HANA. So please go check out our video catalog. We actually have quite a lot of videos on S/4, and if you can't find what you're looking for, we have an AI recommendation chatbot. Try it.

Leaders Digest: Transactional Data Integrity

Unlock performance potential by starting with a clean and healthy SAP system

DM; P2P; PTM; OTC; WM

MD04; MCPU

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

Leaders Digest: Transitioning Sources of Supply

Struggling with source transitions, this guide provides a clear, practical fix

ME3N; ME33K; ME01; VB13

Optimizing planning cycles, costs, and inventory investment

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

Macros for the Win!

Move from manual calculations to logic-driven macros that build efficiency and discipline

Sales & Operations Planning

DM; PTM; P2P

MC94; MC8B

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Martin here. In today's chat we're going to be exploring, wait, wait, what? Macros. Okay. What are we going to be discussing about macros in this particular case? I actually can't wait to see what this one's all about. Has someone gone rogue? Are we talking spreadsheets? What are we talking here? Okay, Jason, help us out here. What are we referring to when we talk about macros? Really Martin, I like to think I have my occasional out of the box roguish moments, but not to worry, this is all happening in SAP. Most folks aren't aware, but we have some major firepower at our disposal with Flex Planning and S&OP. We can perform our own calculations and they can get reasonably complex considering this is an ERP environment. The other thing I'm really jazzed about is the execution of process chains with some basic logic parameters, we can promote data through the process to the appropriate key figures with minimal effort and vastly reduced opportunity for error. So let's dive in and take a look. Alright sports fans, this is macros for the win! Okay, for those of you who are new to these areas of SAP, be sure to look at the bottom right hand corner of my screen. I've got it set up to show you the transaction code as we go here. Macros can be incorporated into several transactions and are primarily set by planning type because they're calculations and process helpers, your macros will be specific to you and your planning, and what I'm showing here is what we've set up in our system. Let's start with an easy one. As you go through your consensus demand planning process, you'll find you have lots of reasons to copy data from one key figure to another. You may need to save an old forecast so you can measure your accuracy based on what was forecasted within a three month lag. You could run a macro at the end of each month to get that timestamp on your forecast and store it in a key figure like this. Now, what if you hit the jackpot and you've got a statistical forecast that looks just great? We can dream right. Let's use a macro to copy it through, or maybe you want to show it to marketing and then let them make some adjustments. You could copy it for them and then factor in their adjustments to the final. See here, maybe you'd like to take that unit plan, convert it into dollars, and then calculate margin by customer. See, we can get some decent mileage here. When we look at the operators available to build our macros from, we can see here that there are really good options. Macros aren't just for demand planners of course. There are loads we can do for supply planning too. Capacity alerts, flexible constraints, and days of supply calculations are all great examples that we could go after. Let me give you a couple of tips while I bring a few more calculations and operator examples onto my screen. Break down any calculations you'd like to perform into steps, test them step by step, then build. It's okay to have a helper key figure for more complex calculations. Not only does this help avoid performance issues, but it also helps everyone else understand what you're doing with the math or the process step. Name things with intention. The clearer you are naming, the less confusion, the less duplication, and the more value for your effort. Pay attention to repeated steps. If you're doing something on repeat, see if a macro can help. It is less likely to be forgotten and less prone to errors. Make the complex easy to execute and easy to understand. So with all that being said, can you think of some good use cases for macros? They do take practice, it's work upfront, but once you get the hang of it, you can come up with some great solutions. See, it really is in SAP Martin. It does take a bit of exploration, thinking, practice, and testing, but we can get a lot of great mileage out of our upfront investment of time. With macros in place, we can make our processes far more efficient. We also love the stability of a repeatable process that lowers the barrier to learning for new or less technical team members. Macros reduce the complexity of the front end experience and allow planners to focus on planning rather than checking every calculation every time. It goes a long way towards trust in the system, the process, and most importantly, the results. Love it, Jason. Okay, I actually did know we're going to be talking about SAP, but thanks for playing along. This gets added to the pile of hidden gems within the Flex Planning and S&OP modules. If you're thinking about an advanced planning solution, what a great place to start. So again, thank you, Jason. Hey folks, we have other topics around S&OP as well, or just some tips and tricks. Feel free to check out our video catalog and if you're struggling to find them, our AI chatbot will really help out.

Maintain Intervals and Shifts

Maintain more granular capacities with intervals and shifts

CR02

Maintain Multiple Capacities

Learn how to effectively maintain multiple capacities

Production & Capacity Planning

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

CR01; CR02

Maintenance Plans

Regain control of recurring maintenance so daily challenges get the focus they deserve

Project & Asset Management

P2P; PM; EAM

IP02; IA07; Display Maintenance Plan; Display Maintenance Order

Hey everyone, my name is Martin. Does your organization struggle with maintenance planning? Is it always a surprise, disruptive, and costly? You are not alone. One of the assets most often overlooked in our client's organizations is the help that they can get from SAP, and specifically with EAM Enterprise Asset Management. It's actually one of the most robust, highly configurable areas in SAP, and I'm happy to say that Fiori breathes new life into the experience, if you haven't had a chance to explore what's available yet. One of the capabilities that can help keep the chaos at bay is planned maintenance through maintenance plans. And today I'm happy to have Manall here in the studio with me to actually give us a quick overview of what that looks like. Manall, take it away. Hello, Martin. Plan, preventative or reoccurring maintenance is very important to a healthy operation. With maintenance plans in SAP, we can really start to establish a cadence of work and helps reduce the opportunity for misservice windows. I want to show you how we can standardize our plans for reoccurring services and explore how this can become a jumping off point for integration into other areas of SAP. Let's head over to SAP, and I'll give you a tour. Here on my screen you can see an example of a maintenance plan. This is a recurring service that can be easy to forget and a pain to fit in if we don't pre-plan for it. To execute this work, we have a couple of maintenance supplies that are required, a service provider that needs to come in and a small downtime, a window on the machine. You could see from this task list that it's not particularly complicated, and if that's true, if we have the supplies and the asset is available when the service provider arrives. The idea is to make this a very routine activity. When the visibility is not there and we don't coordinate well, then the supplies or asset are unavailable, which causes us time and money. In our maintenance plan, we can set up the schedule for maintenance well out into the future. This allows for the necessary pre-planning. We can block the time on the asset so it is available for work. We can make sure to notify our service provider and update our schedule with their availability and last, but not least, we can be sure to order those supplies. The entire cycle can be conducted through a Fiori workspace where we can launch processes, check statuses, and increase visibility through workflow. One of the best things about maintenance plans is that you have everything identified. You know, the timing, the supplies, if you already have a service provider or need to find one. This is the difference between having a dentist that plans to see you every six months and sets your appointment at the time that works for you, versus realizing you need to see the dentist and having to take an appointment that conflicts with everything. So let's make it easy. Let's plan the things we can plan so we have room to deal with the emergencies, and by doing this we'll have less emergencies. This is a definite win-win in my book. Welcome back. A little upfront work sets a schedule in place and improves predictability in the process execution. We all know that getting these services in prevents costly breakdowns. Unexpected breakdowns are a stress that nobody wants. I love the visibility that maintenance plans provide to the cross-functional team. We can then all work together to keep things on track and flowing smoothly. Back over to you, Martin. Hey, thank you, Manall. I'm really happy we're having this conversation today. We see very little utilization of these particular tools in SAP, and I can't help but see the missed opportunity. Planning your maintenance out is massively impactful because it prevents that which is unexpected. The more we can do with that, the healthier supply chains will be as well. If you want to learn more about plant maintenance, EAM, and even some of the Fiori looking tools, please check out our video catalog below.

Workcenter efficiency: Streamline workflows and optimize capacity management

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

Managing Return to Vendor PO's

Learn how to manage Return to Vendor POs, monitor them, and maintain accuracy

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

Master Data Centralized or Decentralized

An essential question we all face, let's dive into the world of Master Data

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

Mastering the Fixed Date Quantity Flag

Unlock the power of one checkbox to make a promise and keep a promise

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.

OTC; DM

MD04; VA03; CO09

Material Analysis

Optimize resources: Assessing material performance

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

MCP5

Material Locations

Quick methods to locate materials in the warehouse

LS24; LS26; LX02; LX03

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

Materials Not Turning

Quickly identify non-moving, dust-collecting materials in inventory

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

Material Staging for Production

Overview of key transactions for staging materials from warehouse to production areas

LS41; LX40; LX41; LX42; LX43

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

Material Substitutions and Supersessions

Manage material substitutions, successions, and special promotions in SAP

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

OTC; PTM

MD04; VB11

Meet the Order Report

Accelerate cross-functional decision-making with the Order Report

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

PTM; P2P

MD04

Midpoint Scheduling

Apply theory of constraints to manage bottleneck resources effectively

ME23N; ME2A; Monitor Supplier Confirmations; Manage Purchase Orders

CM21; CM25

Missing Confirmations

Turn on supplier confirmations in SAP to track orders from acceptance to shipment

Hey fellow buyers, Martin here. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night wondering if your supplier actually acknowledged your order or if you saw that ASN come in for that really hot shipment you're waiting for? Let's explore how we get proactive in identifying missing confirmations from our suppliers. No more lost sleep due to missing baton passes. And once again, we have Liam with us. We love that he is bringing this insight to us because this is going to help restore our sleep. But more importantly, it's actually going to give us some real automation in our process. So, Liam, take it away. Thanks, Martin. We've said it before, right? Collaboration with our suppliers is key. When you pass the ball, you want to know the other person's received it and if they're making progress. So today we're going to start with definitions. What type of confirmations are we referring to? And then we'll walk through how to identify mission confirmations and what we can do when they're missing. What's the best way to check in and remind our suppliers that we were expecting to hear back from them? If the best way to learn is by doing, we better get into SAP and give this a go. So when we are looking for confirmations, think of it as an inbox message you are looking for, but you haven't yet received. And you can see that straight away on this PO that I'm looking at right here, we've told the system and our supplier that we're expecting a confirmation to be sent , but so far our inbox is empty and we're still waiting for that message. Now when we see a screen like this with no entries available, that's our queue to investigate, and we need to go ahead and figure out what's going on, either by reaching out to the supplier or tracking back through our internal processes to make sure that we haven't received something that we should have entered and we just haven't done it yet. So I'm looking at this as a purchase order by purchase order basis, and our confirmation control key is what's driving what we're anticipating. In this instance, we are looking for an inbound delivery to be added to this purchase order. Now if I do the dropdown here, we can see there are other types of confirmations that could be triggered or marked as to be expected on this purchase order, ranging from confirmations, rough goods receipts, and then other inbound delivery type confirmations too. Now I can go through all of my open POs and look at them one by one and see if there are any open confirmations that I haven't yet received and or am waiting for the messages to be sent by the supplier. Or I can actually run a list report. If I go to my other screen, this is transaction ME2A, and this is monitoring supplier confirmations. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave it quite open for now, but as you can see, there's lots of capabilities to filter by a specific document date, expected delivery date, and also by overall supplier and or purchase organization. I'll just enter AB for now as an order acknowledgement and execute that. Now the list is very simple. It's showing me all of my purchase orders where I am expecting a order acknowledgement, AB confirmation to be added, but it hasn't yet been added to the purchase order. And if I double click and drill down onto this purchase order right here, it's going to take me straight to that screen. And as you can see, we're expecting a confirmation and the entry is blank. Now this is operating within the GUI. Now, as we all know, there is a Fiori tile out there that can do the same thing for us. It's a lot more visually rich, and I'm just going to show you that right now. The title of the Fiori app is Monitor Supplier Confirmations. And if I click on that, we get a very similar looking selection screen. I can also enter or select from the dropdown, the type of order acknowledgement or confirmation I'm looking for. So in this instance, I'm going to select inbound delivery and I'm going to go ahead and search. Now, not only do we get the nice list I highlighted before in the SAP GUI, but we get a nice visual representation in terms of a bar chart above that as well. And here we have two definitions scheduled quantity value and pending quantity value. So there is a difference here in some cases. Now, we are not just restricted to this bar chart view. As with all Fiori tiles, we can adjust and minimize the view as we see fit, and then we can also bring back that table view. We are also able to switch that from a pie chart, line chart and all of that good stuff that we have that is an enriched user experience from a Fiori perspective. Now getting into the data just below, if I scroll down on this list because I selected inbound delivery, LA confirmation category type above, these are all of the purchase orders where we are expecting an inbound delivery to be entered, but we haven't yet received one. And if I select one of these purchase orders down the bottom here, I can actually go in and view this purchase order straight within the app, just like I did in the GUI. Now if I scroll down, we can see supply confirmation of which we have one LA but it's not the full quantity, right? So we have 200 entered as an inbound delivery, but our overall order quantity is a 2,500. So it's not just that we are missing, an LA confirmation altogether, we have at least one. We are missing the full quantity, which is also another great way of checking the supply has committed to shipping everything that we've ordered. If they haven't, that's our signal to go ahead, investigate and check where that is. If we think about all the activities that we're committing to through the course of our planning process, it makes sense that we would want confirmations and updates from our suppliers. You're probably getting loads of them. The advantages of getting them into SAP are significant as we start to count on that information, proactive review as part of the daily planning cadence leads to proactive resolution. Giving our supply partners a little nudge every now and then lets them know that we are involved, interested, and ready to help. Hey, Liam, that focus on mutual success and partnership is excellent, so thanks again. The return on effort for these reach outs is worthy of the time that it takes. Good stuff, man. Okay, folks. There's actually quite a lot of information and videos on procurement and automation, so please feel free to check those out and if you're struggling to find one of them, feel free to use our AI chatbot.

Monday's: The Not So Great Reset

Break the cycle, regain clarity, and build momentum that turns effort into progress

CO03; CM25; MD07; MD04; COOIS

PTM

Hey there, supply chain enthusiasts, Martin here. I have a quick question for you. Are you greeting your Mondays with optimism? When you log into SAP to start the day, does it feel like the week is full of possibility or are you logging into what you know will be a pile of problems? You're not alone. Many of us are greeted with that when we come in on a Monday morning. It's the not so great reset every Monday morning program, if you know what I mean. You leave Friday feeling relatively okay about the plan, and then everything looks wildly different on Monday, and as a result, you're off to the races with emails and team messages, and before you can even take a chance to take your coat off, sit down and breathe, you're stuck. And with all that said, I'm happy to invite Jake to this conversation. If there's somebody who's figured out this in his life, it's this man. He knows about the not so great reset. Take us away, Jake. Hey Martin. I know the dread of walking in on Monday mornings to a full on slug fest. It's not a good way to start the week. So here's what I want to do today. I want to get into SAP and describe some of the most common areas that might be affecting your Monday morning, and then I want to give you a few suggestions on how to address them so that we can lessen the degree of chaos that we see on Monday mornings. None of them are quick fixes, but they can be significantly improved. So let's dive into SAP and take a look. So you may be wondering where this topic came from. Well, first of all, it's a common one. Mondays are often very high stress days for planners and buyers. If you haven't observed this, maybe pay attention next Monday. It's not just coming off the weekend is tough. It's that we're often under pressure, stressed and disoriented because a lot happened between exiting the building on Friday and coming back in on Monday. Now, the second origin story for this topic came from overhearing a conversation with a buyer. She was chatting with one of her colleagues about how SAP messes up her week every week. Guys, it literally felt like SAP was a thinking being with less than great intentions that was just lying in wait, waiting to ruin her Monday. But since SAP has meant to enable processes and empower people, this isn't what we wanted to hear. So let's unpack some of the things that might be happening here. You can see here that I'm at MD07. It's Monday morning, and a lot has happened since I left on Friday. Let me run it down for you. First of all, I've got production orders that did not run or didn't finish on time. Turns out there were issues on the line, some problems with staffing. Oh, and because Ava in the office was out last week, were behind on both confirmations and she's the only one who can fix problems with receiving. Not everything for us is line side or real time yet. As a result, I can't quite tell where we actually are and because Ava was out, I know she's scrambling to figure out what's most urgent. The second thing that I can see is our production supervisors went in and resequenced the schedule I so carefully put together. The weekends, always do this without calling, and it just kills me. We do pretty well during the week, but stuff happens and they keep the lines running. Bad news bears here, because they produced some items that were not on my priority list, I'm missing some of what we need for key customer orders, one of which has been re promised four times. I need to call Brenda and she's not going to be happy about it. Also, they've used some critical materials that we need for other orders. So I'm going to have to rework the schedule for this week before they just start running what they can and make the problem worse. Two other fun things about Mondays. We had our big MRP run over the weekend, so I have all new proposals. That's great, but because of the issues over the weekend and the delays in posting, it's not really what I need and I've got to go in and do a careful review. Man, I wish this was running nightly. We only run MRP once per week per site. The other thing is that we get a glut of customer orders in the wee hours of Monday morning. It's by far the highest volume of orders we get in the week. Unfortunately, they generally arrive after the MRP job and to make things even better, I just found out that the job that reorganizes the forecast happens after the MRP run, but before most of the customer orders hit. No wonder it feels like we're in chaos every Monday morning. Now, if I take a step back and look critically at what we just walked through, I can pull out some things that we can work with. Number one. Look at the activities over the weekend to support quality planning results, can we get those sequenced in a better way? Number two. Cleaning up activities and leveling out postings. Maybe there's a few things we could do there. Number three. Communication with the shop floor. Before I leave on Friday, maybe I can get out there and have a recap going into the weekend on the why behind the schedule and talk through Plan Bs that will hurt us so much and be proactive about it. If you just sit down and write out your Monday morning blockers, I bet there's some things that you can get after too. There's no easy button, and some of these things take time, but trust me, they're worthwhile. Let's create better Mondays. Look, I know this is hard. I've been there before and I see this all the time with our clients. So let's recap a few things that we can work on to make it better. First of all, work on the cadence of activities. For example, make sure that the reorganization of forecast makes sense with the way that the customer orders are hitting. And look at the weekly activity list to see what else is being pushed to the end or the beginning of the week that should happen throughout the week. Second, communicate. Don't just go, all that happened again, talk to your colleagues because this craziness has a cost to it and it impacts your suppliers, your customers, and the efficiency on the manufacturing floor. And as you're asking others for adjustments to how they want to do things, offer your support and either provide it or be an advocate when they ask leadership for it. Alright, thank you Jake. Obviously a world with better Mondays would be a beautiful thing, so thank you. So team, what other things drive your Mondays crazy? Reach out and let us know. You're not the only ones and we can share and help to address this with our fellow planners. Alright, folks, if you want to know more about this and obviously talk to Jake some more, there are some videos on this specific topic about keeping the chaos at bay, and if you can find it, feel free to use the chatbot.

Moving From Push to Pull

Pull vs push supply chain best practices

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

DM; IBP; P2P; PTM

MC.9; MD04

Moving Materials in Mass

Master the art of moving materials in bulk

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

MRP Exceptions

Master MRP: Navigate essential exceptions with ease

MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

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

MRP Run Results

Maximize MRP output: Expert tips for utilizing MRP lists effectively

MD02; MD03; MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

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

Navigation Profiles

Discover Navigation Profiles and the efficiency they offer

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

Needles in Haystacks

Managing supply shortages: Strategies for identification and resolution

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

DM; IBP; P2P; PTM

MD04; MD05; MD06; MD07

Negative Stock

Address stock shortages with effective correlation and rectification

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

New Product Introductions

Setting up new materials for a smooth, controlled product launch

Hey there, fellow supply chain enthusiasts, Martin here. Now I know from personal experience that can be sometimes very difficult to get a plane off the ground. Not only do I travel a lot when I'm not in the studio with you, but I'm actually a pilot as well, so I know what a smooth takeoff is versus one that's not so smooth. A common question we get from the Reveal TV community is around suggestions for getting necessary activities in SAP to efficiently prepare for the launch of a new product. Today we have Liam with us in the studio, and he's here to tell us more about exactly that. How do we actually introduce new products into the system effectively? Liam, take it away. Thanks Martin. I do have some ideas. I'll share them with the cost of one scenic flight around Chicago. I want the tour. It does seem more difficult than it should be, but SAP has all manner of tools in the toolkit to help us with this. From engineering change management to material super sessions and follow up materials, we have robust options available to us. But let's start simple. In today's tour, I'll cover a few of the highlights. I'll cover a few examples of material statuses and how you can use these to shape what is and is not allowed in the system. We will also dive into MRP type and when the time is right, make a change there. And then last but not least, I'll go over what I would consider to be the essential pre-flight checklist. So we're confident we are all ready for takeoff. So without further ado. Let's dive into SAP and take a look. Okay, so we're going to start in the material master, starting with the basic data tab. And this is where the story really begins. You can see we've got a material status filled here, and it's actually labeled cross plant material status. Now this means that because it's in the basic data view, it applies to every single plant that this material is extended to. And if we do the dropdown here, we can see the different statuses that are available and these control whether a material can be purchased, produced, sold, or planned through the configuration that sits behind these. And that means we can shape behavior long before the launch date arrives for this particular material. You can think of the status as our early boarding announcements. They tell everyone what's allowed, what's restricted and what's coming soon. And when used in sequence, we can create a predictable rhythm for the organization. Now I'm going to navigate to sales org. 1 view. As we go through these different views, these are different areas and different statuses that these materials statuses can have. And here we see two options now, we've got a X distr. chain status and a DChain-spec status. Now these are great because they control exactly what you can do from a sales perspective. Maybe we don't want to have this material available for sales just yet, just for planning, and we can use these statuses to control whether they apply to just a specific distribution channel or across all distribution channels that we have maintained for our sales area. And each of these choices send a signal, and that signal is what keeps us all aligned. Now, as we head to our MRP views, we also have a material status, but because we're an MRP view, we're a specific plant and now we have our plant specific material status. And again, we've got the same list as we saw in the basic data 1 tab and it's just another way of us controlling specifically what happens to this material at this plant. Maybe it's already launched in another plant and now we're extending it to the new plant. Now the material status isn't the only field that we can use to control new product launches. And the other field on this screen is the MRP type. Now this determines whether the system will generate replenishment proposals, and if we flip this too early, to a planned status, i.e. from ND to PD, so no planning to plan on demand, then we can accidentally trigger some planning activities, if we do it too early, and before we as an organization are ready to plan that material properly. Problem is if we flip it too late, then we miss our window and our launch fails to get off the ground. So I guess the question really becomes, when is the best time to change our MRP type? And really what we want to do is only flip it when our upstream activities are complete and the material is truly ready to be planned. Now what does that mean from upstream activities? And if we go back, I'm going to look it into our MRP stock requirements list. And you know, there might be things in here, this is an active material, we've got customer orders. But if you can imagine if we run a pilot for this material in this specific plant. Do we have old planned orders or purchase requisitions out there? Do we have old production orders which are sitting there for the pilot quantities that we want to just clear out? Do you have inventory in that material that we may not want to consider for use in our normal production or sales activities because it's test material and material we were trying to play around with? If any of these exist and they're in that testing pilot phase, then we shouldn't switch our material over to an active material status or active MRP type. And we want to make sure we either write that stock off, rework it so it is usable, or just get the whole material into a state, which means that it's good to go when launch. Now let's talk about our pre-flight checklist. This is our sequence of steps or things that we need to check before we are ready to launch. And if we consider launching being updating the MRP type to plan on demand. We've got a blank or active material status in here, so we are ready for use and we are ready for planning from an MRP perspective. Now we want to make sure first thing, the correct material status is in place. If you can see from this list, we've got design, we've got design and plan, and we've got use. Okay? So we need to make sure that the configuration behind the status that we've selected allows us to complete all of the activities we want to in our system. Now we also want to make sure that our material master is completely up to date, and that isn't just our status and our MRP type, it's the assignment of the correct MRP controller. Maybe we had a test or pilot MRP controller that was being used and we want to make sure this is the live MRP controller. Lot sizing information we want to make sure is a hundred percent correct in line with what we want to produce or what we want to purchase from our suppliers. As well as that, that comes into our procurement type lead time and any safety stock we have or want to maintain. Lastly, on the transactional side, we want to make sure all of our old POs or anything that we are testing or piloting is all closed off and we start from a clean slate or a state that we are happy to move forward with once this material moves live. Finally, if we are happy to go, flip that switch on that MRP type, and away we go. Once all of that is true and we've got all of that master data updated, including our MRP type, we are truly ready for launch, and that's the moment the material officially enters the planning universe. And the moment we can say we are ready for takeoff. As an MRP controller, you are responsible for making sure your materials are living their best life. This means you're squarely at the center of coordinating these activities with other folks in your organization. Missing our launch date due to mis coordinated activities in SAP is simply not an acceptable way of doing business, is it? So let's get this right. Today we discussed having a good logical progression of activities in the system. Think about them as the governing gateways that create visibility into what we do expect to see happening for that material at that time. This drives the proper activities at the proper time so we can be ready for product launch. It doesn't have to be crazy complex, but it does need to be clear, transparent, and visible if you want to be successful. Going to market is exciting. Let's get this right. Hey Liam. Thank you. I wonder how many of us have simply sat down and thought through the proper sequence of activities for new product introduction. Now, I'm sure we all have project plans and there are people in the organization who are managing that overall plan. But as an MRP controller, have we truly tied those activities to rules in SAP? I like your approach here, Liam. Thanks again. Hey folks. We actually have quite a few topics on this particular area of concern around new product introduction. So please check out our other videos, but if you have a specific question, hey, submit it below.

DM; P2P; PTM

MM02; MD04

Now's the Time to Run the Delivery Due List

Explore SAP’s delivery due list for effective logistics execution

VL10G; VL10BATCH; VL01N; VA02; VL10A-E

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

Open Posting Changes

Clarifying open posting changes and how they are resolved

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

Operation Analysis

Assess operation and work center performance for optimal output

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

MCP1

Options for Confirmation

Evaluating confirmation options and their selection criteria

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.

SD

VA01; VA02; VA03; CO09

Order Analysis

Enhance order efficiency: Assessing order performance

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

MCP3

Our Suppliers Need a Forecast

Setting suppliers up for success with timely and relevant information

ME5A; MD04; ME53N; ME38; MCBZ

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

Out of Sight Out of Mind

A practical look at where inventory hides and how to surface it

Hey there reveal TV Community, Martin here, back with another opportunity to track down stranded inventory in your supply chain. Now, maybe you're one of the lucky ones where all your inventory lives within the four walls of your environment and have no risk of it sitting elsewhere. Most of us, on the other hand, do find inventory in all different places, and it's amazing what happens with that inventory if it's out of sight, it tends to be, out of mind. Here to shine a light on lingering inventory that may not be in the forefront and awareness of your organization is our friend Kelly. So Kelly, take it away and tell us more about how do we find this inventory that seems to be out of mind, out of sight. So when a bunch of supply chain folks get together over a happy hour, and they are sharing stories, this one often comes up. Inventory, lost, forgotten, neglected stock that everyone remembers, but no one's had an eye on in a while. Today I am going to highlight three common places where inventory might be lurking and accumulating cost. First stock at a subcontractor, toller, or co-packer. Second customer consignment, which while assumed sold, may still pose a risk. And last, but not least, offsite or in the yard storage where excess inventory goes on to live forever. Let's get into it. First up on our hit parade of out of sight, out of mind inventory is the stock we've provided our partners for external processing. In SAP, this is represented as special stock type O, also known as vendor provided stock. What we're looking for here is inventory in excess of requirements or inventory that was not consumed as expected in the last production run. We certainly want to verify the count on what is showing in stock with our partners, and then make a decision on how long we want to leave an excess material with them. Perhaps we can use that stock somewhere else. There are two great ways to identify material in excess of requirements. The first is through exception monitoring, and the second is through subcontracting cockpit. Both are excellent options for keeping the stock top of mind. Second stop, customer consignment. Now you might be thinking, but wait, Kelly, customer consignment is a commitment from our customers. I'm sorry to say, but there are actually two potential costs here. The first is risk of return. This is a commercial policy opportunity and worth verifying with your partners in sales and customer excellence. The second potential cost is when your customer is requiring too much inventory versus how much they are consuming. This restricts availability to our customers if the product is not exclusive. It also can create unexpected gaps in the need to top off their orders and create issues with moving material efficiency. It also can create unexpected gaps in the need to top off their orders and create issues with moving material efficiently through the supply chain. Third and final example for today, what happens when you start keeping inventory on trailers in your yard or need to temporarily rent some additional space? Serious question. How often is that temporary actually temporary? In both cases, we're adding the cost and risking quality, and unfortunately, it's very difficult to get rid of this easy button once it's in play, until the situation is significantly and highly visible. That's no fun for anyone. Now we have three ways to make sure that our inventory is not going out of sight, out of mind. To keep things nice and tidy, we must have regular reviews, just like we did today. We need to have a plan for validation and clean up where needed, and where our inventory is growing, where it's going. We need to reset our policies to eliminate the opportunity for that to happen. Okay, great. I feel a lot better now, but it's kind of half the story though, right? I mean, at the end of the day, everyone has to still go look, decide and act. So keep this inventory moving. Make sure you've got an accurate account with minimal risk. So thanks again, Kelly. Hey folks, if you wanna know more about inventory and we actually have quite a myriad of inventory videos, please check out our video catalog. And if you're struggling to find a specific one, please suggest a recommendation below or just use our chatbot.

Over Capacity at a Supplier

Handle overcapacity in SAP without spreadsheets slowing down decisions or action

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

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

Periodic Totals

Learn the how and why of rolling up to period totals

Hey folks, welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. So we know the best way to learn by doing, so let's get cracking on this video. We're going to be discussing an effective feature available in MRP list and stock requirements list, and it's called the periodic totals. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, clicking on that green sigma button will take you to a place that's very useful. Kristie, tell us more about periodic totals. Well Martin, sometimes it's nice to take a peek at the forest and not just the trees. It can be a super useful way to look at what's happening at the day, week, or even month level. There's some great intel we can glean from these rolls up. But you don't have to take my word for it, we're going to go in and take a tour. We'll go see where to access the periodic totals. Review the information that lives there. And then provide some solid examples of where this functionality can be really helpful. Let's plant some seeds to get your minds churning. All right, let's get in and take a look around at periodic totals. You can see here I'm in the stock requirements list. Now you can get to this similarly in the MRP list as well for those of you who are still running classic MRP. But bear in mind your MRP list is static as of the last time the MRP run occurred versus your stock requirements list or MD04 is dynamic as of the moment that you entered it or when you last hit your refresh button. And this is the way that most of us are used to looking at our planning situation, right, so it's date by date, requirement by requirement, element by element. But sometimes it's really helpful, especially if you are having a conversation around a recovery situation or when you're expecting to be caught up in back and balance. If you just need to get a really quick rough cut look, it can be very helpful to roll this up to periodic totals. And the way that we do that is actually by clicking on this little guy right here. So see this little green sigma button? When I click on that, it's going to give me some different options for how I might want to look at this. Now I can go ahead and click on this, and here you'll see we've got these different options, so we can look at it day by day, so it's going to accumulate our forecast, planned independent requirements, our requirements, so our actual sales orders, deliveries, etc. And then our receipts, so what we plan to have in terms of replenishment and then it will calculate for us our available quantity, so what is it that we expect to have available in order to be able to serve the customer. And then over here, you're going to see the actual coverage which is what we intend to have in terms of the number of days of supply, so it's calculating that out for us. And we can look at this on a day by day, a week by week or a month by month basis. So I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the week accumulations that we can see that now it's getting a little easier to see right what those actual balances are and then I can even come up to month and what I love about week and month is that as we look at the planned independent requirements, we can start to think about that as our remaining available to sell so what do we expect to still have coming in, in terms of sales orders or deliveries or other customer requirements, stock transfer orders? What else is out there that is going to come in and consume that forecast that we need to adjust for? Or, if we're planning to that forecast, irrespective of our requirements, what is it that we still anticipate needing to serve? So, open balance remaining to sell, requirements that we have in hand. How much we are expecting to receive. So, you can see here, let's do the math, we are expecting to receive, we have 0 available right now, we have 6 pieces that we are expecting to receive, we have 2 pieces of requirements already on hand, so our balance at the end of the week is 4 pieces. Okay, and then if we come down here, same thing, no additional requirements for this week, we have 11 additional pieces planned to come in, so we have 15 pieces available. Coming down a little bit more, we have 17 pieces planned to go out the door, we have no more coming in, so 17 deducted from 15 gives us a negative 2, which gives us an actual coverage of a negative 14 here. And if you come down even a little bit further, now we have our expected available to sell for these weeks, so we're still expecting to get some additional demand in and again, we don't get caught up really until a few weeks from now. So assuming that today was week 43, really our first full recovery is not until week 51, and so this would be a planning situation that we can then go in and start to work. Now if you have dynamic safety stock or coverage profile in place, your view here will look different. You'll have some additional columns because you're trying to react and respond to that safety stock. In our case here, we do have a safety stock in place and I'll show you that in just a moment, I'll just flip over real quick here to seeing that accumulation by month, so you can see what your end of period balances should look like as you go through and out across the different months. And if you're ever not sure about what something means, you can come in here and you can hit your F1 key and it will bring up the definitions for you so that you can see very specifically what is going on here. So your actual range of coverage in this case is in days versus the other pieces of information that we are looking at are in units, and then you can read a little bit more to understand exactly how the system is calculating that for you. So again, that is going to be the F1 key on your keyboard. So the difference here is ATP quantity versus your days of coverage. Now to go back to what we're normally looking at here, all I have to do is click on the puzzle pieces, I'm going to switch to our individual lines and here again is that safety stock, so the 24 pieces that's netting out our current inventory on hand. So we are reliant on this additional production order for us to be able to supply and you'll see we also have some exception messages here that we need to take care of. But sometimes it's very helpful, especially if you have a very active product, to be able to quickly go in and do that roll up and look at it either accumulated at the day, week, or month level, and really depending on how your forecast split is happening that weekly or monthly can be very, very helpful in terms of seeing what your remaining balance available to sell is. It's also a good way if you're working with some of your counterparts, maybe in customer service or sales support, to be able to give them an idea of what that recovery period looks like and that also is accounting for your lead times. Okay everyone, now we're up to speed on this little piece of functionality that can be so helpful at getting a quick look at how supply is serving demand. We're all on the same page with where to find the periodic totals. What the options are for totaling the requirements, and receipts by period, and the expected available to promise for that period. We also chatted through some context around this information and when it can be the most useful. The hope is that this gives you enough information to start thinking through how we might use this piece of functionality in your day to day life. Back over to you Martin. Awesome, Kristie. I can see how periodic totals can be of help. An actual matter of fact, we probably have to take a step back every now and then and just kind of rise above the chaos of the day and kind of assess our problem to see if it's a persistent one. This in combination with forward looking green graphs can be actually very powerful. So once again, thank you and good stuff. So folks, if you want to know more about this and maybe even about the green graph I just mentioned, please check out our other videos and of course if you have a particular question please submit it below.

MM; PP; SD; DM

MD04; MD05

Picking Areas

Review of picking areas, use cases, and master data locations

Hey folks, welcome to the video service that reveals and unlocks the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here. In this video, we're going to cover picking areas in warehouse and discuss how this feature can be used to strategically group or batch materials needed to be picked. Steve, I'm already thinking of the potential ways this might be helpful, but I'm sure you're going to show us a lot more. Take it away. Sure thing Martin. Think of picking areas as the twin to storage sections, but instead of being used to group materials for put away, picking areas are used to group materials for stock removal. The beauty of this feature is that it can be used in a variety of ways to improve efficiency, prevent injuries, and materials from being damaged. I'm personally a huge fan of picking areas and will touch on a few success stories in the demo and how I utilize them and the benefits that we received in our warehouse. I know the anticipation is probably killing you. So let's jump right into SAP where I'll demonstrate. How this works. Propose a few ideas on how you may use these in your environment. Picking areas are a special field, similar to a fixed bin status. So you would have to go into the material master, in this case, we'll just go to MM03. We'll go for a material 100-600 here. We're going to go to our two favorite WM tabs, WM1, WM2, and why I mean, it's similar to a fixed bin storage type is you have to enter the storage type here in order for that pick area field to be populated on the WM2 tab. So we'll go ahead and enter 001, and we'll go and enter D02 for this material. Okay it defaulted to my WM1 tab. The pick area for this part is actually going to live here, so because we entered storage type D02, here's our picking area field. So in this case this material is looking for a pick area, so a separate release by the storage type of D02. So that way we can queue it with anything to be picked for any specific reason, whether it's a heavy material, velocity, so on and so forth. Then on the actual bins, it's going to look for any of those materials that are eligible. So you could easily search for any pick areas, we'll go to LX02, we'll run LX02 wide open and a field that you're gonna have to bring in that you could see all the, it's actually towards the bottom here, you have your picking area, bring that over to our basic LX02 list, now it's going to be over to the right and you can see our last field here is by picking area, so you can do a sort of all the bins that are eligible by pick area. So in this case, there's 3 bins assigned to this pick area. So if these orders were picked, it will then queue these, this material 100-300, and it's going to release these separately based on this D02 picking area. So again, the best case is going to be if you have multiples of these or many parts in there that you want grouped separately. But the way to do it is going to be to identify those in a storage type, enter your storage type in your material master in the WM2 tab, and then that way those parts will be released and treated differently from a pick area perspective. Welcome back. In this demo. We've covered how picking areas work. And discussed a few different ways they can be used. I challenge you to utilize this functionality in some of the ways that I did, because the outcome and benefits are absolutely tremendous. Man, you've made me a fan too, Steve, thank you. What an excellent feature and great examples you covered in explaining how these work, and specifically how it worked for you in your warehouse. So folks, if you want to learn more about warehouse management or other features that SAP can provide for you to help you, please feel free to check out our other videos, and of course if you have a particular question or even a recommendation, please submit it below.

Planned Order Material Availability Check

Check availability at the planned order stage for smooth operations

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's material availability checking for planned orders. When used correctly planned order material availability check help organizations do real-time checks on the availability of materials at the planned order level. From a production perspective this is the first time to really see if the materials you may need are available for future production runs. Eacliffe, why don't you tell us a little bit more about this availability checking for planned orders? Sure Martin. Planned orders ATP Check is a powerful feature when used correctly to determine if the preliminary schedule, let's say two to three weeks out into the future, has any component challenges. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. Why perform planned order ATP check. The scope of check, which demand and supply elements we are taking into consideration when we do the ATP check for the planned orders. And how to perform the ATP check itself for each planned order. The intent here is to use transaction code MDVP to do a collective component ATP check to determine if you have sufficient components to fulfill the latest production schedule. The goal here is to allow only those planned orders with allocated components to be converted into production orders and eventually get released. You decide how far into the future you want to run this transaction for but I would expect it to occur at least days, if not weeks ahead of when you will be releasing or converting that planned order into a production order. So in this particular case, I'm going to run it for Plant 1000 for this material. Typically you would run this from a MRP controller, recognizing that when you are running ATP for the planned orders, you want to do it for all the materials you're responsible for rather than a specific material like I have here and the other key point is down here is where you can then control how far into the future you run this transaction for. So you can specify the date range and that's how you control how far you actually allocate components to the various planned orders you are responsible for. I'm going to run it wide open since I have a small subset of data. So let's execute and here we can see what we are seeing here is the results of running ATP before we can always come here and do a select all and run the ATP check and it will do everything in mass. This is exactly what I did before. What you can see is that the first order is confirmed at 100%. So the goal is to produce 5,000 and 5,000 we are able to do, versus if you come to the second row the intent is to do 12,000, we could do 11,393 which is 95% of the order and you can also see a status here in terms of where the tree represents ATP check was done and it was fully confirmed versus the two means. Yes, it was also done for the second row, but only a partial confirmation was achieved and then the remaining ATP check did run but none of them confirmed because of one or more missing components. Okay, so a couple of things, so what I'm going to do is come in here this planned order, I'm going to click and change order you could also do an ATP check from within a planned order, so instead of doing it a collective processing you could also do individual just in case you made a change to the date and or the timing. You can come in here and run this to see what the revised results are but the one thing I want you to see in here is that for each material there's something called a scope of check. So if I click on this icon, you could see that this check is zero one, this value is derived from the material master of the component. So in this case, here is the component raw material and it has this value assigned to it. So that's how it knows which option to pick and then it says checking rule PP, which in this case applies to the planned order, it says look, when I do an ATP check, for the planned order this is the rule to employ. This combination then derives this information in terms of, hey, which stock to take into consideration. You know, do I want to include safety stock? Typically that would be yes for raw material. So maybe we should have a different setting, for example that also includes safety stock. We may want to include quality stock, in other words, we receive the inventory, but it's still going through quality inspections so why not include that, and then we have these other objects over here, which is, hey, should I be looking at a purchase requisition? I mean, since it's a planned order that we are evaluating it typically it makes sense to include a requisition. But if this was a production order, for example, be it create or release, we would have a different check-in rule and that other check-in rule would exclude a requisition, it would pay more attention to like a firm object like a purchase order. So this is how we then start tightening up the rule as we progress from a planned order to a created production order, to a released production order. Let's come back and take a look at this particular planned order, so I'm going to select this, I'm going to display this order and here we can see one of the things I want to call out is the fact that we have a committed quantity of 5,000. So again this is another level of visibility when we run ATP check, yes, we can see it in that overview that we initially came from, but we can also come within the individual planned order and see how much are we committed for? If I take a look at the component list the required quantity is also listed here, but you can also see the commitment of the components so this is how much inventory has been allocated to this planned order. Okay versus if I came back to this other one here, this other order, and again, I take a look at this and I come to the component overview and here what we can see is, this is what we required this 7,320 this 6,120 but because of limited availability we could only produce the 11,343 and this is how much inventory is needed. So again once you get the proper rules in terms of the scope of check, if you employ that properly and you employ this process properly, doing this type of check in advance to creating a production order, it allows you to have those critical conversations to determine, do I truly need to move that production out or is there a way to expedite some of these components? And you could do this weeks in advance so that there is reduced number of changes to your revised production schedule. So in summary we have covered how planned order ATP Chart allows you to. Understand why we are performing an ATP check on planned orders. Understand the scope of check for the planned orders, basically, which inventory, supply and demand elements are we taking into consideration to perform the check. And how to actually perform the ATP check for planned orders. Thanks Eacliffe. Using this feature effectively can help tremendously in providing the planners with visibility into availability of materials for future production runs. If you want to learn more about ATP or material availability checking, or even other SAP features and functions please check out our video catalog and of course if you have a specific question feel free to submit it below.

MDVP

Planned Order or Purchase Requisition

Understanding how determination works within the MRP run process

Planning Strategies

Mastering planning strategies: An essential overview

DM; IBP

MD04; MM03

Planning With a Planning Material

Enhance planning with effective use of planning materials

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi Martin here, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's planning with a planning material capability. When used correctly planning with a planning material can help organizations evaluate the quality of signal and plan at a right level to drive results. Kristie, I know that means a lot, how about you tell us a little bit more? Let me break it down for you Martin. Planning with a planning material is a powerful strategy when used correctly. What it allows us to do is group materials that share a demand stream together and allow the demand for that material to consume the forecasted requirements for the family. In this demonstration I am going to focus on three key things. First of all, where we maintain the master data that supports planning strategy 63 or planning with a planning material. Second, what a material that utilizes planning strategy 63 would look like. And lastly, how the materials that are set up to reference a planning material might be related to one another, or essentially the use case for planning strategy 60. Okay, before I show you this one in the system, I think it's important that I give you a little visual in the definition. So, planning with a planning material and without make to order planning strategy 63, you have to think about this one as a one to many relationship. So it allows you to be in a position to produce many different finished goods. Think about it, if you had a whole family of products that were related to one another, and you needed to tie it back to a single material where you were able to get enough signal to forecast. You may be forecasting that planning material to be in a position to produce a variety of different end items. So if you saw our previous video where we talked a little bit about assemble order, and we were walking through the different levels of BOM's that you could stock at, this is using those same principles, but in addition to that, you have one material where you're placing that signal and many different end items that you may be producing as a result that has some variance in the way that it's finally built out to the customer. Okay, and you get to choose the level of the bill of material, so it's got a common BOM. That level of bill of material that you want to stock at, so you're sending that demand signal through appropriately. This is very, very helpful when you have a lot of variants in terms of the end items, but you have some consistency in terms of the non-variable components that can be in there and consumed by those different end items. So let's do this now, let's go ahead and actually look in SAP and I'll show you where this is maintained. So this is our example here, and again, this is a planning material so customer orders will never come in against this item. It's just getting us set up to drive requirements to the materials that are associated with it. So this is 2087 aptly named planning material, and this is where we're controlling that flow. So we're entering our forecast here and it is generating a planned order, which is going to get transitioned over to the related materials. We're going to go to 2088, which is one of the end items that is related to this planning material, so you can see the dependent requirement, it's handing that demand over here. But nothing is going to happen until we actually have a customer order come in and then that is going to be what will actually drive this. So let me display for you, unless we are choosing to stock at the finished good level, but we can control the level at which we want to stock, let me display for you where these settings are made. And this is going to be on your MRP three view of the material master. And you'll see here we've got the planning strategy is set to 63. Our planning material is 2087 and our planning plant is 3000. So you can even use this across network if you need to, to be able to consolidate, but it's much easier to see the demand and supply generally in the same plant, so easier to plan with when you're first getting started, but as you go, you could start to make this very sophisticated. But then as we think through the bill of material that's related for the non-variable components, we're going to be driving from that in order to be able to convert this into the appropriate end item within that customer's tolerance time. So everything that is related to the replenishment with all the non-variable components is driven by that forecast on the planning material and we control the level of the BOM that we want to stock at and then this finished good as the customer orders are coming in, we'll start to see this tick away and we'll get those planned orders converted into production orders, and then everything made and produced and ready for that customer requirement. Okay, so very, very useful technique to help us to be able to get the demand signal at the right level and maintain flexibility as well as assurance of supply as we're passing those requirements down. So in summary, we have covered how planning with the planning material will allow you to. Think about how your materials are related and if we get a stronger signal when grouped together using a planning material. Maintain a forecast at the planning material level to support several different end items. And support cross location planning, referencing a planning plant. This planning strategy is very specific and may be a little hard to understand, but hopefully this helps to generate some interest and conversation around this helpful planning strategy. Thanks Kristie. This sounds like an excellent way to improve demand forecasting accuracy, signal better production plans and increase our customer satisfaction. So if you want to learn more about planning strategies and your SAP system please feel free to check out our other videos and of course if you have a burning question feel free to submit it below.

DM; PTM

MD04; MM03

Planning With Infinite Capacity

Leverage the graphical planning board for infinite capacity planning

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, I am Martin, and in this video we will focus on how to take advantage of SAP's planning with infinite capacity capability. When used correctly planning with infinite capacity can help organizations by providing real time information about the capacity and utilization of production resource. Eacliffe how about you tell us a little bit more about infinite capacity planning? Sure Martin. Planning with infinite capacity is a powerful feature when used correctly to identify when manufactured inventory is truly needed. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. One, acknowledge that MRP only takes inventory consideration into consideration and not capacity. Two, highlight the need to evaluate capacity and address any capacity overload situation. And three, understand the implications to component requirement timing when addressing overload situation. The intent here is to review the results from MRP to show that the results works on the premise of working with infinite capacity. So first we're looking at transaction MD04 the stock requirement list. Right now there's one supply element, this plan order, along with some demand elements. Basically we can see the projected inventory level is negative, so when I run MRP it will generate more planned orders. I intentionally kept this planned order here so that we can quickly drill into it, so I'm going to display this plan order, come to the detailed scheduling tab and here we can see work centers, CHEM_PK1 and CHEM_PK2. These are the two work centers the new planned orders will also work with and put capacity requirements against. We could see we have two capacity category 001 machine and ZLB. This one is also sharing 002 so two different type of labor, but from a finite scheduling perspective the emphasis is placed on 001. So with that said, let's take a quick look at, and just to show that there's nothing behind the scene I'm going to do a quick refresh, nothing has changed, so I'm going to go to CM01. So here we have capacity information, again this is the two work centers CHEM_PK1 and if I page down we will then see CHEM_PK2. So let's go back up to CHEM_PK1, we do see some capacity requirements, the point is that it's related to this one planned order and that planned order is the one that I showed on the previous screen, so 75464, if I come here you can see 75464. So that's where that capacity information is coming from. The other thing I want to show is if I go back to CM 01 capacity planning, so let's arrow back, I'm going to double click on this work center, we'll branch us to display mode of the work center, we are going to go to the capacity tab, capacity category 001, which is machine, double click on that and it's taking us to this field here, which says that we are allowed to do finite scheduling on this particular work center. The same holds true for CHEM_PK2again. Again come here, double click on the work center, go to the capacity tab, click on the 001 machine capacity and again we can see it's relevant for finite scheduling. Okay, so with that said, what we are going to do is I'm going to go back to this transaction, the stock requirement list, I have this option here to do single item multi-level, so let's schedule it, we want to make sure we are doing late time scheduling so recognizing that, hit enter. Okay, MRP ran for this finished good, I'm going to do a refresh here and now we see we have planned orders fulfilling the independent requirement. So let's come to the first forecast. Basically what happens is the forecast is for 8,000, 5,000 there was already a planned order, so within net difference is 3,000 so you can see the projected inventory is 0 after it gets consumed by the forecast. Likewise, we could then see there's a planned order for 12,000 to meet the requirement, but I also want you to pay attention to the timing. So here we can see the forecast is dated 3/13 so the supply is on 3/13. The demand here is for 3/20 so the supplier is on 3/20. In other words what has happened is the system or MRP did not take capacity in consideration, its primary and only focus is on meeting the timing of when is that inventory needed. So going back to the capacity planning, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to do a refresh, and by doing the refresh, we can now see from machine capacity we need a lot of additional machine time to meet the requirements of those planned orders. So here we can see look, current week there's only 32 hours left, and then 40, 40 versus 247, 227 . So that's for machine but we also see a similar situation with labor, we need not only a lot of machine time but a lot of labor. So even though we have the indicator set, and again, the focus is on capacity category 001, and it's set for finite scheduling at this point, when we run MRP it does not take capacity into consideration. It instead says, there's infinite capacity and then it leaves it up to the production planner to determine how this gets resolved. Does it get resolved by moving some of the production to another set of work centers or do we source it from another plant or do we go to a vendor? And if I drill down, we can see all the planned orders, so here's the original one 75464 and everything else is new planned orders generated by MRP, saying look, this is when we need to supply the inventory. How you go about achieving that, that's left up to the production planner. Okay, so this results, we would then move it to the next stage of production planning, which most likely involves a graphical planning board because it's there, we can do things like finite scheduling considering this is the current week, next week, and the week after. The only way that this can be achieved is by moving this into the future, which means we then miss the timing of fulfilling that independent requirement. So in summary we have covered how planning with infinite capacity allows you to. Decide when you want to manufacture inventory to fulfill inventory requirement rather than having an automated decision. Evaluate capacity and decide how to address each capacity overload situation. And to understand the implications to component requirement timing when addressing overload situation. Thanks Eacliffe. Using this feature enables more informed decisions about production planning to avoid potential disruptions for sure. So if you'd like to know more about this feature and other features in SAP please feel free to check out our other videos and if you have a question or a suggestion please feel free to submit it below.

CM01; CM05; CM21; CM25

Plant Specific Material Status

Explore how plant-specific material status interacts with various PLM statuses

Hey everyone, Martin here. And if you're all about maximizing the ROI in your SAP system, you've come to the right place. In this video, we're going to delve into how we can use the plant specific material status field in the Material Master to align the activities and materials eligible for to through its stages of the product lifecycle. This helps with everything from compliance to making sure that we have the opportunity to run the inventory down at the end. So Sean, I'd love for you to dive into this and tell us more about it. What are some of the key things we should know about the plant specific material status? This is a great topic, Martin, thank you very much. Now folks, the plant specific material status is highly configurable to your organizations needs. It's meant to associate what activities a material is eligible for and where it is in the product life cycle. And it creates for us a high level of visibility if you take time to think through the descriptions. This is how we can know if a material is cleared for takeoff. Or on restriction for planning, for replenishment, or for procurement. And most importantly, know that SAP follows rules and alerts, and if you're trying to perform that activity that a material is not eligible for, it's going to let you know. So let's go in and take a look. Today we're talking about plant specific material status. Now this will be a high level demo, but in doing so, a reminder that material statuses are configurable to the needs of the organization. And what they do is they tell us whether a material is subject to restrictions and what those restrictions are. So let's say there's a material under development or one that's about to be discontinued, we will more than likely need a way to restrict that material, which could be blocked for use in certain business activities by assigning statuses that direct how that's going to happen. So we're going to look inside of SAP as to how this takes place and we will take a look specifically at the material master MRP options . So let's get started and let's take a look at what it looks like in SAP. So here I have a material, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the material master and take a look, and you'll notice in this view, this is the MRP1 view, that there's a field here called material status. And so if I open that up, what I see are the restrictions that which have been applied from a material status point of view, and in this case, there are six of them. We see design, we see design and plan, use, phase out, obsolete, and then there's one to block our BOM header items as well. So those are the restrictions that are currently in place. Now, looking inside of that, just to get a view for setting the rules as we go, what we do is get a view behind the scenes as to what's happening inside of the configuration. So here's our material master, and I'm going to again take a look at what that looks like. And now I get the same six areas in terms of these descriptions that I see on the right hand side. This was the drop down, remember, from the material status piece that we saw in MRP 1. And if I wanted to look at what happens here, I can look under design. What are the details behind that? And this is an interesting piece because we spoke about blocking certain things or not allowing certain things to happen. So from a purchasing management point of view, what's the messaging we're going to get if we want to buy something or purchase something while it's in the design phase? And you'll notice there's a B, and if I just bring those dropdowns for you, there were three options. If it was blank, there'd be no message at all. It'd be go ahead, do as you need to. If it was an A, it would give me a message, a warning that would say, look this is still in the design phase, so here's a warning, you may not want to do this. Or as is currently the case, it's a B and that B says it's going to give me an error and it will not allow me to do any purchasing based on something that's still in the design phase. The same can be said for manufacturing. So if I come down to this piece of the puzzle under production, I'll notice here that I also have a B. So it's also going to block me, it's not going to allow me to do anything from a production point of view, it's going to hold back as far as that's concerned. And so these are really interesting and important pieces that this is where we set the rules that is going to help us guide. If I went into the use phase, if I look in the use, what I'm going to see is that it's all open. Once this material is in use, it's free, we can purchase, we can put out RFPs, we can do production, etc. So that's how the rule set works. By contrast, if we got down to an obsolete place and we look at what does the obsolete look like, I'm now going to just see that I've got this B everywhere. So whether it's purchasing, whether it's bills and materials, whether it's routings, whether it is the material requirements, whether it's production, the B is indicating to me, as I showed you earlier on, that it is going to give us an error message. In other words, it's going to block us from actually going down and continuing with that. So this is where the power of the material status comes into play in terms of creating restrictions and not allowing us to continue in that space because we've set up the rules, and we can see as we track back here through the configuration process, we're setting up the rules to say, please make sure that we actually block things at this stage of the puzzle, and we don't want to make it go forward as far as these are concerned. So that's the first area where we're able to put those restrictions in place. It's in terms of the material master inside of MRP. Okay folks, let's review the so what of this powerful field found in the MRP 1 tab of the material master. First of all, well constructed statuses show a clear progression that matches how a material might move through its lifecycle with some accommodation for things that could come up and that would require temporary restriction. The fields we're discussing today is at plant level, which can be helpful if status change and may need to be done differently by either plant or by country. Now most importantly, while this field is great to support reporting, it is an operational field that's meant to have teeth and assist the MRP controller in their planning and replenishment processes. And then the warehouse team in moving the inventory through the process. Thank you, Sean. This of course sounds super valuable and an opportunity that one of many organizations should spend time thinking through and getting right. So folks, as always, please check out our video catalog and if you have a specific comment, please submit it below.

P2P; PTM; DM

MD04; MM03

PO Churn Churn Churn

Learn to manage exception messages effectively to better meet customer needs

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

Predictable or Unpredictable: What's the Story

Using history to illuminate predictability vs. unpredictability

10 min

Welcome to the ultimate guide to maximizing your SAP system. I'm Martin and today's video, we're going to help you unlock some of the functionalities you didn't even know existed. So shall we? Okay. In this video, we're going to take a look at some of the red line graphs and see what they can tell us about a material's history. I'm very pleased to say that we have a special treat today, none other than Sean Elliffe. He is a man that knows how to tell a story, so I cannot wait to hear him articulate some of the examples for us. Sean, take it away. Well Martin, we have action, we have adventure, we have surprises at every twist and turn and we are going to go in and see if these materials are predictable or if they're unpredictable. You know what the biggest surprise is? When we feel like an item is completely out of control and then we take a real look and find the consumption is actually pretty steady. So let's get in and take a look, see what the story is. I'll also highlight what we can and cannot determine from the visual that we're looking at. It's fun to imagine what the story may be, but we do not want to assume facts that are not actually evident. So let's go in and take a look. Welcome to the demo on predictability and unpredictability. Now, I ran my inventory report and found a few materials worth considering. I chose raw material and two finished goods and I based that on an analysis of key figures, such as the number of times that we've been issuing these materials over the period, against the average inventory value over the same period. Let's take a look graphically at these materials. So the first is then the raw material, let's start there and we're going to go and take a look at what does this look like graphically. And surprise! Look at that, wow! It really is a nice looking graph. You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to change up the size of those lines a little bit so it is even clearer and we can what a wonderful looking graph, but what does this tell us? First, it looks like the activity is contained in a pretty consistent band. From the top to the bottom. If we look at all of these top to bottom, pretty consistent band, and we call that process deviation, and that consistency is the first good sign of predictability. The next thing we look at is what we call the consumption lines. Now, if you take these lines, the downward lines, all of these downward lines are consumption, where we are using material, consuming it, and looking at those, they actually look to be fairly parallel, pretty much parallel to one another, that's what they look like. And that parallel line between them gives us a second indication that we have a predictable material. Now there's some other indications in here, let's call them facts without evidence. We could call on what is our average inventory and it looks to be somewhere running through there close enough to about 30,000 kilograms. And what is the lowest point? So the lowest point over the period is this here, and that is known as our dead stock. And our dead stock here running around about. 13,000 kilos. Now, these are important pointers for inventory analysis and they're going to be covered in other videos. But let's look then at what is the final sign of predictability, and so for that let me come out of here and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to what's known as my receipts and issues diagram. Oh voila! Look at that. And what this is telling me is if I take a look at the receipts against the issues, and we'll open up the legend so we can see what that looks like. The green line are the accumulated issues and the blue line there are the accumulated receipts over time. And we're seeing two things here. One, they're tracking pretty close to one another. And that's a good sign where receipts and issues are very close and almost equal to one another. The second sign we see is that the line that they are tapering upwards is around about 45 degrees, and those two key pointers indicate predictability. So as a result, I would argue that this particular material has a high level of predictability and is really one that could go into an automation process quite easily, but a high level of predictability from that. Okay, let's take a look then at our second material, which is a finished good, and once again, we're going to go and take a look at the stock level and say, Oh, this looks a little different. And we'll do that same little trick that we looked at early on and change the width of those lines. All right, that gives us a much better picture. And so as we look at this and change that scale, the result is that we can see from the analysis, there's a large range and if I just give it to you off the top in terms of dollars this time instead of kilos, this high point here down to this low point here is a range of about $300,000 here to about $10,000 here at the low end and that is a significant process deviation from top to bottom and so at first glance that might look as being an unpredictable material because of this huge process deviation that we have. But it also raises some questions that require further evidence. Are we producing to plan? Are we changing constantly as we go ? Let's look at our lowest inventory point of the analysis, which is this one down here. It in fact, gives us a false sense of the read on deadstock, which as we go forward is actually climbing because as our averages go up and this space below, it's starting to show that deadstock is rising as we go. So we get these other nuances that we can start to look at. But looking at those instances, we also see lot sizes that are produced and if we look in this space here, we can see these lot sizes were pretty much consistent. There was another space there. Here's another space. And here's a third place where we're looking like they were running pretty consistently. And those consumption lines by the same token from our earlier conversation are showing some form of consistencies and there are some parallel dynamics against it. So once again, we want to go and say, okay I'm still not a hundred percent sure Let's go and do our final check then as to what that might look like and we're going to look again at our receipts and our issues diagram and what does that look like? Oh, well, look at that. So now if we put our legend in again, we start to see the green line is accumulated issues and the blue line is accumulated receipts. Now, we do start to see semblances of that 45 degree angle of the lines, which talks about predictability. But what we are seeing here is that once we look a bit further into it, we see that the gap between the two is getting wider. And that gap suggests that we are, in this case, bringing in way more than we are actually using. So our receipts are outstripping our issues. In and around that, we still have a good argument that there is predictability here that we can work with. And if we can take that predictability and optimize this material, I think we'd be in a good position. But I would argue in this case here that there is still a good semblance of predictability that we can see on this particular material. Okay, so with that said, let's go back and let's take a look at the final example that we have. And we'll follow the same process. Let's go down and take a look at what we have. Oh, this looks a bit higgledy piggledy, it looks like it's all over the show, right? So let's again, adjust that width so that we can see those lines a little bit more clearer. And what we also noticed is that we did have a stock out at a point here, but it's pretty difficult to start to see whether the downward lines are parallel with one another. And we start to get a sense that this is probably less predictable than we would otherwise think. We're also seeing that the process deviation from top to bottom is fairly wide, it's quite large, and so that noise suggests again that maybe not so good. Maybe it's not quite as predictable as we would imagine. And just looking at this particular graph, I would err on the side of saying, there's less predictability here than would otherwise be the case. So if we follow what we've done thus far, and we go back and we take a look at our receipts and our issues, once again, we get that issue. from a consumption point of view on the issues, that's the green line. There is a little bit of consistency. We can see some predictability with this material. The receipts seem to be all over the show and creating gaps between the two and therefore we're bringing in way more than we need but from a consumption point of view, it looks like that consumption is a lot more consistent. And so for us, the challenge is inconsistency on the supply side, which is the receipts but that needs to be tightened up for us to get to an optimized space at the end of the day. And so folks getting to grips with visibility on what is predictable and what is not will position us to better optimize our inventory and help our organizations as they go on the quest to free up working capital. What a fun demo. There's no doubt that a picture is worth a thousand words and being able to rally around a visual is immensely helpful to critical thinking and to problem solving. These graphs offer us an opportunity to be curious and investigate further to truly understand the story. And then when we're well armed, and particularly if we've had a surprise twist, and the material does have predictable consumption, We can focus on taking control and smoothing out the supply. Knowledge is power after all. So let's take the time to explore and understand. Thanks, Sean. Whenever someone says story, I always hope you're one of them to tell it. Thank you for helping us understand the opportunity in this feature and function. All right, folks, if you want to know more about this and hear more stories from Sean, please come back and check out our video catalog and of course, if you have a specific question feel free to submit it below.

P2P; PTM; DM

MC.9

Pressing Snooze on That Exception Message

Learn how to break the cycle of repetitive issues in exception monitoring

The best way to learn is by doing so, welcome everybody back to the video series that is not only going to unlock, it's going to expose you to some of the best features in SAP. Martin here. Now just wait a second. Who's trying to hit snooze on their exception? Uh oh. I really don't think I'm going to like this topic. We can't just hit snooze, can we, Liam? Take it away. Thanks Martin. I personally love a good snooze. Just five more minutes. We often get asked if we can clear an exception message and make it go away once we've reviewed it. Well, for those of you on ECC or running classic MRP and S/4, yes you can sort of do this, but even if you do, it doesn't go away, and this feature has gone away in our new S/4 world. MRP is relentless in trying to supply the demand. Demand is king and it'll shout at us if we're not aligned. So what we need to do is work the planning situation, and when we've done all that we can, we need to make a note. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Let's dive into SAP and take a look. So here we have a material with a couple of exception messages on it. Firstly, we have a safety stock violation, so we are already negative straight out the gate. But we still have some inventory there, so although we want to try and get out of there as quickly as possible, we still have some material on hand to fulfill some of our obligations. Nevertheless, MRP has done its job, it's proposed some supply proposals, and we've converted those into purchase orders. But guess what? They're still going to be behind. Mainly because of this demand, right in the 1st of the month, and so this purchase order is asking, Hey, can you bring it in earlier? And then secondly, we had this purchase order here, which is set for the 10th of September, but we actually need it today in line with our safety stock. Now, what's the options here? We can try and work with the supplier as much as possible, but guess what it looks like we already have. We have shipping notifications against these purchase orders, and if we have a look at those as well, they're down as inbound delivery confirmations, meaning that they are probably on the water in transit, or most certainly imminently on their way and cannot be changed. So we are pretty stuck right now and we cannot improve the planning situation in any way. Our first point of call really, is to work with our counterparts in a manufacturing department to try and navigate these demand elements that are now going to be overdue by a couple of weeks. Secondly, we can add a note. We've worked the situation as much as we can, and there's nothing else we can do to influence this anymore, apart from adding a note. So anybody looking this material again, gets an idea of what the situation is. And the way we add a note is specifically on an individual material and it's using the notes button attached. Once I have my notes here, I can add in a quick text. I'm going to write my username first, the date, and then my note. Tried to work with the supplier to improve the date, but the goods have already been goods issued. I'll go ahead and save that, and now if I green arrow back, we should see my note has appeared in this line here. All is well and good, and the next person that looks at this material will figure out that there is a note there. It's timestamped and username stamped, and they can see the further information there. So even though we couldn't do anything to improve the planning or supply situation for this material, what we could do is add a note and that adds up further information for future reference. Okay, confession time. We've had clients that have hidden exception messages. That's not even snoozing, that's hiding from the truth. We do want to have all of our exception messages active and when we have an exception message that we've dealt with but continues to linger, it's probably worth a relook to make sure nothing else has changed there and no other options we can pursue or colleagues we need to notify. It's important to revisit because if there is a new opportunity for improving that planning situation, which improves our service levels, we do not want to be caught snoozing. No, we do not. I know it can be tempting to snooze and move on when you see a message that can't be handled in that moment, but the power of exception message is in the awareness, the conversation, and the actions. It's all three, and unfortunately, it's a slippery slope of apathy. Let's rather get good relevant exceptions by driving the right rules and quality plans in SAP. Then we won't be so inclined to hit this snooze. Hey folks, exception management's a really critical topic and we actually have quite a lot of messages and videos on this. So please check out our catalog and of course, if you have a specific question that relates to this topic or others, submit it below.

Price Breaks

Expert strategies for evaluating good deals and managing risks

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here, and in this video we're going to focus on how to determine if that price break is really a good deal, using standard information for decision making directly in SAP. How do we know if we're really getting a good deal? As we know, the best way to learn is by doing so Kristie tell us how we're going to analyze the quality of that data in SAP to determine if that's a good deal or not. Oh boy, this is a great one. I had a friend in college who always bought a lot of what was on sale because he was actually always "saving money". Whether he needed that great deal item or not. Let me tell you, even canned goods eventually expire. Sometimes volume discounts make a ton of sense, and other times that seemingly good deal, well, it just really isn't a good deal. Now in terms of total cost, in today's demo. I am going to highlight a few key stats easily available in SAP to help evaluate the quality of that price break. How that price break should be maintained. And some options for potential negotiations to make that break work for you. So what happens when you get a quote back from your supplier and they are offering you some price breaks based on volume discounts? Well, we want to make sure that we have the opportunity to capitalize on that and at the same time we don't want to over purchase because what that can result in is dead stock, so inventory that is sitting there, not turning, not being used well in our process and sometimes even what we call slow moving or even excess or obsolete stock within your own organization based on your definitions. We don't want that. We do want to make sure though that we are taking full advantage of the pricing. So here's a couple of different options for you. First of all, I'm going to talk a little bit about what not to do. So oftentimes when we get price breaks back, the temptation is to do one of two things. It's to come in here and it's to set this minimum order quantity based on what you think that the best price is from your supplier. So let's say the supplier said, hey at 500 units you now get a lower price. You come in here and you go, okay, I think that you know $2.22 is really the most I would want to pay for this particular item. So I'm going to go ahead and set the minimum order quantity here. So what I do like about that is that you're providing a specific quantity. Never cover your lot sizes or your minimums that you're going for with periodic lot sizes. Meaning, if you think that your average usage per month is 1,200 units, don't set your lot size key to be a 4 week lot size because what if your demand changes? Then you're not getting, you're not necessarily achieving what it is that you were trying to from a discount perspective, and it's really hard to see and understand what that quantity is. So, make sure your minimums are your minimums. So, what is the smallest lot size that you would purchase from that supplier? And then also consider your rounding value, and then consider how frequently you have the opportunity to place orders and receive shipments from that supplier, and sometimes you may even have something like a fixed lot size that you're adhering to, or you could have a maximum lot size that you are adhering to. So make sure that we set this up properly. This section, this lot size data section is frequently underutilized, so make sure that you take advantage of that. The other thing is, if you are able to negotiate with your supplier so that you can get your volume discounts over time, another great alternative is an outline agreement. So something like a scheduling agreement or even a contract. So you can see here this is the same item, this flywheel and we have a contract that has been set up. What you'll note is as I select this item and I go into our item conditions, we have some conditions out here and you'll see here there's a little tick box that says scales. What this means is that there are price scales for this item. So there is a price per 1, but then there are also additional prices as we increase the quantities that we are procuring. And when we set this up, you can see here if I buy 1 I pay $45, if I buy 40 I pay $40, and if I buy 80 or more, then I'm getting $35. So I can go in here and manage this and you'll notice that the validity period here goes out quite a ways, but the contract has a validity period that goes through February 25th of 2023, so it's going to be governed by that overall document. What we want to make sure of is that then we are referencing this contract in our source list and every time we buy, it is looking here to see what those price breaks are so we're able to accumulate across time. Same thing with our scheduling agreements. We can also make sure that we are getting our price breaks there, and this allows us to bring in material at the rate that we need it and still accumulate our volumes so that we are able to get those price breaks where appropriate. So, as you're placing your orders, ensuring that you don't have to go and manually remember or key in, oh, this order is for 40, so it should be $40, or this order is for 120 and it should be $35. It will automatically reference the scales that are associated with the contract and every time you go in and you place that purchase order, it will read the correct value for you. So, this allows you to have multiple price breaks and be able to reference them accordingly as you are calling off those documents. And, there are a ton of different scale types that will allow you to model the price strategy that you're experiencing with your supplier, so you can get more creative with your negotiations so that you're able to go in and make that happen. So, really awesome ways to do this without just saying, I want to go for this economic order quantity and not be able to adjust that based on changes in your demand. If you are going to do something like that and enter an economic lot size in, you must review it regularly to ensure that that value still make sense, and the best way to do that is to look at what your consumption history has been through MC42 or look at your requirements going forward through MC43 and we cover those transactions in a variety of other videos. So, make sure it's a good deal, don't overpurchase and use outline agreements to help you to make sure that you're getting the right price based on those purchase orders each time you place an order with that supplier. So in summary, we have covered how to. Quality check the value of that volume discount. Properly planned for the discount. And some options or alternatives for how you might set the rules in place to capitalize on that quality buy without unplanned purchases or relying on manual intervention. Thank you, Kristie. No one wants to be your friend from university who took advantage of what turned out to be not such a good buy. But however, this is a serious concern. We want to negotiate great deals but we also want to make sure these deals work for us. Allowing SAP help to analyze and then apply the rules for those purchases is a huge help in making the right decisions in consideration of the total cost of ownership. So if you'd like to know more about this particular topic or any other topics in SAP about how to utilize SAP better, please feel free to check out the video library.

PR/PO Release Strategy

Make order release in SAP a value-driving step—not just a transactional task

Purchase Order Acknowledgements

Get started with effective supplier collaboration in SAP

Hi there, it's Martin again, and I'm quite curious to ask, how do you know if your suppliers have received your purchase order? How do you know if they've accepted the price, the delivery date, or even the terms? How do you know if they need to make a change to the date or quantity being delivered? For many of the folks we work with, the answer is quite simply, I got an email or I don't know. Some people even have robust collaboration tools that support this process that may or may not be able to flow the data back into SAP. Today, we want to explore how we can get better communication flowing with our suppliers and more timely information to our buyers so they can make a promise and keep a promise. Here to talk us through this one is one of our best communicators, Jen. Jen, can you help us understand how we can efficiently process acknowledgements and updates from our suppliers? Message received Martin. I'd love to help make the communication flow in SAP. Today we're going to look at the options for order acknowledgements. This is a supplier acknowledging that they have received and accepted the PO. We'll look at where this information is stored in a standard PO. We'll then talk about what happens if your supplier responds with a date change a change in quantity or even split shipment. You have options for how you can choose to use this information and whether you accept it or not. No matter what we do want to see the information in SAP, so we have the history of the updates, requests, and acceptances or denials. Let's jump right in. One of our strongest areas of focus on Reveal TV is setting ourselves and our partners up for success. Encouraging proactive communication with our suppliers, get the collaboration flowing. If we've written a PO with all the right rules in place, then most of the time our PO should be easily accepted. However, it would be good to know for sure and not to have to dig around in an email to confirm. So here we are, in ME229. This is a purchase order that we place with all the right rules in place, the supplier has come back and acknowledged the PO. An order acknowledgement is a type of PO confirmation. PO confirmations are configurable and use different types to suit different communications over the life of the PO line item. Some of us have very long lead times and a lot can happen in 90 or a 100 days. And yes, some of you have lead times that are much, much longer. Here's the basics. We send the PO to the supplier. The supplier acknowledges that it has been received and accepted. Great time marches on, the supplier has an update on availability. They send back a notice letting us know that we'll get part of the requested quantity on time, but part of it will be late by two weeks. We can record this update in SAP. See there. They can let us know when it's on its way to us through different confirmation types, and we can create an inbound delivery from that ASN. My friend Rutul made a video on that topic, check it out. So what happens if we get acknowledgement or notice of change that's different from what we ordered? Well, then we have some options. First of all, we need to decide if that supplier is reliable in the information they provided. If so, we could use a confirmation type that is MRP relevant. Meaning that the rest of the integrated team would know what the new date, and we get exceptions if the new date poses a problem, so we respond and work with the supplier. Let's go to MD04 and take a look. The great news is that supplier performance monitoring stays in place. We can still measure performance versus lead time, or we can choose to adjust our statistical date, and now we can also measure their performance to their confirmed date. They'll allow us to measure if they're both capable to supply and reliable to their promise. Now if you have a lot of lines to manage, you may want to consider how to load order acknowledgements into SAP. This can happen in a variety of ways. They can be delivered via collaboration portal or perhaps via a good old fashioned EDI. Or you could choose to use an upload tool with error handling. There are lots of good options to help get this done. No matter which option you pick, knowing your supplier has the ball and is running with it builds confidence in the way we support our customer. Let's create the visibility we need to make good decisions by having proactive communication channels in place. The order acknowledgement really is a great tool to get closer to your suppliers and encourage the proactive exchange of information. The showstopper for a lot of teams is if they're just getting started and the volume seems impossible to keep up with. It doesn't have to be. There are lots of ways to get this information loaded into the system, and a pilot program supported by the manual maintenance will help the team see the value in the effort. Then you can optimize a process with your suppliers, broaden the program and make it efficient. Let's keep the communication flowing with the effective use of order acknowledgements. Hey, thank you, Jen. Well communicated. No one wants to get to the delivery date and realize the supplier doesn't even have the order open on their end. And this functionality can also tie into other processes like reminders, exception monitoring for missing parts, late confirmations, or delivery advanced shipping notifications. All of these are powerful things that we need to consider. So folks, if you want to learn more about some of these things I just itemized and listed out, please check out our video catalog if you can't find them, ask the AI chatbot.

Purchase Order Management

Easily locate and manage overdue purchase orders

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin and in this video we're going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's purchase order management capability. When used correctly, purchase order management can help an organization stay current on the status of open orders. This is critical for success when making promises to customers and of course to the manufacturing floor. Kristie, share with us some knowledge about that. Sure Martin. Purchase order management for overdue purchase orders is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. First, how do we find overdue purchase orders? Second, what should we consider in how we should resolve these overdue purchase orders? And lastly, what is the value and impact to MRP when we are able to keep our dates up to date and what happens when we don't keep them up to date? Erosion of the quality of our planning. All right, let's go into the system and talk through some PO management. So in a couple of our other videos we've gone through how to find overdue MRP elements. So in this case, purchase orders through using the exception monitoring tools, so things like MD07 or MD06. In this case, we're actually going to go into a list display to identify purchase orders that are past due, and then we'll talk a little bit about some of the date maintenance that can go on in order to be able to help you to manage those purchase orders successfully. And it's really important to maintain your purchase orders with the correct dates because not only does MRP rely on that in order to balance supply and demand but so does ATP or available to promise both to the manufacturing floor, to your affiliate facilities and to your customer. And this is essential that we have the dates in the most correct or accurate fashion possible because without that, the system assumes, SAP will assume that it is coming in any day now it's very hopeful, it lives in a somewhat naive world so it believes any moment that's going to arrive. So our list displays for purchase orders are going to be found under the logistics, materials management, purchasing, purchase order, and then list display. And we may use a wide variety of options here, we could be using everything from an ME80FN to something like an ME2L, or ME2M, or ME2N. Okay and we're just going to go ahead and go in by material for the moment, and for the purposes of our evaluation today, I'm going to choose any purchase orders that have a material number on them, so not equal to blank, and our part of Plant 1000. I could then specify my purchasing group or my purchasing organization, or even a subset of documents here if I wanted to. But the most important selection here for us is really in the selection parameters. So if you look WE101, these are the items that are still open for goods receipt and it's notable that a purchase order can remain open for a variety of reasons even if it's not still eligible for delivery. But within the context of worrying about MRP and ensuring that we're in a good position there to be calculating the correct requirements plan and ATP to be able to promise accurately, we're looking specifically for items or purchase orders that still have open goods receipts, so that's going to be the WE101. Okay but these statuses in general are really helpful as you're going through and you're trying to evaluate different conditions of your purchase orders and making sure that we're taking good care of them and closing out the cycle. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say, hey, I want to look at my purchase orders that are passed due by more than a week. So I'm going to go ahead and drop a date in here of 4/6 and then I'm going to go ahead and run this. And what this is doing is it's going out and it's identifying any purchase orders that have materials on them, so not free text POs, and anything where the dates are at least 7 days or more in the past. Okay, and this is going to bring me in at the line item level, I can then go into the delivery schedule and this is going to show me for every single line on the PO. Now for the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to turn some of this subtotaling off, so I'm going to go ahead and pull that out, and then I'm going to read you my sort sequence here once that comes up. Okay, so now you can see that I'm starting to get some date information so I can really see what's going on. So I've got my document date, I have the quantities that I'm dealing with here, and then I have also my delivery date and my statistical delivery date. Okay, these are very important, it's important to pay close attention to the difference. I'm going to actually sort this into sending order by document date, and I'm going to go ahead and just bring this out a little bit more and see if we can find a good example that we can go in and take a look at. And what I'm looking for here are some purchase orders that maybe need a little love and attention because they are still sitting out there open. You can see that in this case I've got a wide variety of document types. I have scheduling agreements, I have standard purchase orders, and I have stock transfers. You can see that in the type category, and what I want to do is just go ahead and go in and take a look at one of these just so we can see what's going on. So I'm going to select that line item, and I'm going to go up to go to, and I'll say purchasing document details and that's going to bridge me right into that purchase order. Okay and this is taking me directly to the delivery schedule tab, which is perfect, that's where we should start our conversation today. So my document date is the 22nd of February and my delivery date is the 3rd of March, and so is my statistical delivery date. Okay, so if I had a more accurate date from my supplier, then what I would want to do is go in and update my delivery date to reflect that, okay? That's the date that's going to be relevant for MRP and for ATP. So we are able to get a more accurate read, and that's going to allow manufacturing or the customer to be getting the correct dates as they're going through their planning process. The statistical delivery date is the one that we would use for evaluating performance. So all of our performance metrics would be here. So only in the case that we ask the supplier to move that date out for our own benefit, would we want to change that statistical date. Otherwise, that date should stay the same, and it's the delivery date that moves as we run into issues in the supply chain. As soon as we output the purchase order, that's when that statistical delivery date locks in. Otherwise, if we haven't sent it to the supplier, that's how SAP tries to be fair lets us know if we've actually sent it out to the supplier or not. If we have not output it, then it will continue to recalculate that statistical date based on the planned delivery time. Okay, so if you know your purchase order is going to be past due and you have a better date, or you are currently past due, and you need to give it your next best guess on when it's coming in, while you're working on confirming with the supplier, this is the field you'd want to enter is the delivery date. That's the one you want to update, and the statistical delivery date would stay the same. Now if something has happened and you are no longer expecting to receive more on this purchase order, it's closing out short, then you would want to make sure that you tick this delivery complete tick box. Okay, that's going to be very important. You would tick that and that lets us know we're not expecting to receive any more against this line. The last thing I wanted to show to you here though, is the confirmation. So if you're not currently using confirmations, this is another awesome opportunity. So a couple of things here. When the supplier receives the purchase order, they can acknowledge it and send that confirmation back. Okay, that can be received into SAP in a wide variety of ways. You can even be manually entered if your volume is low enough but there's a wide variety of ways for us to accept that information back in. When we have that, we can choose to make that confirmation relevant for MRP or not but we want to make sure that if that is the better quality information and it's the more accurate date and it's being tended to, well then we want to be able to use that so they can acknowledge it and that means that it's now on their books and they've acknowledged a date back for when they can facilitate delivery of goods. The other option is to allow them to also make changes so that acknowledgement would move based on as they're moving closer and closer to the date, if there are differences in when that delivery date is going to be. And then the third thing that we can do is we can actually have it move from the acknowledgement type AB for order confirmation to actual shipment notification, so an inbound delivery or an advanced shipment notification can be posted and then we'll see that actually change to an LA which lets us know that this is inbound. Now, what's really great about both of these is that we can actually expose that field also in MD04 so we're able to see the confirmation types progress as we move through the cycle of that purchase order. So a couple of different options there. So again, statistical delivery date stays static based on the planned delivery time unless you have asked the supplier to move that date out. The delivery date is relevant for MRP, and so you would modify that as you're getting new information from your supplier in order to be able to keep your planning current. Once you get to a point where you're mature enough to receive information back from your supplier, then instead of you modifying that delivery date, we start to use the confirmations both for order acknowledgement for changes or updates, and then also ultimately for that as a inbound delivery, which also helps us to reduce errors on the delivery processing at the dock and then if we know that we're receiving that purchase order short, we received all that we were going to receive, then we're going to go to that delivery tab and we're going to go ahead and close it out by clicking on the delivery complete indicator, rather than doing anything like deleting the line off of the purchase order because we want to make sure that we have the integrity of that document staying intact. So it's a little information for you on how to update your purchase orders and PO management and being able to use the list displays to get there. In addition to how we would use that for housekeeping through the exception monitor, if you check out the video how to clean up overdue purchase orders. So in summary, we have covered how purchase order management allows you to. Keep the transactional integrity of the system intact. Support quality replenishment, proposals, exception messages, and ATP checks so important for our customers. And lastly, stay in sync with our suppliers and suss out any problems sooner rather than later. Thanks Kristie. Staying in sync with when our suppliers will be delivering goods is critical to our success. Nothing is worse than finding that the supplier is missing an order or we've expedited an order to the manufacturing floor but are missing a key component. If you'd like to learn more about how to get the most of your SAP system please check out our other videos and if you can find the video you're looking for please submit a suggestion.

Purchase Order Versions

Use PO versions to cut through cluttered change logs and simplify how work gets done

Well, hello there artisans of supply chain, Martin here. We all know that time invested in setting our suppliers up for success, pays dividends in improved service, ability to negotiate and of course collaboration. If we're changing our purchase orders all the time, there's a cost to that, and the cost will show up in the price we pay, whether it's stated or not, that's how we pay for it. Here to help keep changes clean, clear, and under control is our friend, Liam. Liam. How can we use PO versions to help us with this particular challenge? Well, how horrendous do your change logs look right now? I know we've seen some pretty packed change logs out there in the field and they're just a mess to try and sort through, especially when you're trying to understand what's been expected of your suppliers. PO versions help us track important changes, compare the changes we've made, and help our suppliers stay ahead of the game. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that this functionality is also available for purchase requisitions. So let's hop into SAP and have a quick look. So let's take a look at this purchase order. As you can see, it's got a single line item, and typically what you would normally do if you wanted to see what's happened on this purchase order line item is select the line, go to environment, and then check out the item changes. And you get a helpful but not very well laid out list of all the items and information that was changed on this purchase order line item. It's useful in the way that it captures the typical SAP audit trail, username, date stamp, time, and what was changed, but it doesn't allow you to capture any of the reasons why this data was changed on this purchase order, and that's where versions come into play when we're dealing with version management on purchase orders. If I looked at the right hand side of this tab, at the top, we have a versions tab, and we can see we have a very initial version that was created when this purchase order was initially saved. It's version zero and it's complete, which means that this is the version that has been transmitted to the supplier, and we could see that by the messages. Now say, I want to make a change to this purchase order. How do I go about doing that? Same way as before, let's toggle the display change indicator, and now our fields are open up for more entries, either changing existing data or adding new materials to this purchase order, which can happen, right? We send an initial purchase order out to a supplier and then, Hey Presto, we have another immediate requirement that comes out the very next day. Now, depending on the supplier's requirements, we might have to create a new PO, but that's not always the best practice. And instead, if we've got a purchase order that we can leverage, let's try and add to that. So I'm going to do that right now. Let's add in a new material, I'm going to add that for 25 pieces, I'll keep the delivery date the same, and then update the price and plant.So now we have all the information we need, we'll go ahead and check this purchase order, and what you can see is a new version has automatically been created, and not only has it shown us the net order value new price, it's given us the value change as well, highlighting the fact that it has been an increase in the price. Now it still has the same, audit trail, username, created on, time, date stamp, et cetera, et cetera. But what we can also add to this is our reason. These reasons are configured as part of configuration, and what we can do is we can add a reason, so additional material has been added, and I can add in some new text here. New requirement for project requested by me. Now, the beauty about version management is that you could have a version open for a period of time. Notice the complete indicator is not checked, so I go ahead and save this, and I might get an update from one member of my team to add a new line item, and I might be waiting for other members of my team to come in before I complete this version and issue it to the supplier. All the time while this version is not complete, I won't be sending this automatically to the supplier, so it'll stay with that new output message, but until that's complete, I won't be sending it to the supplier. Now let's go in and I'm going to make a final change and I'm just going to say, oh, yep, a new requirement, we actually need 50 pieces instead of the original 25. Okay, I'm now going to update the delivery time and synchronize that with the other item. I will now confirm that upon checking, we'll see the data is updated on that version one that's now being completed. I'm now also going to hit the complete flag, but I can also highlight the line and check the complete checkered flag conversion up there. Now that item's complete, and we'll go ahead and save that and the PO is ready for reissue to the supplier. Now, you'll notice there's some other icons at the top here. We can change the layout and add or remove fields as we need to. Most of them are displayed, but we bring in things like, is there a deletion indicator? Is there approvals on that version status? Is it completed or not? We could also export to Excel. And then we can also see detailed changes that have taken place on that item. And here we get the same familiar view that we see, which has price changes, material updates, et cetera, et cetera. But we have the added text of a reason why, and crucially that context. My personal take on this is that PO versions are not for everyone or everything, but it's very useful when warranted. Here's what to love about it. Enhanced visibility into changes without dependence on change logs, tighter control of the change process with good quality traceability, and ultimately a framework that supports complex compliance requirements. This is a great tool for strategic purchases for sure. I love uncovering hidden gems and SAP and this is one that could be compelling for organizations that need that extra visibility on changes or are working to improve their supply performance. So Liam, thank you very much. Hey team, we actually have quite a lot of videos on supplier performance, so if you're looking for something else, please check out our video catalog and if you have a specific question, feel free to submit it below.

Quota Arrangements for Internal Sources

Explore how to manage volume splits across multiple supply sources in your network

Production & Capacity Planning

PTM; P2P

MD04; MM03; MEQ1

Hey everybody, Martin here with an episode of Reveal TV you won't want to miss. We're all living in a period of ever changing complexities on where we can get product from, who we can get the product to, what lines we need to run on, which materials we should have or use , you name it. Supply chain is always a puzzle. It's just a little extra challenging right now. Sometimes the best way to untangle a tricky problem is to start at the source, and that's where we're going to start today. Here to talk to us about a tool that can help you get your demand pointed to all the right sources is Nicole. Nicole, we've spoken about quota arrangements before to specifically help us with source allocation. Can you help us today figure out how to use quota arrangements to get to the internal sources of supply? Yes, I certainly can. Martin. Quota arrangements are there to apply rules to how we award business to different sources of supply. A source could be an outside supplier or a plant, or a specific production line, or even a production version. Quota arrangements can accommodate all of these, even including transfers. I think we'll kick it up a notch today though. We're going to set up a fairly complex quota and we're going to take it out for a spin. Let's dive into SAP and take a look. So our plan today is to create a beefy quota arrangement. We're going to go ahead and build it from scratch. Now, we're also going to assume that we have the prerequisite master data already in place. So for example, if a production version, source list, PIR, material, master, updates for quotas, et cetera, is required. We're assuming we've already done that. Stop and make no mistakes, there are quite a few data prerequisites for any type of source determination, internal or external. What you see here on the screen is the stock requirements list. Now, here's the scenario. This product has been going up, up, and up in volume. In fact, we just qualified it on a new, more efficient line. But we're not ready to move it to the new line completely just yet, because even the new production line is starting to fill up pretty fast. You see, we're one of the few domestic suppliers of this product, and now is a particularly good time to source domestically. So what we've done is set up a couple of production versions. We have one for the old line and one for the new line. We also have one for the old line, which contains a newly qualified material that we're hoping will make the old line more efficient. We have limited supply available of that new material though, so we can only produce so much per month with that alternative BOM. In addition to all of this, we also have a plant that we can draw from, but again, only a small percentage of our total requirements. So if we look here at the top of the screen, just a note that it looks pretty normal, I'm going to show you a change here in this location in just a moment. Now I can't wait to create this quota because I've been managing all of this in my spreadsheet and manually creating all of my orders. Yep, if you know, you know. Here we are on the first screen and the first thing we need to do is enter the material number and at a validity period. That's one of the nice things about this. Not only can you update a quota arrangement, you can also have a finite time for which these conditions will exist. You can also proactively set up the next set of rules to kick in at a future dates. Alright, first source, the old line production version using the old entrusted BOM. This is my steady Eddie. I'm going to say about 40% of the production volume should land here for now. Now let's consider the production version for the new line. Let's get that entered and let's make it 20% of the production volume. Okay? Now, for the old line with the new material that's in limited supply, we're going to put that in here as well and make it at 20% of the production volume. And last but not least, I want to include one of our sister plants as well. So that one will be a stock transfer from another plant, but also at 20%. Now let's look at the other fields here. The other field that I'm interested in for our new production line and our old line with a new material is a maximum release quantity. I'm going to add that for both of those options and for the new line, that'll be per week. I'm going to add a maximum release quantity for both of those and for the new line, that'll be a per week quantity, and for the old line with the new material, that'll be a per month quantity. So since this is pretty crazy, I'm also going to run a simulation and make sure that SAP is cool with all the data that I've just entered. And great, amazingly, it looks great. Now, if we go back to our stock requirements list and click the refresh button, we're going to see a new button appear at the top signaling that this material has a quota arrangement. And if we take a moment to run MRP, and confirm again, that we're really, really, really sure, we'll see we've got some changes. Let's return back to the stop requirements list one last time and see our handy work. If we scroll down, we can now see that we've got several sources of supply in play, all following the rules that we set in the quota arrangement. So let's go back to the studio. Whew. Now, that was a robust quota arrangement. Hopefully that triggered some thoughts on how you might put this useful feature into practice. Let us recap with a few highlights though, shall we? First, the quota arrangement is meant to take the proposals that resulted from the demand signal and the MRP run and route them to a specific source based on the rules in the quota arrangement. This can help us level, load or control the max volume sent to a particular source, and we also start to get some exception messages if the rules or restrictions we've put in place are violated, which can be very helpful. Hey, Nicole. Thank you very much. Insights for sure. Now if you're curious about other uses of these quota arrangements, or even more specifically the prerequisites to getting it set up properly, please check out our video catalog and if you have a specific question, submit it below.

Quota Arrangements Managing Transitions

Transition sourcing for superior buying and inventory tactics

Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, Martin here and in this video we're going to focus on how we can use SAP's quota arrangement rules to manage transitions. I know this is a pain point for a lot of companies when they are getting started with quota arrangements. This feature in SAP allows a material planner or a buyer to introduce or retire sources, manage changes in volumes and commitments and support all those important transitions. So we know the best way to learn is by doing so Kristie tell us more about how to use SAP quota arrangements for transitions. Absolutely. I agree that this is a pain point that comes up again and again. Let's dive in and see if we can help make this functionality a little bit clearer. In today's demo, we will. Review active quota arrangements. Introduce a new source of supply. And adjust the rules. I'll also highlight a key field in the quota arrangement called quota base quantity that is oftentimes overlooked, and a key indicator that will help us to identify if we are experiencing a problem. It's all about getting to the right starting point. Okay, let's talk about how we can use SAP's quota arrangements to help us manage transitions from one supplier to another. You can see here we are in the MD04, the stock requirements list, and if we look at our planning situation we have a couple of different sources of supply that are out there where we are alternating back and forth between multiple sources. And you'll see here SAP is giving us recommendations on the quantity for each of these replenishment proposals as well as the dates that we need to start working on getting this information over to our suppliers. So our start or release date for when we need to actually be working through getting those schedule lines over if it's on a scheduling agreement or getting a purchase requisition turn into a purchase order. These are outside of our opening date so we're not late enough as of tomorrow this will actually turn into either a schedule line or into a purchase requisition depending on what we have out there. So what we want to do here is actually go in and we're going to introduce another supplier into our quota arrangement and you'll see because this item does have a quota arrangement it is up here as an option at the top of my screen. As soon as this has a quota arrangement available for it you will see that button appear. We're going to go ahead and click on this, it takes us through to our quota arrangement and I can double click on this line. Okay. And here you can see we have two different suppliers and we have a 50:50 split, so 11,000 going to the first supplier, and a little over 11,000 going to the second supplier. As soon as there's another demand element, it'll go to the first supplier, and it'll continue alternating back and forth, trying to keep that as in balance as possible, since we're using simplest rule in a quota arrangement which is just a percentage split. In our quota arrangements we can have a variety of sources, it could be a production line, it could be a specific production version, so a combination of that BOM and routing. It could also be a mixture of both internally sourced and externally sourced items or sources, and it could also be transferring from another location. So, one of the most confusing things about the way the quota arrangements work is that when you are transitioning or introducing a new supplier into the mix, a lot of times folks will add that and add the percentage split and then all of a sudden all of that volume is going to your new source of supply, and I'm going to show you today how to prevent that from happening. So first of all, if you're transitioning, if you're proving in a new supplier or you're starting to ramp one down, remember that you can use your fair share rules to help you with that. So you can put in whatever split you would like here in order to manage slowly across time that introduction or exit from the supplier. Remember as well that you have validity dates on your quota arrangement, so you can control that split over time, maybe you want to do a slow ramp down over a couple of months or a couple of quarters. You can go ahead and control that with the quota arrangement validity periods. When you're at a point, though, where you want to introduce a new supplier to the mix or start to remove an old supplier, the way that you would do that is actually to pay really close attention to this thing called the quota base quantity. That is where the calculation starts in terms of awarding business to the next source of supply. And so what we're going to do here is we're actually going to introduce a third source. We're going to start to dampen our, valuation on 5595, we're going to take them down to 25%, and we're going to introduce a third supplier into the mix for the last 25%. So I'm going to go to Quota Arrangement at the top and I can switch into Maintain from my view, and I only want to do that when I'm actually ready to make a change. It's really important SAP that you don't go in and just go in to change for change's sake, you want to make sure that that's really, a good reason. And I'm going to go ahead and put in my new supplier, which I think is 1472, and then I'm going to adjust my percentages, I'm going to go to 25 here, 1000 is going to stay at 50 and my first supplier is going to go down to 25 as well. I'll hit enter and I'm going to go ahead and click on the save button. Now I have the option also to simulate right from there, but for the purposes of today's demonstration, I'm going to go ahead and just run it through MRP. And we're going to keep a look at this time horizon, we know this is about where our lead time hits, so kind of from that July 31st and onward standpoint. So I'm going to go ahead and run and it's going to say, are you sure? Are you sure? Are you really, really sure? I am indeed sure. And you'll see we had some changes here, so there were some plan orders that were changed and then some schedule lines that were adjusted for our scheduling agreement. I'll come back here and remember that your stock requirements is live as of the time that you enter the transaction, so because we just ran MRP, we do need to hit refresh. So keep an eye right now on our vendors over here. I'll go ahead and click the refresh button and you'll see now we have introduced 1472 into the mix. What I want to do is go back to the quota arrangement and show you the results and so you'll see here we've had an adjustment. So we've got 6,000, 6,000, and just about 11,000. Now I can control where we start that math from by adjusting the quota base quantity, and sometimes that might be necessary. So if I was removing the first supplier altogether and I was just adding the third, I might need to adjust where we were counting from. So I might come in here and just even these out and say I want to start the new supplier from 10,000 and the old supplier from 10,000 and then have it award from there. So make sure you pay attention to this, if your numbers look off after your MRP run, this is where you want to want to make that adjustment because it's controlling where the start of that calculation is from. So if you have had that quota arrangement in place, you have activity against it, you definitely want to make sure that you adjust that quota base quantity and that will start to level things out. In this case, because we haven't had a whole lot of activity against this quota arrangement yet it's okay for us to start from zero. But if you've had activity against it, the quota base quantity is your key to being able to get your suppliers balanced and get the correct ratios. Just look at that allocated quantity, bring it over, use that as your base quantity to start from. So if you're taking it from 50% down to 25%, start your allocation quantity for the supplier you want to bring down to that 25% of the total volume. Start your 50% guy from 50% and then your newest entry is going to come in and it will start to pick up based on that quantity you started also at the 25 percent in order to be able to make sure that that is working for you. Okay, so a couple tips and tricks there to help you get started, but that's how you introduce a new supplier into quota arrangement and help to manage transitions. So in summary, we've discussed how. Care and feeding requirements for managing transitions from source to source can be clear in SAP. How we might adjust our volumes to ramp up or ramp down. And one of the most common pitfalls that comes up and commonly erodes the faith in the quality of planning. And how we can overcome this and be confident going forward. Thank you Kristie. Managing such a key component of the company's sourcing strategy is risky business, and since the purpose of source diversification is to reduce risk, we definitely want to do what we can to get those activities back into the system so SAP can do the heavy lifting for us. So once again folks if you want to know more about quota arrangements or any other features and functions in SAP please check out our videos and if you have a question please submit it below.

Released Order Material Availability Check

Ensure material availability when releasing production/process orders

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 focus on how to take advantage of SAP released order material availability check. When used correctly the released order material availability helps organizations by ensuring that we are making the right pre-flight checks to ensure that we are positioned for success on the manufacturing floor. So Eacliffe, how about you tell us a little bit more about this whole process around released order material availability checking. Sure Martin. Released order ATP check is a powerful feature when used correctly to validate that the manufacturing can proceed with executing a production schedule. In this demonstration I'm going to focus on three things. One, why perform another ATP check when releasing a production order? Two, the scope of check, which demand and supply elements are taken into consideration. And three, how to perform an ATP check for released production orders. The intent here is to use transaction COMAC to perform an ATP check an availability check of all components needed for production orders in a release status. The goal is to determine which orders can retain its current schedule dates versus identifying which ones need to be rescheduled out into the future due to one or more missing components. So let me go ahead and execute this transaction. And what we can see here is the production schedule where we have a couple of released production orders, which are currently active and then into the future there is a few production orders in a created status and further out into the future we have these planned orders. We can see that we have these statuses, so MANC status basically is telling us that for these production orders, an availability check has not been performed as yet. You could also bring up additional columns here to show how much been confirmed in terms of what you can make which will get populated once we do an ATP check. So I'm going to actually run the ATP check for everything here right now recognizing that we have a released orders, created orders and planned orders. Again, the rules in terms of how the ATP check is done will differ between released versus created versus planned orders due to configuration that was done ahead of time. So let me go ahead and I'm going to do mass processing. I'm going to execute and the ATP was carried out. I'm going to do refresh and we can see that the status did change to MACM, and this is telling me that confirmation has taken place. Okay, and we can see that these orders have been a 100% confirmed. So let's take one of these released orders and dive into it, and we are going to come to the component overview and the goal is that we can see that we have requirements, quantity, this is what we need for each one of the components, and the question is we can see the committed quantity, so the inventory for these components has now been reserved. What I also want to show you is, I'm going to come to this particular component and I'm actually going to, in fact let me come back I need to come in change mode, so I'm going to come back in this order in change mode, I'm going to come to, the first thing I want to call out is that look you can actually trigger an availability check, it says up here check material availability. So this is one area you can run it within the order. The other option is you can actually come to the component overview and here it's called component availability. It's unfortunate that SAP has used different labels depending on where you are within the transaction, but they are both performing the same task. So I'm going to select this item, I'm going to run the component check and the reason I want to do that is to show how the rules are applied depending on the status of the production order. So because it's a released production order, it's important to observe that the check-in rule, which is what we configured Y2 and the focus is that for when we are dealing with a released order, we literally just want to take the physical inventory into consideration. Things like purchase orders and planned orders we do not want to take these things into consideration. So if you can imagine how you would physically do this type of check. If somebody says, hey, go check and see if you have sufficient components by inspecting the warehouse, how you would perform that task should align with the rules that's defined within the check-in rule. And in this case, the goal is say, look because it's released, the inventory should physically be in the building hence only take a look at that. Okay, so I'm going to close this and again, you can see that the inventory is being confirmed just based on that inventory. So we are going to do continue and we will do a save. So in summary we have covered how released order ATP check allows you to. Understand which demand and supply elements are taken into consideration when the ATP check is performed. How to perform the ATP check for that released production order. And the fact that you can trust the ATP results your system provides for the released production order. Thanks Eacliffe. This seems like a critical step in the process to help support a successful run of the schedule. So if you'd like to know more about production runs, the material availability checking, or any other SAP feature and function please check out our video catalog and of course if you have a particular question please submit it below.

COHV

Reorder Point and Safety Stock Differences

Learn how Safety Stock and Reorder Point planning work together effectively

Hello supply chain aficionados, Martin here and today, we're on a quest to unlock the hidden treasures within your SAP system. Ready to reveal its full potential? Let's jump right in. In this video, we want to take a deeper dive into the key differences between reorder point and safety stock. Many organizations struggle with where to use each one of these distinct techniques. Today, we strive to bring clarity to the definition and purpose of each. So Monique, what do we need to know about the difference between reorder point and safety stock? Definitely, Martin. Here's the good news. We have two really great techniques in our arsenal. And they can quite happily coexist. In today's demo. We're going to review the definition and application of both techniques. We'll talk a little bit about determining the value because that's one of the key differentiators in how we might think about each. And lastly, we'll highlight the types of exceptions an MRP controller should expect to get when using either or both options. So let's go in and take a look. Okay, so here we are friends. And I'm sure by now if you have watched many other episodes of Reveal TV, you know we're jumping right into SAP to get the party started. This is the stock requirements list. This is where an MRP controller lives. It is our news feed so we have what we need to manage the day. And as we can see here, what we need is to replenish our safety stock. We have a number of videos that speak to safety stock, but what we are discussing today is the difference between a safety stock and a reorder point. A safety stock is meant to protect against variability and volatility in demand. It needs to be reasonable to the volume we're expecting to sell and protect us against normal fluctuations. It is not meant to cover the outliers that happen once in a blue moon and we should only be dipping into it every now and again. A good safety stock is regularly reviewed and is not chosen in isolation. It needs to be a conversation with your counterparts and woven into your overall inventory plan and demand program. It's about how much additional coverage you want and over what period of time that needs to be covered and it can be static or dynamic. In this example, we're looking at static safety stock. Now let's go to the material with the reorder point attached to it. This material is now on a reorder point type that is manual with external requirements. If that's Greek to you, don't worry, we've got you and we'll explore that detail in another video. The purpose of a reorder point is that it becomes the mechanism for reordering. When I hit this number here, MRP is going to trigger replenishment. The makeup of the reorder point is based on the lead time of the product, includes any safety buffer, and either does or does not include external requirements. You may not have known you have options here. A lot of folk avoid reorder point planning because of the limited visibility, but know you truly have options. My friend Sean will tell you about that in another video. Now, the quantity for replenishment will be influenced by the lot size key and any other lot size information that influences quantity. Reorder point items are generally lower value items with shorter lead times and are sometimes space constrained as well. So here's what I want to do next. I want to add a safety stock back to this item so you can see how reorder points and safety stocks can work together. That's right, they are distinctly techniques that work together. But here's the thing, the safety stock is there as an alert only. It is a warning to us. Danger, Will Robinson. You are depleting that inventory faster than expected. You may need to expedite. And oh, by the way, if that's happening a lot, it's time to understand why and then come up with a plan to address any performance issues and logistics or at the supplier, confirmed orders are going out the door as expected, and there is not a process hiccup in planning. And where necessary, adjust the reorder point. They do require regular care and feeding. There is no set it and forget it here. And the good news is that SAP will not allow it, it's going to let us know, just like setting the safety stock, the reorder point is something that directly impacts your inventory plan. Okay, so now that the safety stock is set, let's run MRP. Here's the result page and you'll see nothing has changed. Now let's go back to the stock requirements list. See our safety stock? While it is driving an exception message, it's not driving replenishment. In reorder point planning, the safety stock is a warning system. It is always lower than the reorder point and is there to alert us when we need to hustle, intervene, review, or correct. Alrighty, everyone. Let me just highlight a few things before we end our conversation today. First, it's important to appreciate the distinction in definition and use case between the two techniques so we can deploy the techniques in the most effective way. This is important because they are both valuable and have a place in the toolkit. Lastly, I want to leave you with this. As I've explored new tools over the years, I've found that shifting from the theoretical to the practical speeds the journey along. So give it a try, and refine as you check your planning results. You are in control and that in itself is empowering. Thank you, Monique. I think it's a great call out, though, that when we're trying to solve big problems like this and try to help understand the differences between certain topics, it's good that we get together like this and actually share ideas and experiences with each other. That way, we get to the best solution. So, folks, if you want to know more about this topic or other related videos, please check out our catalog, and of course, if you have some suggestions for specific topics related to these or any others, feel free to submit it below.

Reorder Point Basics

Master the art of utilizing reorder points effectively

Reorganizing That Forecast

Discover essential tools and tips to keep your forecast organized and precise

Hi there folks, Martin here and welcome to the only video series where you get to unlock the secrets and reveal the hidden magic behind your SAP system. Intrigued? Okay, let's stick around. Let's get into this. We're going to talk about a very important maintenance step that is part of the care and feeding that supports a healthy demand management program in SAP. The step is called reorganizing the forecast and this activity helps to keep the demand signal clean, clear, and under control. Steven, reorganizing a forecast is a really tough subject. Take it away and tell us more about it. I certainly can. We can all appreciate how challenging it can be to produce a reliable forecast. Particularly, to be the humans who manage that process. The forecast can be off in two ways, time and or quantity. There are a variety of tools in the toolkit to help manage this. One of them is by reorganizing the forecast on a regular cadence. It helps to address when we want to drop, keep, or roll forward the remaining forecast to sell into a future period. Reorganizing the forecast addresses the former, and today we'll look at some options. It's important to synchronize the watches, make sure this cleanup activity aligns well with your S&OP calendar. Let's venture in and take a look. To keep or not to keep? This is the question. Let's dive right in and take a look at this material in our stock requirements list. We can see here that we have an ongoing forecast that goes out in weekly buckets for the next three periods, and we can observe that the forecast goes back to the beginning of the month of April. We're midway through the month and then in monthly buckets for, let's scroll, 15 months after that. This allows for a total visibility horizon of 18 months. Now some of you may see your planned independent requirements. The MRP element that represents the consensus demand plan or the forecast that's been released for execution. Those PIRs might be neither weekly or monthly buckets and stay at that level for the full horizon. SAP is happy to take daily, weekly, or monthly buckets and is fine with mixing horizons. So you can differentiate where it matters most. Let's say, for example, you were managing a specific promotion, event, or planogram. You might enter a forecast for a very specific period of time and also give it its own requirement plan number. You'd watch that very carefully, and then as the orders came in, check to make sure the orders match the expected quantity. When the orders are all in, you might then go in and remove any unused balance because you know that temporary specific need demand was now fully received. How do you maintain that? Well, you may have an advanced planning solution where the reconciliation will happen and the reduced values will be loaded into SAP as a change. Or, you might maintain it manually, like we're showing here. Double clicking on the forecast line to be cleaned up. Then going into MD62 to lower the quantity to what has been received. But what happens if you have a lot to work through? Well, you might want to put SAP to work and reorganize that forecast. Let's head there now. We can see here that we have some nice, healthy selection criteria. We can choose a plant or multiple plants, material or multiple materials, and then get far more specific. In this case, we're going to specify the requirement plan number, and I'll go ahead and specify the key date. Please note the text here on the screen around for plants without a reorganization period. Because this is key for regular maintenance. And we'll revisit that option here in a moment. Now one of the things I really enjoy about this activity is we can run it in test mode. Let's do that so we can see the results. We can see here that we have some allocated quantities. These are the quantities that are soft pegged to the forecast as pending consumption. We will have SAP net to those quantities and not below so we can keep the demand pegged to the period it was planned for. When we take off test mode, it's going to go ahead and clean these up. So back to our original question, to keep or not to keep? As a part of our monthly S&OP cycle, we need to evaluate what we want to keep, leave open, or roll over, and in this consideration, we also need to think about our consumption modes and the number of days for both forward or backwards. We also don't want to have outdated forecasts hanging out getting old and moldy. Here are a few things to consider. First, set your conversation around drop or roll forward to occur as you go into the third week of the month. If we're rolling forward, the volume gets added to the next period or the period we expect it to come in if we have new information. Second, consider breaking your forecast down into weekly buckets and running the reorganization as a regularly scheduled batch job, dropping a week at a time instead of an entire month. And again, work this in conjunction with your consumption mode and period. Third, think about the communication and collaboration opportunities when transitioning from S&OP to S&OE to keep everyone aligned and moving in the right direction. We have the tools to make this easier. Fantastic! Now let's review some highlights. Reorganizing your forecast on a set cadence can help relieve that feeling of a monthly reset. It's that sentiment of a big change at the beginning of each month when the forecast drops. When this activity is synced well with the S&OP cycle, the changes become more predictable and can even be taken in bite sized adjustments throughout the month. Lastly, we like to keep the planning clean in SAP, and this particular tool helps to maintain a clean sweep so we know exactly where we are and what we're aiming for. Thanks Steven. Maintenance is very important to a healthy system. No one wants to waste precious time and resources working on an incomplete, overstated and outdated plan where we can help it. Great tips today. Thanks again. Team, if you want to know more about forecasting and other related topics, please check out our catalog. And of course, as always, submit your questions below.

DM; PTM; P2P

MD04; MD62; MD74; MD73

Requesting Materials and Services

Make your next repair or project easier, faster, and simpler

Project & Asset Management

EAM; PS; P2P; PTM

IW39; IW33; MD04,

Hey everyone, Martin here. I've just returned from a client where maintenance work orders are a significant portion of the work they process. In speaking with the team, we heard lots of good intentions on collaboration, but also lots of struggles with effective communication. Buyers live in what is needed, where it is needed, when it is needed, and what the costs of those products are. The broad spectrum of folks requesting goods and services often struggled with the clarity of communication. As you can imagine, this is difficult and I know you're not alone. Many, if not most organizations, struggle with this. So let's talk about this with Jake.Jake is an exceptional communicator and is able to help us prioritize and clarify exactly what to do with this kind of work orders and predicament we find ourselves in. So Jake, take it away and show us the path forward. I've got you, Martin, not to worry. Now, team, we can do this. So let's start with this. Knowing what your partner and supply needs to know is the key, and if you can understand that, then you can help. On the other hand, if you have a large pool of people that are making requests, understanding on the buyer side of what a reasonable level of clarity is, well, that's also important. Realistic expectations are important. Then we can plan for how to accommodate or improve. We'll walk through a few scenarios today. Stocked items, non stocked items and services. So let's jump into SAP and give it a go. It doesn't really matter what part of our life we're talking about. There are two things that we run into as part of this process that people struggle with, clearly communicating a need and filling out a form. It's holiday time as we record this, I'm just thinking of the pure chaos confusion of the post office as people try to figure out what they need to fill out to get their package out the door, and then ultimately to their destination on time. The people behind the counter are stressed out and dealing with folks all day who are also stressed out and unsure the amount of time someone makes it to the counter and then has to rework their form. You know, I've got to believe that's a high percentage. So it's no wonder we struggle with clearly communicating our needs in SAP, especially if we are only in an occasional requester. I think the magic is in making it easy. So first up, let's talk about the most straightforward request, stocked materials. For the purpose of this discussion, when we say materials, think parts, supplies, that sort of thing. Stock materials have a material number and are often run through MRP and are expected to be on the shelf and available. So the good news for these items, our work order becomes a demand element and we'll get a reservation, and in response, MRP will run and plan replenishment if necessary. And that's a normal course of business. Now, if the item isn't in stock or if you need more than what's in stock, that's our opportunity to check in with the buyer and let them know that we need some help. If you put an accurate date on your work order from when the maintenance will be performed, they'll also see the issue on their end. However, don't rely on them to find it. They may just think it's a hope rather than a need. And if it's a need, you need to give 'em a heads up. Next up, non-stocked items. Now this is where things get challenging. These requests are often ones that need rework. Did you find a material number? Is it even the correct one? Were you unsure so you gave up and entered a rough description in the text. Did you allow time for sourcing if we don't have a source identified? Just a little extra vetting, a pause for reflection before you submit is a key for success. Coach your team members, especially the ones that are less familiar with SAP, to check in with a peer or with the buyer if they're struggling. And here's a pro tip, a review of searching strategies and SAP will help. It just so happens that I made a video on how to find anything you want in SAP not too long ago. So check it out. And last but not least, services. This isn't a typical service, so be diligent. I mean very diligent in the description and the service request. Make sure you have the right material group assigned. If you know that there are materials and supplies that are masquerading as services, let's get those cleared out, accounted for. And the more information you can provide upfront, the better. When you're unsure, just stop and ask. Getting answers to one question often solves for many questions that may come up in the future. Look, everyone wants to meet the need, so let's add clarity as a key ingredient and get this one done effectively. Welcome back. So here are today's highlights. We've got to send the right signal. Don't say it's urgent if it's just a routine request. Ask for heroic efforts when required, and with extra communication. Make sure you've got the right material and service description and realistic timing. Remember, your partners need time to source an award for anything that requires a competitive bid or is an unusual requirement. And lastly, reduce rework by being proactive. If you know you're supposed to fill in a detail that you don't know, don't submit it and forget it. Reach out and let the buyer know. It may be okay, they may help you out, but don't assume. Ask for the help you need and help them help you. Submit it and forget it. I think that's so important Jake. Doing that is hoping it's going to get better and become somebody else's problem and offers no opportunity for improvement. I think good things will happen if we stop doing that. We'll get to know our counterparts, learn how to provide what's needed and tackle whatever we're struggling with together. That one action alone may help so many. So thanks again, Jake, for everything. If you want to know more about this particular video or other related videos regarding work orders, please check out our catalog. And of course, if you have a specific question, feel free to submit it below.

Request Quotes or Proposals

Simplify proposal and quote procurement with RFP and RFQ management

Contract & Supplier Management

P2P; PM

ME39; ME41; ME42

The best way to learn is by doing. Welcome to the video service that unlocks and reveals the hidden value in your SAP system. Hi, my name is Martin, and in this video we are going to focus on how to take advantage of SAP's request for quotes or proposals capability. The RFQ process in SAP allows the buyer to solicit bids from multiple suppliers and centralize that data collection right in SAP. It's a widely underutilized feature that when use correctly promotes flow through the procurement process and allows us to make strides in strategically managing our spend. Kristie, tell us more about this underutilized feature called RFQ. I would love to tell you more. Request for quotes or proposals is a powerful feature when used correctly and in this demonstration I'm going to focus on just three things. First, where this highly underutilized feature lives in SAP. Second, the basic structure of the process. And third, the advantages via integration of facilitating this process directly in SAP. All right, let's talk request for quotes in SAP. So a lot of us are not using this functionality, in fact very rarely do we see people going out and doing RFQ's. They may be doing it for some things around large commercial projects, capital buys, services sometimes. But even then, it's really lightly used and almost never do we actually see people using this for things that are actually inventory materials. And so I want to go through today and highlight what this actually looks like and some of the capabilities, and I'll tell you if you're in S/4 and you have Fiori, there's a lot of additional, cool stuff in that they've really reorganized how the data flow works in terms of how it's presented to you and when you try to do things like go in and rank your suppliers and do comparisons, you've got a lot of nice analytical features in the way that that's going to present information to you and how you actually select which supplier you want to award. So you have that to look forward to and we will do a video specifically on that to give you more of the flavor there. But I did want to just mention it because it gets, it gets pretty cool. I'm going to click on materials management here and go into purchasing, so then this is all going to be pretty familiar to us. So we've got our purchase orders information, we've got our purchase requisitions and our outline agreements, all those transaction codes down below that, hopefully we're using all three. Down below that we have our RFQ or quotation information. So I'm going to go ahead and open that up, this is where we do all of the RFQ and quotation work. And you'll see here we have two different folders, so, request for quotation is the actual RFQ and that process flow quotation is actually working through and managing those results as they're coming back in from the suppliers and being able to do that comparison and ranking so that you can make a decision on who you would like to award to. And it's really nice that you can compare multiple suppliers directly in SAP so you can make that determination. But let's go into the request for quota and I'll come in here and I'll show you what the beginning screen looks like for creation but then I'm going to actually go in and show you one that has already been started, so you can get an idea of what it looks like once you've got it going. So first of all, RFQ type it's going to be AN, it's going to be standard for you, language key is EN so if you want to present this in English, or you can set another language key just like you would on a purchase order, so that you're getting that translation if necessary. You've got your RFQ date, so the date that you're actually going to issue the RFQ, and then the quotation deadline. So when they need to have it back. If you have an internal reference for the RFQ number and you've allowed for that in your configuration, you can enter it. Otherwise, the system is just going to generate that document number for you, just like it would for a purchase requisition or purchase order. Mandatory, you're going to need to enter your purchase organization and your purchasing group, and then down below if you'd like to default any information in across all the line items on this request for quotation, you can enter these in and that will go ahead and add them appropriately for you. Now what's most exciting though, and where I really wanted to draw your attention is this. So first of all, if you have something where you are periodically quoting, so you need to send an RFQ out, and then you've got reasons why you need to quote that on a periodic basis, once a quarter, biannually annually, every 24 months, whatever the case may be, you can actually copy a prior RFQ and bring that over all the information so that you can send it out. If you're sending RFQs out to separate suppliers and you want to be able to copy and send a unique document to each supplier, you can do that here. The other thing that you can do is if you have a purchase requisition that's been submitted into your procurement department, and you need to convert that into an RFQ, you can do that and it will inherit all the information that's already been entered into the purchase requisition that's relevant for the quotation process. And then lastly, and I think is very exciting is you're able to actually do this from an outline agreement. So let's say that you have a contract or a scheduling agreement that is up for renewal, it's coming to the end of its validity period, you can go out and quote it by copying in a lot of that information directly into the RFQ. So that's super nice and that really helps that periodic flow and I think also if you're looking for a use case, for me, if I'm thinking about some of the challenges of working through those documents that should have very clear validity periods, this is one of the ways to help accommodate that whenever it is that we need to go out and we want to rebid or want to create a more competitive environment and go across a couple of different suupliers. So let me back out here and what we're going to do is we're actually going to go in now and take a look at one that is in flight and go in here, and I just want to give you a little bit of a better idea of what the bones look like once you're inside. So you'll see it looks very similar to a number of our other purchasing documents. So requisitions or even setting up the header level or item level of your scheduling agreements before you get into the delivery schedule. So you'll maintain a item category of appropriate, your material number if it is a material, and then if not, your free text will go into the short text field, which will be the description for what it is that you're looking for. You'll maintain your quantity and your unit of measure, your anticipated delivery date, and then any other information around material groups, plant storage, locations, or text, so you can maintain and attach different texts and information here to make it easy for your suppliers to understand what it is that they're quoting and actually go through the quotation process. And from here we can actually go in and start to look at a few other things. So you can attach a release strategy, so you want to prepare your quotation, but then you would actually like to have somebody review it before it goes out. You're able to invoke that release strategy here. You can come in here and you can actually set up the details around this item. So you've got your RFQ quantity. If you had different deadlines across the different items on the RFQ, you can set those up here, and then you can also set up any reminders to remind your suppliers of when this is due so that you're sending that information out to them on a regular basis. If your supplier has their own material number, you can maintain that reference here, and then if it's attached to a particular quotation or line item, you can also enter that information. In addition, you also have additional data, and so this is where you can maintain anything that is specific to how this item should be delivered to you. So something like planned delivery time, if you have specifics around weights and dims that might be helpful for the supplier, you can maintain that here as well as anything around any type of incoterms or any other things that you would want to negotiate in terms of how they're going to perceive this. And as you're tracking through your entire process end to end from RFQ all the way through the actual procurement cycle with final procurement document, then you can also maintain other information here that would help with that. So if you're maintaining the same batch number for example, and you want that to flow all the way through and you have a specific batch that's required, you can maintain that information. In addition to that, you can also associate a delivery schedule with your RFQ. So you're able to go in and and set that up across time. Now, generally speaking, you're not going to do that you're more than likely going to let MRP go ahead and provide that but if your supplier needs to see a rough forecast for what those volumes look like across time, in order to be able to produce that quote for you so you can see how the volume is broken down, then you have that capability. Most of the time you're going to be doing something like a validity period with an overall target quantity but in the cases where you have special commodity types or special services rendered where you need to be able to see that information in more detail, you are able to maintain that here. Okay, now lastly, and the one other thing I wanted to show you is just if we come in and we look at the kinds of selection you have in terms of ranking for being able to review your results, you can actually bring in results from several different suppliers and we'll go into the quotation segment here, and you can come in here to do price comparison and that is going to be under ME49, that's going to be the transaction code, and you can see here, you can bring in specific quotation numbers, you can bring in a collective RFQ if you've got multiple out there that you're trying to combine together, and you're able to come in and decide how you would like to see that ranking occur. So you can go through and review the different options so you can come in and take a look at what you want to include. So if you've got discounts or delivery costs, if you need to do any type of price calculation or determination in order to be able to see that landed cost, you're able to do that, and then it will come up with a simple ranking list and you can make your selection to be able to award that to your supplier. So very helpful in terms of being able to search and bring that information in and go through the process and we'll do another video around what it looks like to do that comparison in Fiori so that you can see how this process has continued to evolve and some of the new tools that are available. So, RFQ is very useful and you can see that they can fully integrate into your process if you think about your periodic reviews, trying to create that competitive environment without having to come up with a new document, being able to copy over, being able to reference contracts or outline agreements in order to be able to send those bids out and then be able to compare multiple suppliers to determine how you'd like to place that volume. So in summary, we have covered how requests for quotes or proposals allows you to be able to. Send requests and consolidate responses from suppliers all under one central document. Move from the RFQ stage through purchase and treat this as an integrated function positioned for pull. And lastly, supports reporting that is ripe for evaluation, especially when it comes to monitoring and managing supplier performance and figuring out how we can best set our partners up for success. Thanks Kristie. Using this feature automates and streamlines the procurement process, reducing the time and effort required to manage the process manually. Getting our procurement cycle started on the right foot pays dividends back to the organization over time. If you want to learn more about this feature and other features in SAP please feel free to check out our video log and of course if you have any specific questions or comments, please submit then below.

Rescheduling: Analyzing Results

Guide to analyzing and understanding results