The elements I covered were:

• Reporting and Analytics – context
• Defining Supply Chain KPIS’s Pre-requisites
• Defining Supply Chain KPIS’s
• A word on the importance of dater qwality
• Identifying your KPI’s
• Understanding your KPI’s
• Set Goals, monitor and improve or correct

If you would like further information on this or would like to talk about your Supply Chain issues with us, then contact me using the ‘get in touch’ page.

Some photos of the event:

I will be talking about ‘Enabling Reporting and Analytics for your Supply Chain’. I will be delivering this presentation with Geoff Armstrong – National Service Line Lead Business Intelligence, Plaut IT Australia Pty Ltd.

All together there will be 34 presentations and the highlights include:

• Most up to date SAP product releases available in the market
• Access More Supply Chain Data with SAP BusinessObjects to Extend Your Reporting Capabilities
• Take Control of Master Data by Centralising Control, Addressing Change Management Issues and Training Staff
• Rethink Services Procurement in Mining: Lessons for Other Spend Categories and Industries
• Get Past “We’re Different” and Standardise BI Reports Across Your Enterprise
• How Coca-Cola Manages Direct Store Deliveries Using Strategic Route Optimisation and Vehicle Space Optimisation Solutions
• The Future Direction of Sales and Operations Planning in SAP
• Make Warehouses and Logistics More Efficient Through Voice Picking
• Integrate APO to Drive the S&OP Process
• Automate Employee-Facing Transactions in the Supply Chain
• Get Your Inventory Basics Right with WMS
• Use SAP Solutions for Enterprise Contract Management
• Use Outline Agreements for Service Contracts
• Initiate Cultural Change in Supplier and Operations Relationships with Invoice Automation
• Sell the Proposition of Procurement Beyond Just Reducing Costs – Into Delivering Higher Value and Generating Revenue
• Analyse Supplier Enablement Solutions in Conjunction with Your SAP Solution and How to Determine ROI for Such an Implementation

Register today to be part of this great event.

• You can use the BAPI BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_CREATE. This BAPI is RFC enabled so it is a good candidate if you are using an external application to perform your forecast and want to replicate them in SAP by making a remote function call.
• Another option is to use the standard upload program RM60IN01 – which is a direct input program that reads a formatted file to create your PIRs in SAP’s demand management (the RM60IN01 program can also be used in LSMW in concert wth object 0180).

In this post, I shall explore the second option. The aim of this is to have PIR figures uploaded in SAP’s demand management – i.e data populated in the table below, such that it can be taken into account by the MRP run (or not if you do not set the active indicator):

To illustrate this scenario, I’ll work through a simple case but it should give you all the tools you need to do further exploration on your own. So I will show you here how you can upload PIR quantities for multiple schedule lines for multiples materials – all in one go. Also we will want for these requirements to be active such that they are immediately taken into account during the next MRP run.

To start of let’s try and execute the program to see how it presents itself. Using transaction SE38, execute the program RM60IN01.

In the next screen you will see this.

SAP defaults the sequential file name to PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT. I.e that is the logical filename that SAP will read to upload your PIR’s. That logical filename is transparent to the user, but it is actually mapped to a specific location – the one where the physical file will need to reside if SAP is going to be able to read it.
By default PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT maps to a filename called RM60IN00 in SAP’s DIR_TEMP directory. If that is not a convenient place for you, that is something that you can always change. To do so go into customizing (based on ECC6.0) and follow the path SAP NetWeaver / Application Server / System Administration / Platform Independent File Names / Cross-client Maintenance of file names and paths (the corresponding transaction code is conveniently called FILE).
So at this point what we are missing is the file format expected by SAP and in order to get that information, the easiest way is to let SAP do the work for us!
Go to transaction MD61 and create some demand for anyone of your products.

Add some requirements in your planning table and save your changes.

Now go to transaction SXDB. You will come to a screen that looks like the one below (maybe some projects will be there).

Select the menu entry Goto / DX tools. This will take you to the Data transfer – tools screen. In that screen type the information as it is indicated below.

From this screen we are going to generate a template upload file. You’ll be able to use that file to get a feel for what data has to be uploaded, where it fits in the file and how it has to be formatted if you want to successfully upload your planned independent requirements.
So the next step is to generate that file by populating it with some demo data. To do that, click the “From Test Program” button located at the top of the screen. In the next screen that comes up, type the data that corresponds to the material for which we created some requirements earlier on and just click execute.

What this has done, is to create a ready for upload file using the data we created earlier on. If all goes well, you should have a message coming up, such as the one below.

If we use transaction AL11 to navigate to the logical file name PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT which is DIR_TEMP/RM60IN00) we have should see:

So there we have it – a template with live data!
If you go back to the DX tools screen and additional feature here, is that you can edit the file you just generated. To do so, go click on the “change” button.

SAP shows you the template file you generated in a different light.

What you can also do here is to edit existing segment as well as delete or add some – just double click on a segment to do so. Any changes you do can be saved to the template file.
I also suggest that you look at every segment so as to see what other information could be contained in them. Note that if you are using configurable materials additional segments can be used to populate characteristics and their associated values. If that is your case, use the B60C1 structure segment to hold that information (as shown below).

At this point, I would like to point what seems to be a bug. If you change a record B60BL (the one that contains the material number) and save your changes and then try to process that file you will get an error message saying Number :61262 ‘Project and/or WBS element does not exist’. If you run across that problem, apply OSS note 594774 and you should be right after that.
What you can now do, is to download your file onto your PC so as to further study the file structure.
To do so, from the transfer tools menu, click the “copy” button.

Indicate the source file (the template we generated) and the target file (the one we’ll save on the PC). Note that you can use the same method to upload your file onto the server (switching the target and the source of course).

There we go – we have our template file in notepad.

We’ll now try to upload a new file. This one will have two materials and for the second material, we’ll upload not monthly but weekly buckets.

So let’s upload our new file and process it.
Note that you can, execute the program in test mode first if you prefer.

If things work out without a hitch, you will just get an information message appear at the bottom of your screen:

You might also get warning messages (especially if requirements already existed).

So let’s see what has happened.
If we look at the first material Z127 this is the material we uploaded in monthly buckets.

And if we have a quick look at the stock and requirements list, we see the requirements are ready to be planned:

If we now look at the other material Z126, this was the material we uploaded in weekly buckets.

Enjoy.

If you are using the Service Desk functionality of Solution Manager, you may know that it is possible to create support requests right from your satelite SAP system. This is a really neat functionality because it allows you to report an incident right there and then when it happens – i.e there is no need for you to connect to a solution manager system, either via the SAP GUI or portal to report the incident.

To do that, you will find a “Create suport message” menu entry that allows you to do just that.

The trouble is that if your system administrator has not done the customising that enables for your SAP system to know the destination of the incident (the rfc destination of you solution manager system), then you will get an error message such as the one below.

So to correct this you need to add an entry in the table BCOS_CUST. To add that entry go to transaction SM31 in maintenance mode.

You then need to add an entry identical to the one below (except that you must of course indicate the rfc destination of your Solution Manager system).

In the VAR scenario, the customer is expected to act on a message when the status is :

• Author Action (further information is expected from him)
• Proposed Solution (a working solution has been tested and is proposed to the customer)

Now that we have set what we want to achieve, let’s go and customise it.
==> It is assumed that transaction SCOT has already been configured in your system to send emails.

Check your action and status profiles

The first thing you need to do is to check the action profile that is assigned to the transaction type you want to customise. In my case, I’m using message SLFN and the action profile assigned to it is AI_SDK_STANDARD. Whilst we are here we’ll also note down the status profile we are using.

Customise the smartform

If you use the standard action that comes packaged in SAP, your customers will simply get an email message titled “Service message w. Transaction” and an attachment (if SCOT is set to send pdf’s) that give more information than is necessary. The point of all this, is to send a message to the customer to let him know that he is required to take action on a service request that he logged so you want this to be specific, short and sweet.

This step is optional – you can do it now or later.

Go to transaction SMARTFORMS. Select the form called CRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01 and make a copy of it.

I have called mine “ZRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01”.
Go to the Form Attributes and change the description to something meaningful.
Note in my exampe that the description terminates with a “&” Character. This character will be replaced with the Service Request number in the email.

Once you have done that go down to the mail content and change it to suit your requirement.
In my case I have conveniently added the link to the service desk portal and re-iterated essential Support Desk information like contact numbers.

This is the text of my mail.
Dear Customer,
A service request – Number: &orderadm_h-object_id& and description
&orderadm_h-description& – logged in the Service Desk has been
actionned and re-assigned to you.

Best Wishes – Service Desk Support
Tel:99999 999 999

Activate your smartform and leave the transaction.

Define a new action

Now go to transaction SPPFCADM. Here we will add an action to our action profile (the one we determined earlier).
Select the application CRM_ORDER and click on Define Action Profile and Actions.

In the next screen, select your action profile and double click on action definition.

Switch to change mode and click the new entries button.

Define a new action as I have done it here.

Two important switches here are:
The partner function – in my case SLFN0002 the message reporter. In my context, the reporter is the customer, the person that logs the service request. You could change it to another partner function to suit your needs.
Action merging. This setting defines how many times the message will be sent. In my case I want a message to be triggered every time (not just the first time) the status of the message is “author action” or “proposed solution”.
Now go to the “action description” tab and add a small text description for your action.

Now double click on processing type.

Add the processing type and mail setting as shown below.

Note that the form name is the smartform I created earlier. If you did not do that step, then use the form CRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01.
Save your work and step back to the PPF:Applications in customizing screen. Again select the application CRM_ORDER and this time click on Condition Configuration (transportable conditions).

If you are having difficulty location your action profile, click on the Technical Names button.
This will show the language independent name of your action profile.

Switch to change mode if your are not already in it.
To add the action you created, click on the create button and it from the drop down list.

As a result, your action will be added to the list of existing actions.

Double click on it and then go through the tabs as I shown below.

Click on Edit Condition.

In the next screen, give the condition a name, then click the text displayed that says “click here to create new condition (not the Create button).

This will take you to the condition editor.
Remember that we want to trigger the email if the user status is author action or proposed solution.
Double click User Status. This will update the condition expression.

Now click on the “=” button (we want the expression to be equal to…)

Now use the search help in the constant field to find the status “author action”.

Your selection will now be displayed in the constant field.

Then click the selection icon to copy the value in the expression editor.

Now repeat the same steps to add an OR logic to add the “proposed solution” status. Your equation should then look like:

Save your work and leave the transaction.

Putting it all together

We have a message and we change the status from “in process” to “Author action”.

If I check my email inbox, I have an incoming message.

Notice that the service desk number appears in my message.
The details of the request are sent as an pdf attachment. Again note that the service desk number and title come through nicely in the message.

If you do not want to send messages as attachment files, you can send them as text. You can control this in transaction SCOT.

We’ll switch to text and see what happens when the status becomes “proposed solution”.
This time you see that the text of the message is the body of the email.

There you go – emails made easy in SAP Solution Manager (or CRM)

Recommended additional reading:
Sending E-Mail from Support Message on SDN by Dolores Correa

I will first recap elements that I have setup in my system (that you can also find in the afore mentioned SAP document) and add the elements that I find are missing.
As usual, I encourage you to do test this in a test system before rolling it out to your productive clients.

Master data checks and setups

Check your business partner(s)

The service desk messages created in your system will use several partner functions, one of which is the sold-to party – these are your customers. So first check and make sure that your customers have the ‘sold-to party’ partner functions active. To check this, go to transaction BP and search for the organizational object “organizations”.

Double click on your selected business partner to navigate to its record and drop down the list of partner functions.

If you do not see the partner function “sold-to party” (in display mode) , then you need to go and create that partner function for your customer.

Check your IBASE settings

When your customer creates a service desk message, one of the key elements that he will add to his message is the IBASE for which he is reporting the service request. The IBASE (Installed BASE) in this context is a concatenation of characters that identify the system ID + the installation number + the client number. You need to make sure that your customers’ IBASE have been assigned to the correct “sold-to party” business partner. That way, when a message is created the sold to party will automatically be attached to the service request.
To check this, go to transaction IB52 and display your IBASE (usually 1 in the standard system). As you see in my example below, there are multiple SAP clients within one system. I could have the same sold-to party for all clients or individual ones for each one. Business partners can be assigned locally to each client or once for all clients.

I will add the sold-to party once for all clients. To do so, I select my entire system node and select the menu path Goto / partner.

In the next window I indicate the business partner number that corresponds to my customer.

Save your entry.

Check your organizational model

Your organization (sales and service departments) have to be mapped in SAP Solution Manager using transaction PPOMA_CRM. Each organizational structure is super specific to every company, but you can if you want use the one that comes shipped with Solution Manager. Use the SAP guide “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” to help you set it up if needed. In the case of this example, I have adapted the one shipped by SAP to my context – SAP uses country DE, but I and my customers are in country AU – I have therefore used that country.

Set up your product hierarchy

Whether you understand the benefits of this step or not it does not matter, this is simply something that you have to do. The hierarchy could potentially be copied from your SAP ERP system if it existed there or you can maintain it locally in your SAP Solution Manager system. The hierarchy essentially helps you structure and segregate your products – for example you may wish to differentiate service products from say educational products, on site from off site service, internal services from external services. If you want to get this step over and done with just to get SLA’s calculated in your system, then again, just follow the “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” guide.
Below are snap shots of how I set up the hierarchy in my system. The hierarchy maintenance transaction is COMM_HIERARCHY.

The following set types have been defined.

Define your support product(s)

The next step of the process is to setup a product – the one that we will include in the contract with the customer. I have created a simple product of type “service” called SUPPORT_DESK. The transaction to maintain products is COMPR01. Notice of the product is linked to the category of my hierarchy.

Add the item category group SRVP. We could add the service and response profiles here in the product, but we will add this information in our contract.

Assign it to the sales area Sales/01/01.

Save your product.

Customizing changes and setups

Adding your response and service profiles

The point of all this process is to be able to mirror SLA’s that I have with my customers, in my Solution Manager system. Doing so means that you have contractually agreed with your customers that you will respond to all his service requests within a certain amount of time and that you will provide him with a solution – that resolves the issue – within a set timeframe. To add complexity to this, these time windows are more than likely to be variable depending on how critical the request is. Below are the times that I shall be using in my example.

Priority – - > Response time – - > Resolution time
1 – - > 1 Hour – - > 4 Hours
2 – - > 4 Hours – - > 2 Days
3 – - > 8 Hours – - > 4 Days
4 – - > 16 Hours – - > 8 Days

To set these parameters up in the system, use transaction CRMD_SERV_SLA.
You first need to setup a service profile. The service profile essentially dictates the hours during which your service desk operates.
Click the clock icon to maintain your “open for business” hours.

The service desk is open Monday to Friday from 08:30 to 17:30. Also, notice that the indicated time zone is UTC + 00.
I found that by using my actual time zone which is AUSVIC (UTC + 9), the SLA calculated times were during non business hours (eg 2am). Setting the time zone to UTC+00 has fixed my issues – so I assume that SAP automatically makes that time zone transformation.

The next thing we need to add, is the response and resolution times. I have chosen to only use the priorities of the service requests. I.e for each priority I shall indicate the response and resolution times.

For each priority I have maintained the SRV_RF_DURA (Duration Until first reaction) and SRV_RR_DURA (Duration until service end).

Check the SLFN message settings

I am of course assuming that you are using the standard SLFN service desk message. You need to make a couple of adjustments to it. Go into customizing to SAP solution manager / Configuration / Scenario specific settings / Service Desk / service Desk / General settings / Define transaction types.
If the below settings are not yet made, do them. Essentially we need to indicate how the contract selection will occur and also the how the sales and service entities will be determined in your service message.

Add your product to the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT

Remember that your contract will only be selected if certain elements that can be found in both the contract and the service request are identical. The service product is one of those elements. We will therefore customise the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT to add our service product to inbound service requests.
To do so go to transaction SPPFCADM. Pick the application CRM_ORDER and click the button as shown below (Define action profile and actions).

Assuming you are using the SLFN message for the VAR service desk process, you need to change the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT that is in the profile AI_SDK_STANDARD.

Select the line AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT and double click on processing types.

Switch to change mode and click the change icon as shown.

In the next window that pops up, click the create icon.

Create the container element with the following parameters. Translated, this will add the order product to the business transaction (the SLFN message) at the item level.

Finally and this is very important, you have to indicate the product that you want to add to the SLFN service message. Indicate the product code you created earlier.

Validate your entry and you will now see that the container editor looks something like below.

Save your work and leave the transaction – we can now go and create our contract!

Putting it all together

Create the service contract

Go to transaction CRMD_ORDER and create a transaction of type SLFV – service desk contract. Indicate your business partners and indicate the product you created earlier as well as a quantity (in my case I have indicated 1000 hours).

At this stage you can click on the ‘Organization” tab of your service contract and see that sales and services organizations have been determined – you can also click the “log” icon to see how those entities were determined or not!).

We now need to indicate the IBASE/systems for which this contract can be selected. In your contract item, indicate the system for which this contract can be selected. In my example, this contract can only be selected for two SAP clients that exist in the same system.

Remember that we also went to the trouble of adding response and resolution profiles earlier? Let’s use them. Go to the item data of your service product and in the service data tab, add your profiles.

Lastly we need to release the contract otherwise it is of no use – you need to do this for the header and item level. Go to your contract header – status tab and change the status to Released. Do the same thing at the item level.

Save your contract – you’re done.

Setting up a working layout

This step is optional – it is just going to make you work easier. All the fields that will be populated via this process appear in transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR in green.

To fully test your work, you will probably create multiple messages and quite possibly go into this transaction multiple times. As it can be a bit annoying to change the layout every time you use this transaction during the testing phase, I created a layout variant called GREEN_SCREEN that only shows the columns that could be populated via this SLA calculation process.
So let’s go and try to create some service desk messages. I’ll create three messages with three different priorities to see how the dates are calculated.

If I now switch to Solution Manager and call up transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR with my screen layout I get the following.
You can see that system now calculates my initial response and completion dates/times based on my agreed SLA’s.

So there you – more to follow soon.

Disclaimer – I make no guarantees nor do I take any responsibility for you replicating these actions in your system.

According to Wikipedia, “Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines”. I don’t think that this definition does do it any justice – I think that RIA’s are:

• Applications that offer a visually rich and engaging user interface
• Applications that offer content richness and useful and diverse functionalities

In other words it has to deliver functionality and it has to do so in an engaging UI – the argument being that such applications will deliver a greater employee productivity and/or customer loyalty. I would certainly vouch for that – go see a demo of SAP Business Explorer to see what I mean (you can even
upload your own data and play around with that).

As a continuation to my experiments in marrying technologies such as Php, Pear & Ajax to query a SAP database and expose the data to a user in a visually appealing form, it seemed only fitting that I would give this RIA thing a shot too. You only need to google terms such as “SAP FLEX” to see that there is
a wealth of information out there on that topic showcasing these two platforms with plenty of whoa factor. Being from a logistics background I thought it would be appropriate to use logistics functions in my examples.

So in this post I’ll be looking at the following scenarios:

• A sales application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A production order application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A sample sales application using SAP and Flex (web service call method)

The tools of choice for my experiments today are:

• Adobe Flex (which is built on top of Eclipse – the same tool used to build the SAP Developer Studio). Adobe is very generously offering you the chance to download a try-before-you-buy fully functional demo version for 60 days (if you have already have Eclipse or SAP developer Studio you may elect to download the plug-in instead – although I have not tried that).
• Easyphp which is a nice WAMP (Windows Apache Mysql Php) package that I have been using for years – php in version 5.2.8
• The SAPrfc extension module for Php
• Of course SAP. The SAP backend system I’ll be using is a SAP ECC 6.0 system.

In the first two scenarios, I’ll be using php as the go between Flex and SAP.

Essentially the Flex application will call an http service that is a php script to which we’ll be posting some variables. Php will then wrap those variables in an RF call to the SAP backend system. Assuming all goes well, SAP will send a response that needs to be formatted in a xml like structure so that that it can be properly interpreted by the Flex application – again php will take care of that.

echo "<CUSTRECS>\n";
		for($i=1; $i<=$ADDRESSDATA ; $i++){
			$DATA = saprfc_table_read ($fce,"ADDRESSDATA",$i);
			echo "<CUSTREC>\n<CUSTNUMB>" . $DATA["CUSTOMER"] . "</CUSTNUMB>\n";
			echo "<CUSTADR>" . $DATA["STREET"] . "</CUSTADR>\n";
			echo "<CUSTCOUNT>" . $DATA["COUNTRY"] . "</CUSTCOUNT>\n";
			echo "<CUSTCITY>" . $DATA["CITY"] . "</CUSTCITY>\n";
			echo "<CUSTNAME>" . $DATA["NAME"] . "</CUSTNAME>\n</CUSTREC>\n";
		}
echo "</CUSTRECS>";

will yield an xml response to the Flex application as below,

<CUSTRECS>
	<CUSTREC>
		<CUSTNUMB>0000100000</CUSTNUMB>
		<CUSTADR>800 Gardiner Street</CUSTADR>
		<CUSTCOUNT>AU</CUSTCOUNT>
		<CUSTCITY>Darwin</CUSTCITY>
		<CUSTNAME>Customer domestic 00</CUSTNAME>
	</CUSTREC>
</CUSTRECS>

and in the Flex script below, on lines 5 and 6, you can see how I’ll be retrieving the customer number (CUSTNUMB) and customer name (CUSTNAME) in my Flex datagrid.

<mx:DataGrid dataProvider="{srv3.lastResult.CUSTRECS.CUSTREC}"
width="368" height="119" y="10" x="10" id="dg1"
change="dgChangeHandler()" dropShadowEnabled="true">
	<mx:columns>
		<mx:DataGridColumn dataField="CUSTNUMB" headerText="Customer Number"/>
		<mx:DataGridColumn dataField="CUSTNAME" headerText="Customer Name" textAlign="left"/>
	</mx:columns>
</mx:DataGrid>

So, without further adue, below are explanations and swf animations for each process.

A simple sales order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• An http service calling BAPI_CUSTOMER_GETLIST is used to populate one datagrid
• An http service calling BAPI_MATERIAL_GETLIST is used to populate another datagrid. The product pictures are stored locally on the web server, and the picture filename corresponds to the material number in SAP (eg if the material is called Y126, we have a picture file called Y126.jpg)
• The user will then pick the customer expected delivery date, the required quantity and indicate a selling price
• The Order button will then post the data to another http service in order to create the sales order (by calling the FM CREATE_SD_ORDERDAT1) in SAP. If all goes well a response with the sales order number will be issued to the user.

* Note that some values have been hard-coded in the php files (but they could just as well have come from posted variables). Also, the user will be required to type in his SAP credentials (the SAP server information has been hardcoded in the php file, but we are passing the SAP username and password to the script).

Here is a swf example of this application.

A simple production order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• There are two tabs in this application. One tab will show the data in a tabular form whilst the other tab is geared toward delivering the information graphically.
• An initial http service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST is used to populate a datagrid containing production order header details. The response provided by SAP is first interpreted and transformed into xml by Php.
• The same http service above will not only deliver production order header data, but also aggregated data that will be used to drive some of the charts in the graphical dashboards. All this data is delivered in one xml formatted stream.
• Whenever a line is selected in the production order header datagrid, it will trigger for another service call to be executed and this time call BAPI_PRODORD_GET_DETAIL in order to retrieve the production order component and operation details.

Here is a swf example of this application.

A very simple production order header report

In this last example, similar to the one above we will consume a web service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST and populate the retrieved data in a Flex datagrid – nothing more here – if just to show another method to get the production order header information.

The corresponding Flex Project can be downloaded here. Remember to change your server name and port before using it.

Here is a swf example of this application.

Recommended readings

Rich Internet Application Development on SDN

PHP Development on SDN

Engaging User Interfaces with Adobe Flex
Consuming ABAP Web Services using Flex a hands-on tutorial given by Matthias Zeller, Ed Herrmann, and Dan McWeeney

I hope you find these examples interesting and if you do find them useful and if there is anything you’d like to share, then please do leave a comment.

His customer tracks perishable products that are bought / inventory managed / sold using the SAP functionality Batch Management (LO-BM). The products have a shelf life and therefore a “Use by/Expiration” date. His problem was that he was able to correctly update the characteristic “Expiration date” of the batch, but was not able to select batches during the delivery stage, based on the “Expiration date” – i.e batches that were still fit for use.

So here is a tutorial on how to select batches during the delivery (but it could be applied to any batch search requirement) for which the shelf life has not expired. It has to be noted that SAP covers all kinds of scenario.

- It might be company practice to ship out the door products with a minimum shelf life of X days
- It might be that a specific customer requires a product with a different, longer minimum remaining shelf life
- It might also be that products that are shipped to a specific country require a yet again different minimum shelf life

It might be that you require all three or a logical combination of all three. SAP will easily cover all those requirements and more.

This tutorial only covers the batch determination process in SD, but once you get the jist of it you should be able to apply this to any other module where that function is covered. I also assume that you have set up your system in such way that you are able to have products batch managed.

Step 1 – Standard SAP characteristics you will import

The first thing you need to do is to check that your SAP client has all the required SAP standard characteristics. To do this go to transaction CT04 and query your system to find all characteristics that are called LOBM*.

If a list of values such as the one below is returned then it means that you are all set to go to Step 2 – Create and assign Batch class to products.

If not it means that you need to copy them from client 000. To do that go to customizing and follow the path indicated: Customizing / Logistics – General / Batch Management / Batch Valuation / Updates Standard Characteristics (or transaction BMSM)

The following messages will be displayed if everything goes well.

Once that is done you might want to go back to transaction CT04 and query for characteristics called LOBM*.

Why do I need to do that do you ask? Well for one thing all the work is done for you. Secondly and more importantly the standard SAP functions that will enable us to dynamically calculate the “Expiration date” based on minimum remaining shelf life, makes use of these standard characteristics – they are hard coded in the ABAP functions.

Moving on to step 2 and getting your basic data right.

Step 2 – Create and assign Batch class to products you will do

In our case we have one product, to which we have assigned one class (of technical type 023 – batches). This class has been conveniently called “EXPIRATION” and contains only one characteristic. That characteristic is one of the standard SAP ones called “LOBM_VFDAT – Expiration date, shelf life”. The system has been set up in such a way that when ever I do a goods receipt on this product, SAP will ask me to input the production date and then based on the shelf life of the product, automatically calculate the expiration date of my batch.

This will update a standard SAP table field (MCHA-VFDAT / MCH1-VFDAT – depending on the validity of your batch across plants). This will in turn update the value of the characteristics LOBM-VFDAT within the batch .

So if we look at the shelf life list report (transaction MB5M) we see that this information concurs with that contained in the classification of our batches.

Step 3 – Create a Batch search class you will do

This is a class that will be used to search and find applicable batches during batch determination. It is not directly assigned to the product – it will be assigned to the batch search strategy of the product.

The question is, what characteristics should we put in this class?

If we go back to basics, what we will want to do, is find batches that have a remaining shelf life of X days. If we view this requirement in a different way, we can say that we will want to find batches that have an expiry date that is equal or greater to “delivery date + X days” . My class will therefore use the following characteristics:
- LOBM-VFDAT : The expiration date of the batch – that value SAP will calculate.
- LOBM-LFDAT : The delivery date – that value will be automatically updated by SAP with the delivery date from the delivery

All we need is a characteristic where we will be able to input the value corresponding to X (minimum remaining shelf life required). Again, we do not need to do anything, SAP provides the characteristic “LOBM_RLZ – Remaining Shelf Life for Batch”, to do just that. We therefore have a class (also of technical type 023 – batches) that looks like this.

Step 4 – Create a sort rule you will do

It’s all good to build a batch search class to find batches, but assuming SAP finds numerous batches, how should they be sorted (i.e which should be the first one used?) ? By batch number? Of course not, we want to sort batches based on the expiration date in ascending order (the batches with the date closest to the present should be the first to go).

To do this, call transaction CU70.

Give your sort sequence a name and in the following screen, give it a description as well.

Then click on the characteristics button and assign the characteristic LOBM-VFDAT to it. Also select/amend the sort order that you want.

Save your sort key.

Step 5 – Create a batch search strategy you will do

We want to create a search strategy during delivery processing, i.e in SD – Sales and distribution. So call transaction VCH1 – to create it. We’ll create a strategy determined based on the customer and the material (standard strategy type SD01 caters for that).

Enter your customer and product (amend the strategy as required).

Click on the “selection Criteria” button to assign the search class. In this case we indicated our search class, which copied across the characteristics associated with it.
We also indicate the value “>=30″ in the characteristic “Remaining Shelf Life for Batch” – this means that we will only want to select batches that have an expiration date that is greater or equal to delivery date + 30 days.

Now go back to the previous screen and now click on the “sort” button. There you will assign the sort rule you created in the previous step.

Save your work.

Step 6 – Putting it into practice – the fruit of your efforts you will see

Now that we have created all the required basic data, let’s see how it all hangs together.

We have a sales order for which we create a delivery – batch search will be triggered manually to better follow the process.
In the delivery, we go to the batch determination screen and we see that the system has automatically searched, found and proposed batches that have a remaining shelf life that is greater or equal to 30 days only and it has sorted them according to expiration date – just what we wanted.

The system here proposes 3 batches (yet remember that above, it did indicate that we had 5 batches in the system). To get a better idea of what parameters were calculated/used to determine those three batches, click on the “selection criteria button”.

We see the >=30 that we typed in the batch search strategy. We also see that the system took the delivery date “08.09.2008” added 30 days to it and determined that the batch it was going to search for had to have an expiration date greater or equal to 08.10.2008.

We can also change the search parameters here (this is customizable). We’ll change the value of 30 to 4 right there in the batch determination.

This shows even more batches – logical as we have indicated that batches should only have a remaining shelf life of 4 days or more.
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To set the scene this is what will be shown:

• We will first call a PHP script that uses BAPI BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST to retrieve a list of SAP production orders.
• As time goes by the amount of production orders that live in a system can be quite staggering and I didn’t want to bombard the user with thousands of production orders in one go. To solve that problem I’m using PEAR, to be more specific I’m using the Structures_DataGrid package to setup the paged navigation and render the data in html format (I highly recommend this package as it takes care of everything for you and you can even style the output as you want it)
• Once we have the data output (a list of production orders) we will then want to see a bit more detail for a chosen production order. This is where AJAX comes in. We will make an asynchronous call to another PHP script that calls the BAPI BAPI_PRODORD_GET_DETAIL.
• The result of that AJAX call, is that the current page (or part of it) will be refreshed with new content. The content will be detailed production order information.

If you can’t wait to read this post to the end, I’ve recorded a small flash animation that demonstrates exactly what I have outlined above. The animation can be viewed here (Give the file time to load as it makes approx 4.8Mb).

So we start out with a list of orders:

Clicking on the detail icon will reveal detailed data about the production order:

Finally we’ve added an image which shows an overlay of:

• The list of orders
• The order detail showing the operations and the components of the order
• A screenshot of the operations (in SAP)
• A screenshot of the components (in SAP)

What? No code? do I hear you say. Well as there are very rarely comments made on the code, I’m not going to bother including any in this post – it’s up to you to change that….

As usual these tests have been made using an HP (Compaq nc6220) laptop running on MS Windows XP Pro, the Apache server version 1.3.33 and the PHP scripting engine in version 4.3.10 and of course the SAPRfc library (the Apache/PHP install was that installed via the EasyPhp package). SAP side I was using SAP ERP ECC (ERP Central Component) 5.0. I also used the script.aculo.us javascript libraries. You can download them here.