availability Archives - Paper Street Enterprises

I’ve been doing Variant Configuration for the majority of my “professional” career. I learned something in a recent project that I somehow missed up until now. Sales Order Availability checking for Make-To-Order items has some major limitations. Let me start by explaining the setup and what we ran into in a recent client of mine when we attempted to use Variant Configuration Availability Checking.

We were creating a reasonably complex VC model and placing it into the sale order. We were generating an Assemble-To-Order production order directly from the sales order (skipped the planned order step). Now to further complicate things, we were also using collective orders inside of the VC bill of material structure. None of these things by them self were that far out there, but it was the first time I’d ever done all of them together.

SAP provides a program, SDV03V10 as an availability checking program. I found this through some OSS notes and eventually started playing with it. The functionality worked alright, so we went live with it. What we quickly discovered after go-live is that orders just weren’t being pulled into early dates. It quickly became apparent that the MTO availability program ran one line item at a time. During unit testing, not problem, but suddenly there were many VC line items on the same sales order (or possibly even standard items). Well, the availability programs don’t exactly play well with eachother. Below are the conditions we discovered.

The standard V_v2 will not pick up any MTO items. It automatically excludes them from the program selection. So now this program will only work on standard items.
The SDV03V10 program only executes one sales order line item.
Sales order are often complete delivery

This “perfect storm” cause nothing to be rescheduled automatically. If you are not picking up the pattern, don’t feel bad, it took 3 of us to finally pull this all together. So, here’s an example:

Sales order 1 has the following items: The original promise dates are shown first.
10 STD1 qty: 1 Date: 12/12/2012
20 MTO1 qty:1 Date:12/12/2012

The sales order is complete delivery.
Now there are some inventory changes that make the availability of item 10 to be 11/15/2012 and item 20: 11/20/2012.
if you run V_V2, it will run against the order, but because it is complete delivery and there is an MTO item, it can’t reschedule it earlier than 12/12/2012. Now if you run the SDV03V10 (or any variation of this), the exact same thing will happen. This will leave you in a loop where nothing reschedules unless you go into the order and run a ATP check of all items.

After finding this, I decided that JaveLLin Solutions, LLC should design a new program that will mimic the complete ATP check. If you think this is something you could use, please contact me.

Thanks for reading,

Mike

It’s been a while since I talked service, so I thought I’d start posting some simple tips and tricks again. In case you forgot, and if you read my blog often you might have, I’m actually a functional consultant, not a basis guy =) Service and VC are favorite areas to work in. I think they provide an interesting set of challenges and are often areas where it is hard to find good people (which is awesome for me). Anyway, I’m working on a 5 – 10 part course talking about the basics of service management. I haven’t decided how long it will end up being, so stay tuned. I have so much in the hopper, but I want to actually show you guys I do know something about SM, service availability.

Today, I want to talk about Service Availability. I’ve seen it used sporadically in places, but never very well. So I want to talk about the how and why. Now, before I get into the meat of the topic, let me explain why this part is important. Just as in sales, knowing if all of the components are available is extremely important to managing your workload. SAP provides the same availability functionality in the service order as it does in the production (except of course, running it in mass… but for that, check Armory by JaveLLin Solutions. couldn’t help the shameless plug). Transaction IWBK is actually a good transaction to show you all of the availability associated with a service order, and it even gives you fancy traffic lights to let you know at a glimpse if everything is available. In addition, the status of the service order itself lets you know if all components are available.

Now, you may be asking, why do I care? Often you have a decent workload of service orders and you require components in order to begin work on them. Wouldn’t it be nice to see at a glance if all the components are available to know if you should start working on the order? Perhaps you released the order to get some MRP requirements out there for parts. Well, if you don’t know when the parts are available, how do you know when you can start working on the order? Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for getting this part back to the customer. Your metrics look worse and worse, all because you don’t know if you have parts to start working on a repair.

Alright, you understand the problem, so what can you do about it? First thing you need to do is make sure the availability check is configured the way you need it. Just like the availability for sales and production orders, you can have a unique one for service (or more often you’ll use the same one that production uses). The screen shot below shows you were to find the configuration to see what in the system.

If you look at the Define Checking Rules, you’ll see the following. Please note, SM is the default.

Next go the Define Scope of Check… this is where the real work is done.

Remember, that the scope of check can be different depending on the material availability check.

This example shows 02 – SM

Every one of these options determines things that either availability includes or excludes. Every organization is different, so I can’t tell you there are default settings to use. I can tell you that you should experiment with whatever you do select. Have a service order with some components and make sure your settings do what you expect. ATP is touchy… powerful, but touchy… in my e-class, I’ll go into more details about the exact settings.

finally, you need to assign the availability check to the plant/order. And you also can change the check for creation vs. release.

Here’s the settings you can control:

Alright, now that you’ve seen where to configure the availability check, you should understand how to run it…

Well, it’s pretty simple. SAP only offers one place to execute availability. IW32.

Press this button to availability. There are several important system status that relate to availability:

MANC – Availability not checked
MSPT – Missing parts
MACM – All parts Available

If you use IW38/IW39 or Iw72/Iw73 and you look at system status, this will give you the quick look to determine if you have components available or not. Please note, this doesn’t do a hard allocation of the components. it simply says, based on the availability check (see above) that it is in stock.

I hope this little overview gives you an understanding why availability could be an important piece of service that you’ve overlooked.

Thanks for reading,

Mike