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Variant Configuration – Return Configurable Materials

I’ve been a roll with VC for the blogs, so I’m gonna keep going with it (besides, I’ve been pouring all my SM knowledge into the SM E-course).  Today I want to talk about the configuration needed to handle return configurable materials.  I’m also going to talk a little about the processes you’ll need to consider when you decide to accept configurable returns.

First, the easy part.  the configuration is pretty straight forward.  Most of the work is already done for you out of the box.  The item category REC is meant for configurable materials.  The one major change that I encourage is in the item category configuration.  Being a purest, I’ll always encourage you to copy it and make a ZREC, but that’s your call.  The one field that I change is the Special Stock Indicator.  Why you may ask?  If you don’t set this, when you attempt to do your Post Good Receipt on the configurable item if you don’t change this to be E, you won’t get stock back in the system.  Rather, you will get a confirmation of service when you receive this.  Me, I’m a fan of knowing exactly what is coming into my plant.  In addition, I might be able to strip this part down for components, or maybe even resell it.  What this means is that when you receive the item in, it will be sales order stock for your return sales order.

This brings me to the process process portion of the VC return.  Now in order to use this, you will need to do some material movements.  I’m not going into a MIGO lesson here, but you need to know that you must either issue this directly from the sales order ot another sales order, or you might even need to create a material variant and then transfer the stock.  I’ll talk more about the material variant process in another post…  Anyway, returns in VC can be complicated.  Be sure you’re aware of the process cost.  If your product is cheap enough, it could be worth it to leave the settings as they are, and just throw the item away as soon as it arrives.

Anyway, more to come on VC returns, but this will get you started,

Remember, if you need VC or SM help, please contact me and let me know how I can assist you.

Thanks,

Mike

Variant Configuration – Requirement Types

Well, today is a quick lesson that I just relearned.  When you are configuring the sales order/item category for a variant configuration item, one of the big things you have to configure is the requirement types.  Now there are some standard ones, but based on what you need, you’ll probably still tweak.

So let’s start at the beginning… where do you configure this?
Txn: SPRO  Sales and Distribution–>Basic Functions–>Availability Check and Transfer of Requirements–>transfer of requirements

In here, the first 3 pieces are what you generally need to be concerned with.  All the real work happens in the define requirements Classes step.  In here, you can define if the order generates a planned order, a production order, a service order, can it take configuration? the screen shot below shows you the full assortment of items you can control.  Ultimately, you will need to use trial and error to fit your business.  the screen shot is for the standard 040, which works for configurable items.  Certain things like the accounting section will need input from your FICO team, but out of the box, this one will work for you.

Now, once you’ve created or modified your requirement, you’ll need to create the requirement class.  I personally think this step is silly, but you have to do it.  I’ll usually name the class the same as the requirement, but do whatever you like.

Now for the last step.  Assign the requirement to your item category.  use the configuration:  Determination of Requirements Types using Transaction.

Use the search to find your VC item category.  In the second column enter in your requirements class.  Now, the last and final piece, put a 1 in the third column.  This is a subtle thing, but it tells configuration to follow the requirements settings in your sales order, not in the material master.  If you don’t put the 1 in there, you could spin your wheels for a while (like I just did) trying to figure out why it’s ignoring your Sd settings.  Anyway, that’s your tip of the day…

As always, I’m learning the hard way so you don’t have to =)

If you’re in need of consulting or SAP Add-in applications, please don’t hesitate to contact us.  We’ll soon be releasing several new VC applications, including a history report.

thanks for reading,

Mike

 

Variant Configuration – Pricing Descriptions of variant conditions using VK30

Just a short one for today =)  here’s a little trick for anyone new to variant configuration pricing.  When you use VA00 (or something similar) for your variant conditions the business sees your cryptic variant condition names.  if you go into transaction VK30, you can give it a a more meaningful name that will show up on the sales orders.  The one drawback is that you cannot have different descriptions by language.  Regardless, this will still allow you to provide a little more meaningful description to your sales order entry group.

Thanks a lot,

Mike

Variant Configuration – Pricing dependency Group

If you’ve been doing VC for a while, you might remember the days when nothing worked without an OSS note, performance was terrible, and it took discipline to build a model that would work for sales and manufacturing.  I remember those days fondly.  Well, pricing was no different.  That’s why I wanted to put this quick tip out there for you.  If you do variant pricing, a way to improve your performance is using the dependency group :  SAP_PRICNG  (no, I didn’t misspell pricing.  ha ha ha).  You simply need to add this into configuration.
SPRO–>Logistics General–>Variant Configuration–>Dependencies–>Define Groups

Once you add this dependency group, be sure to add this to all of your pricing object dependencies.  What this will do is it will only fire the dependency if you call for pricing.  Of course, this will depend on your configuration profile settings as well, but it does give you the opportunity to improve your performance.
Hope you find this useful,

As always, if you need any help in Variant Configuration or you are looking for some great applications to make your SAP life easier, please let me know.

thanks,

Mike

Variant Configuration – CWG – The Group in the know

Since, I recently attended  (and even presented at) the CWG conference in Marco Island, I figured this would be a good time to let you know about the group.  The CWG, or Configurator WorkGroup, is THE group if you do anything with Variant Configuration.  This group focuses on variant configuration, configure to order, engineer to order, and pretty much anything that has to do with being able to dynamically configure a product based on a set of rules.

http://configuration-workgroup.com/

If you’re not part of the CWG, I highly encourage you to get registered.  It’s free, and without a doubt, it has the most complete forum of VC related questions.  If you can’t find an answer here, make a post and it’s likely someone will have an idea that can solve your problem.

About my only complaint with the conference is that it tends to focuses heavily on the IPC (internet pricing and configuration), which is the web based/CRM based version of the variant configurator.  That’s not a bad thing, but there are a lot of us that care about the ERP based engine.  The conference this time around actually was good, because there was nearly a day of ETO/Specials processing in VC.  All of presentations are online from the past 10 years or so.

short story, I encourage you to involved… or check it out if you haven’t been there in a while…

good luck

Variant Configuration – Keep BOM Dependencies Simple

Having just gone to the CWG (configurator workgroup) for the first time in many years, I was reminded of my most famous story.  My friend Barry Scott Walton even told the story in his presentation.  He was nice enough to remove the names, to protect the guilty.  Some of you probably even remember this story…  It’s not the peanut butter piehl story, but perhaps I’ll share that one too someday…  This was the story of how Mike Piehl shut down MRP because I used very complicated BOM dependencies.

This was back when I worked for ADC Telecommunications and there was a mad scramble to get all of our CTO product lines converted onto to SAP before the dreaded Y2K.  Well, I was frantically working on product lines, and of course pushing the envelope, because no one ever said not to.  ha ha ha.  It all started on Wed.  I still remember grumblings of MRP being really slow, and wondering if I had done anything.  At the time, I couldn’t think of anything I did…  thursday came, the same issues were still occurring.  Then Friday, it became critical.  MRP hadn’t finished in 3 days, and no one seemed to know why.  After lots of digging, working with planning, IT, and even calling SAP’s platinum hotline, we narrowed down the issue.  We had created about 30 material variants and added a forecast to them.  In a normal world, this wouldn’t have been an issue.  But in my design, I used every tool I could in the BOM to make things work.  Well, my design was spot on.  The problem, which Barry later explained to me, was that MRP doesn’t read complex dependencies in the Bill of Material well.  And when I had a bunch of material variants, all with these complex rules, and then it read them over and over and over (because of the forecast)…  well, let’s just say, I become famous.

As soon as Barry explained the MRP issue (which in my defense was never documented anywhere in SAP), I quickly found a work around to get me by until I could rework all of the selection conditions.  I moved my variant table to a database table.  Now, I do not recommend this approach because you lose the tracability, but we had to do something quickly, and this gave us back the performance to get MRP running again (and still forecast those 30 parts).

The work took significantly longer, because I pulled all of the complex logic out of the selection condition, and moved it to the configuration profile.  This meant more characteristics at the top level, but the trade-off was well worth it.

To this day, I encourage all of my clients to keep it REALLY simple in the BOM.  SAP has done better in adapting MRP to handle variant configuration rules better.  But, in my opinion, you want the configuration profile to do all of the heavy lifting anyway, so this approach won’t steer you wrong.

Anway, learn from my experience…  Keep your BOM rules simple…  don’t add tables, don’t do complicated calculations…  just do simple assignments.  You’ll thank me later =)

Mike

Service Order Document Flow – Configuration

In a recent post, I talked about the document flow functionality.  One of the things I wanted to cover is how to turn on the service order document flow.  In the sales side, all of this information is turned automatically.  In SM, you need to manually turn on the pieces you want.  My recommendation is to turn all of these items.

First of all, this is where you go in configuration

Once inside the transaction, this is what you’ll see.

Now, I encourage you to make sure all the components you use are checked.  that’s all there is to service order document flow.

If you have any SM needs, please press the contact us button at the top of this page,

Thanks for reading,

Mike

Service Order change documents – Make sure this is turned on

One of the important pieces of tracking your metrics (and more importantly your improvement) in SAP hinges on having data.  In the service order, a lot of the change documents are turned off by default.  So I thought I’d put together a quick post to show you how to activate the Service Order change documents.  So, let’s start with where the configuration exists in SPRO

Now, here’s all things you should be aware of in this transaction.  First, find your order type and plant, then start scrolling across and make sure that you’ve checked everything that makes sense for your business:

Indicator: Status change document active for materials  this will track the status changes in a service order for the materials.  if you do metrics reports, you need this checked.

Increment this is the increment of operation numbers in your task list.

Status change document for header order/network this collects all the header level status changes.  Again, if you collect metrics, you need this checked.

Collective Requisition if you want a single purchase req for the whole order, check this box.  Otherwise you’ll receive a different pur req for each item.

Res/PurReq this determines if the purchase req/component is released as soon as it’s entered, or not until the service order has been released.  I’ll usually recommend (2).

PDC Active exactly what it says, plant data collection is active.

Indicator: Workflow for purchase order change you get the idea.

Indicator: creation of change documents active highly encouraged, so you can see all changes.

Ind.: Copy Net Price from Requisition into Purchase Order you get it.

Indicator: Status change document active for operations another change indicator.

Indicator: Status change document active for PRTs last change indicator

If you’re not sure you have this stuff set, I encourage you to go check.  If you don’t need it now, I’m sure you’ll need it in the future.

As always, if you need any SM assistance, please contact us,

Thanks,

Mike

Variant Configuration – ETO CWG Tips

Here’s some quick ETO tips I got at the CWG that I didn’t want to forget.

If you are dealing with an engineering special or ETO configuration, you could use output determination to send an email to a group of engineers.  The drawback to this approach is that you need to know it’s a special in advance.  Much more difficult to use if it might be std or might be special.

In addition, the functions starting with CAVC allow you to build your own order bom workbench.  If you wanted to build your own CU51 or OEWB, you could use the functions to design your own transaction.

 

Remember, if you need more in depth VC help, please contact us,

Thanks,

Mike

Service Management – Understanding the Repair Procedure

One of the key pieces of the in-house repair scenario is the repair procedure.  The repair procedure simply put is the roadmap of actions that need to happen when you perform a service process.  I’m going to talk about how you can set this up and use it to fit your business process.

First thing is show you where in configuration you define the repair procedure.  The following screen shot shows you where to go in SPRO to configure the repair procedure.

Initially, select the Maintain Repair Actions.  This screen will give you the translation of what each action means.  The actions are the key in the actual repair procedure, so I wanted to show you what they look like.  Normally, this screen doesn’t need to change unless you want to add better text to the action (this will show up in the repair screen).  Some of the important terminology in this screen:

  • Send/Pickup Replacement refers to loaned equipment.   Simply put, you send the customer a unit to use while the repair happens, then they send it back after they receive their repaired unit.
  • Replacement Part – this is an exchange.  It means the customer will keep this unit (and typically return the unit they currently have to you.  then you can repair it and add it to your refurbished/spares inventory).

Alright, now on to the real work.  Next we will pull up the repair procedures.  I’m going to walk through the example of an in-house repair that allows loaners.  the next screen will show you how to get into the repair procedure.

Select the procedure you want to view (or copy in the event of creating a new one).

Now, you’re looking at the SAP logic of the repair procedure.  What you’ll notice is that everything is broken up by stages.    Remember, for each stage you can only define a single Default.  The stages are as follows:

  • 101         Accept repair: this is the actual receiving of the item
  • 102         Start repair: this is the repair of the item, or the processing
  • 103         Confirm repair: this is what happens after the service order is confirmed.

Now, if you look at the first stage(101) in the procedure below, you’ll see the following steps.  These are the steps you are allowed to do as soon as you enter in the material to repair.

  • 101         Returns                – this is flagged at Default, so that means this will automatically be placed into the sales order as soon as the repair procedure is selected.
  • 104         Send Replacement – this allows you to send a loaned piece of equipment to the customer
  • 106         Replacement Part – allows you to send an exchange to the customer.

Looking at stage 102, you’ll see the addition of Manual and Conf. populated.  Before I move on, the options for confirmation (conf.):

  • 01           Repair: fix me
  • 02           Do not repair/can be delivered: don’t fix me, but send me back
  • 03           Can be scrapped: scrap me
  • 04           Repaired/for delivery: I’m repaired, send me back to the customer.

Also note, if something is set as manual, even if 01 -> 04 above are selected, the item will not be automatically added to the sales order.  It will have to be manually entered.

Now looking at the actual data for stage 2 you’ll see that the numbers make a little more sense:

  • 102         Repairs                                 01                           : since this is 01, it means repair me, thus generate a service order.
  • 103         Outbound Delivery         02           Manual: this is the scenario  where the item cannot be repaired, so just send it back to the customer.  This is a manual step.
  • 107         Scrapping                            03           Manual:  Similar to 103, but this time we won’t even send the item back to the customer.
  • 108         Credit memo                                                     :  Create a Credit Memo Request for the customer, with reference this line item.
  • 109         Debit memo                                                       : Create a Debit Memo Request for the customer, with reference this line item.

I hope this makes sense of how to structure your repair procedure.  If you’d like more detail, please comment below.  Now for the next piece, how do I attach this repair procedure.

In the item category configuration, scroll to the bottom of the item category, and enter the Repair Procedure.  I’m not going into the details of how to select this item category (I’ll save that for another post).

I look forward to your comments,

If you need more in depth assistance on this, please contact us for additional consulting help,

Thanks,

Mike