Category Archives: PM
SPP and Plant Maintenance Installed Base
As we discuss in the post..
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2008/10/02/spp-leading-indicator-forecast-profile-tab
…there is a tab in the Forecast Profile that allows you to select an Installed Base. An important question would be where that installed base comes from. There is a way to show the installed base. This is not coming from the material master, but rather from the Equipment BOM or E-BOM. This is part of the Plant Maintenance or Customer Service ECC submodule. Therefore, under standing the integration between PM and CS as well as SPP is critical.
This is the path to view..
ECC- Logistics – Plant Maintenance – Management of Technical Objects – Equipment – Installed Base – Display
You can choose by a variety of criteria. One is serial number.
However, you can also select by Installed Base number.
In addition to selecting by equipment and material, you can select by the External ID. The number we found was under quantity. We are curious if this is the installed base for this E-BOM.
If we select the Material BOM level, we can see the location and material which corresponds to this Installed Base number.
SPP Creating an Equipment BOM for Leading Indicator
Equipment BOM
Anything from a production utility, test equipment to production resources/tools and even buildings can be managed as equipment. Equipment has a hierarchy, hence the name of the BOM. If you want to find out more about BOMs see this post.
The equipment master contains the following:
- General data
- Plant maintenance (time dependent data such as the responsible work center)
- Serial number data
- Configuration data (such as data that describes the individual components of a standard product make up)
Information that is necessary to know before E-BOMs are created
- How are equipment number assigned
- Do you have to enter equipment descriptions according to particular company specific method.
Different from M-BOM
You can see how little information is in the M-BOM when compared to the E-BOM.
This is very simple, just the materials that are part of each item. Now contrast this to what will be seen in the E-BOM.
E-BOM
If you wish to use equipment and equipment BOMs from SAP ERP for leading-indicator-based forecasting, you create the equipment and equipment BOM in the ERP system as described below. (This is the procedure for creating equipment BOMs, not for moving them over to SPP.)
You can also see the Warranty and Partner information on the Equipment BOM on the tab.
Procedure
1. In The ERP system starting with the SAP Easy Access screen choose Logistics – Plant Maintenance – Management of Technical Objects – Equipment – Create (General) and create equipment as follows: a. Specify a name for the equipment and an equipment category and choose Continue. Example Enter equipment LB2-EQUIPMENT-0001 and equipment category M – Machines. b. Specify an object type on the General tab page. Example Specify object type 1380 – Bulldozer. c. On the Location tab page, fill out the fields in the Location data area. Example Enter the following: MaintPlant: SPU1 Location: 0001 Plant section: 010 Work center: SPP_RVB1 ABC indic.: A d. On the Organization tab page, enter a responsible work center for maintenance measures. Example In the Main WorkCtr. field SPP_RVB1 / SPU1. e. Save your entries. 2. In the ERP system starting with the SAP Easy Accessscreen choose Logistics ® Plant Maintenance ® Management of Technical Objects ® Bill of Material ® Equipment BOM ® Create and create equipment BOMs as follows: a. Enter an equipment, a plant and a usage. Example Enter the following: Equipment: LB2-EQUIPMENT-0001 Plant: SPU1 BOM Usage: 4 – Plant Maintenance b. Confirm your entries. c. Enter the individual items of the BOM on the Material tab page. Enter item type L as the item category for all items. Example You create item 0010 as follows: ICt: L Component: HJS_HALB_0012 Quantity: 20 Un: EA You create item 0020 as follows: ICt: L Component: HJS_HALB_0010 Quantity: 1 Un: EA d. Save your entries.
To find out more about leading indicator forecasting in SPP see this link.
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2008/11/11/spp-leading-indicator-decision/
Assiging Product Locations and Resources to a Model
Product and Locations
One thing that is highly confusing about SCM is the assignment of locations and products to one another and to the model. Creating a product for a location does not add that product to the model (although it probably should). Even though you can bring up a location combination in SCM (/SAPAPO/MAT1).
Controlling Batches of Master and Transaction Data
Both product and location as well as other supply chain components must be assigned to the model. This goes for whether the components are created in SCM or are CIFed over from ECC. Planning Version and Planning Models are essentially ways of controlling batches of master and transaction data. If allows us to run parallel planning models, and to experiments with duplicate copies of data without having different boxes to do so.
Planning Version and Model (SAPAPO/MVM) Copying Master and Transaction Data
Below is the transaction for copying data (transaction and master) (/SAPAPO/VERCOP) from one model to the next. We will use this once we get the data the way we like it in one model, we will then copy it to a duplicate planning model and planning version. Notice, you can copy master data and master data and transaction data. However, you can not use this transaction to copy just transaction data between models. This is something we wanted to do as we had made changes to a model in the master data, and did not want to copy the master data from the active model to our model. The supply chain model items can be assigned using the Supply Chain Cockpit. Now we need to add the objects with a right mouse click.
Adding Product Locations
After they are added we can see the products per location added below. However, this graphic shows something we did no immediately see previously. We have an icon for SNA-GA for location SNA2 and for SNA-RE for location SNA5. However, we do not have icons for the other product locations. So this is a very good screen for seeing which are the valid product location combinations. However, it does not make the product location valid, it merely shows valid combinations. Furthermore, after we copy the planning version and model from the active 000, and 000 to our new planning version and model SNA PV and SNA MODEL the few valid product location combinations do not carry over. One of the major issues is that we have to be very conscientious about adding locations and products to the model in addition to simply creating them. This is easy to miss and in fact the locations must be added first and the products added second or the assignment won’t take as we learned the hard way. So here we go to assign the locations first. Next we will go and assign the product. Now we go to the Supply Chain Cockpit (SCC), and we see that now all product locations are active. Of course, we have other locations aside from plants. We have storage locations (MRP Areas from ECC) and vendor locations. We add these to the model by using the same location transaction that we used to add the locations above (/SAPAPO/LOC3). Again, the icons next to the objects (Vendors and Storage Locations) show that they have been assigned properly to the model.
Adding Resources to the Model
Now we will add resources to the model. Now we can see the transportation and handling resources that we just added. However, you will notice than none of them are activated, they all contain the negative symbol. However, again, these resources are not assigned to the model, so we need to do this. However, there is an extremely bizarre error in terms of how the resource screen is setup in SCM 5.0 (it may have been solved in SCM 5.1). What occurs is when we type in the resource and location, and then what appears to be the change button, we receive the error in the screenshot below. Resources are covered in detail in these posts:
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/05/02/scm-resource-types/
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2008/09/14/resources/
Viewing Resources
So while you can see the resources in the SCC, you can not actually view them in the master data transaction (/SAPAPO/RES01). This is because the resource exists but it is not assigned to a model, and unlike the product and location maintenance transactions, adding the resources to a model is in the screen following this one. So we will have to select the model independent check box just to get into it. Once inside we must select a resource. Now we need to select the strange multi-box button to the top.
Error in Resource Assignment
Here SAP makes a major error by assigning the resource to a number or models that we did not tell it to add. Trying to create a new resource brings up the same problem, so we have little alternative except to add the resource all the models that SAP has brought up. This is of course not what we want to do. However, we repeat this action for all of our resources. We then go and check the results in SCC. The icons show us (before they were minus signs) that the resources have now been successfully assigned to the model.
Other Issues
Further confusing is that EWM has its own resource screen, which has nothing to do with there resources in this screen. The resources in the EWM transaction (/SAPAPO/RSRC). These are warehouse resource and are only assigned to a warehouse. We now go to Locations instead of Product Locations, and add the locations there. Once they are added to the locations tab, the network appears up to the upper left hand corner. Instead of adding everything all together, add in stages. Once we saved after every time that we added on objects, we were able to add everything we wanted without the error above.
Assignment System in SCM
Its hard to conclude anything from this except that the assignment process is extremely confusing and badly designed. SAP development has some serious errors here that lead to difficult model maintenance requiring many hours to master. The resource maintenance is particularly problematic without a change transaction. We will continue to investigate this issue and post new information at a later date.
SNP Transportation Lane and Transportation Resource Setup
Creating the Supply Network with Transportation Lanes
Transportation Lanes connect up the nodes in the network. When Purchasing Info Records, Scheduling Agreements are CIFed over to SCM Transportation Lanes are automatically created. However, if you need to created them, you can go into (/SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) and set them up there. However, when we go to do this, we find that the transportation lane has already been created, most likely from our purchasing info record that we CIFed over earlier. Here is how they are created one by one, however, this is not the best way to do it, but it is merely for instructional purposes. Really, these should come across from he CIF, unless the SCM instance is stand alone from SAP ERP. There are five different ways to created Transportation Lanes.
- Using the transportation lane maintenance screen
- Using SCE
- Transportation lane mass maintenance
- Transferring Purchasing Info Records (our preferred way for the sake of simplicity, of course this will not do when we need transportation lanes between internal plants/locations for transfer orders.)
- Transferring the special procurement key
Mass Maintenance Creation
The Mass Maintenance transaction is the (SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) is the fastest way we know of to create transportation lanes. It may be one of best transactions in terms of ease of use for payoff we have used. This good because creating Transportation Lanes using the one by one method may be one of SAP’s worst transactions in terms of usability. You simply need to have a transportation lane already created in order to begin. We used a transportation lane that was already created for us by CIFing over the Purchasing Info Record.
Just like that it created 20 transportation lanes for us between all of our plants.
Transportation Resource
You can create Transportation Resources by going to the transaction (/SAPAPO/RES01).
However, while it allowed us to create Transportation Resources, it seemed to have a hard time remembering it had created them.
We created 5 different Transportation Resource, but could find none of them when we went to go and edit them. However, when we tried to recreate them, we could not because SAP said that they were created already. However, we thought we would test if we could assign these Transportation Resources to Transportation Lanes (TL) that we created earlier in this post. Understand that the only functioning item in these TLs is the calendar that we have assigned. That is it is the only item which would limit the application of demand on the resource.
First we go back to the Transportation Lane transaction (/SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) and select the appropriate lane, then select the “create” button under “Means of Transport.”
(Hit the page button above) This will bring up the entry panel to the right.
There are some interesting things which can be configured. A few that caught our eye is the following:
- Transportation Calendar
- Transportation Distance
- Transportation Duration
- Transportation Cost
- Resource (assigned to lane)
We found these interesting because they can be used to model important factors in the system. We have a post linking to this and it deals with inventory balancing. The Transportation Cost would be an element which would help determine if a stock movement would take place. It would look at the transportation cost, warehouse space savings, service level improvement (this is a function of SPP).
Transportation lanes can be setup in the following way.
- Product Specific
- Means of Transport
- Product Specific Means of Transport
The way we just demonstrated was the means of transport. However, products or product groups can have their own special transportation lanes setup for them. Here is how the setup changes when a specific product, or groups of products are involved.
We were successful in assigning the Transportation Resource (TR) that we created, therefore, we are pretty sure it exists and the previous message we received when we tried to edit the TR was an SAP error.
The different resource types are described in the post below.
http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/05/02/scm-resource-types/
SAP ERP Org Setup and the CIF
Issue of Integration
One of the most frustrating things for getting EWM or any SCM component up is the work required in order to get ECC working properly. As EWM is transactionally focused (rather than planning oriented), it has a high degree of traffic moving between ECC and SCM. SCM has only a few things that it wants from ECC, yet it requires all types of setup that the SCM consultant is not interested in getting into, and often there is CIF consultant on staff (most projects to not see the CIF as requiring a separate consultant, but expect the knowledge to come with a functional consultant). If you are on a project then you can ask a fellow ECC consultant to do this, however, if you are not or if you can’t get their time, you will have to do it yourself. We tried to create POs using the Purchasing Org and Company Code that we did not create. We ran into problems because the of the validity period of the company. You can see this below. Notice how a number of the Company Code’s validity periods are in the past.
Company Code (Hijacking)
This in SPRO is where you create the Company Code.
We tried creating our own company code but ran into problems, so instead we decided to use an existing company code. (which is 3000)
Next we want to assign a plant to this company code.
This is where you assign the Plant to the Company Code. By choosing an existing company code we don’t have to worry about assigning the company code to the purchasing organization. However, we do want to assign the purchasing org to the plant.
Sales Org Assignment
We used an existing company code as the company code we tried to create ourselves we had problems getting to work properly. really, we want to just get things working from a supply chain perspective and we are not concerned about financial postings. Next we want to assign the Sales Org to the Plant. You can find this by doing a search.
However, even after doing this, we still were not able to extend a material to our new plant. It did not bring up plant SNA5 as an option. However, when it finally did, we were not able to extend the material because it did not have a MRP Controller assigned to the plant. For some reason we forgot to document this step last time for the first four plants that we created.
Next we go through entering various fields into the material master and we get an error on the Scheduling Key and we find that it is not assigned to the material.
Then to this.
MRP Areas and Transfer
Next we create storage locations Enterprise Structure – Definition – Materials Management – Maintain Storage Location.
Now when we goto MRP Areas.
SPRO – Materials Management – Consumptive Based Planning – Master Data – MRP Areas – Define MRP Areas
We can see that the storage location creation essentially creates an MRP Area for us.
We want to assign these MRP Areas to the correct material and plant combination. To do this we go into (MM02), to the MRP 1 tab and select the MRP Area button towards the bottom of the screen.
Now we will fill in the next screen.
Now we will want to transfer the MRP Area to SCM with CIF.
Strangely, while this is documented (to use storage locations as proxies for MRP Areas) this actually did not work when we put in into practice. However, if we add the MRP Areas in the screen below, then they do show up in the integration model.
You can see them in the integration model.
After we check the CIF model that only transfers MRP areas (as recommended by SAP)
Why Variants?
Just because you create an integration model, does not mean that you only have to type in the integration model and change it. In fact it is necessary to save integrations models as variants in order to bring them up in the future and modify them. You do this by selecting the save button after you have configured your integration model. Without doing this, we do not know if it is possible to alter the integration model after first creating it. There is no CFM* transaction for modification. It is transaction CFM1 with variant.
When you get back into the CFM1 transaction it necessary to select Goto the menu and then choose your variant. Here you can see there is a log for changed integration models when you go into transaction CFM2.
Unfortunately we got the same errors. However, we have gotten errors before and the CIF still went through. The way we check is to go to the Location Master in SCM and type in the MRP Area.
After all those errors it the storage location came across fine!!The big lesson from this is to take the CIF errors with a grain of salt. Also notice the location type is 1007.
So it is a 1007 location inside of a 1002 location (distribution center plant).
Customer Creation and Transfer
Next we will want to create a customer. It is very important that the customer be picked up as a 1010 type (VMI) as that is the only location that will be modeled in SCM. Later we will test this to see if it was the case.
Now after filling in a few fields our customer is created. This next part is very important so we wanted to quote directly from SAP documentation.
“As of release 4.0 of SCM the maintenance of the sales area shifted from the customer location to the CIF. You assign the sales area to your sold to and delivering plant.” – SCM215
It is located here:
Integration with Other mySAP.com Components – Advanced Planning and Optimization – Application Specific Settings and Enhancements – Settings and Enhancements for Sales Orders – Settings for Vendor Managed Inventory VMI – Assign Sales Orders and Order Type to Orderting Party/Plant
While this functionality has been moved to the CIF, interestingly another portion does not move through the CIF – that is the sales transactions.
“Similar to that of the plant, stock movements will be modeled via stock transport requests in SNP and PP/DS. When it is time to deploy and ship, SAP SCM can instruct SAP ECC to convert stock transports to sales orders. This functionality is the reason for the addition of the VMI tab.” – SCM215
Now we will want to create an integration model to move the customer over to SCM and see if it is picked up as a location type 1010. Underneath Material Independent Objects, we find the selection for Customers. We want to CIF our one customer over.
We will activate and run the model with (CFM2) and not bother looking at the error log as the CIF error log always seems to have some problem. Now we can see the customer has been created.
Supplier/Vendor Creation and Transfer
The supplier is just another location (type 1020) Lets start by creating our Supplier.
Now we will transfer to CFM2 by typing /nCFM2.
However we keep getting an error on the address of the Vendor. This error is critical as it prevents the activation of the integration model. However, we do have the address field filled in, so the actual problem is not apparent to us. What we did learn is that we had left over errors and a blocked message queue even after we changed vendors we received the old error.
So we goto the qRFC Monitor and delete the queue.
Skeptical of Changing Integration Models
We had some problems with the different CIF models that we created for just the vendor. We also became skeptical of changing an integration model, and instead created new integration models. However, through trial and error we eventually got one to work. However, one thing very confusing is that ECC uses different numbering than SCM for vendors. So Vendor Master 2222 in ECC is actually 0000002222 in SCM.
