For your SAP MM, SAP SD & SAP PP Tips & Tricks

Openbravo ERP : Moving into Open Source ERP

By Kowboy | Published: September 16, 2009

Openbravo ERP instead of SAP? The past six years I worked with much pleasure in the SAP arena. I had the opportunity to work together with some of the larger corporations to help them achieve their ambitions. Part of my experiences is written down in this blog. Many people visit this blog on a daily basis and some of them leave me some wonderful messages. My contributions in last few months diminished, and will come to a total stop as of today.

The last two years my interest in the open source movement increased when I learned of the existing ERP alternatives at that time. As an ERP professional I was interested in to what extent these “free” software alternatives could actually fulfill commercial cutomers’ needs. Out of the ERP alternatives available I quickly focused on Openbravo ERP. Barcelona based Openbravo is the commercial organisation behind Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS. In comparison with their open source ERP competitors Openbravo’s partner driven business model, heavy financing and marketing efforts instinctively won me over as the most professional alternative available. But what about the functionality of the software? According to some sites open source ERP is weak and I was admittedly a bit sceptical. As the English say: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. Hence I needed to give it a try.

Through documentation and experimenting I learned that installation of the Openbravo ERP stack is child’s play (i.e. if you take at least some pleasure from tweaking and fiddling your system). The application supports all fundamental processes in a business: Procurement, Sales, Production, Warehouse, Project/Service Management and off course Finance is integrated into the main processes. I was impressed by the basic functionality. Coming from SAP you do have to adjust expectations. In my opinion SAP is the Porsche when it comes to all integrated functionality and its price. Openbravo ERP is more like a Honda: tuned into a specific market need and way more affordable. That is why Openbravo aims at Small and Midsize Enterprises.

Openbravo ERP Sales Order entry

I was considering making a change and move into this new business opportunity. At that time I just moved my career to being a free-lance SAP Logistics consultant. Moving towards open source ERP, I had to have a good feel about the people behind the organisation. Early 2008 I visited an Openbravo partner event in Barcelona. There I learned a lot about Openbravo’s capabilities as a professional organisation and its management. These people definitely take the opportunity serious, and at the same time they are very approachable. I left Barcelona with an excited feeling of “opportunity”. I couldn’t do this by myself: I needed to find a suitable business partner.

Openbravo Team

While exploring Dutch networks for potential partners, in the meantime I kept on doing my SAP tricks with great pleasure: ERP and process improvement, the combination of social interaction and technical configuration, is just what I do best. Only this summer I ran into the suitable partner I felt I needed to start this business. GlobalOrange in Amsterdam is offering application development and outsourcing service to SME. An extension of these services to ERP business is a perfect match. So did my partners think. Hence from now on I will be focused on making Openbravo ERP a success in the Netherlands and Belgium.

My break-up with SAP is not a dirty one. We had a great time together and who knows where we meet again. But as it is the times they are a-changing.

…this blog will be up for as long people will end up here and find the content useful…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Changes, Open Source, Openbravo | 3 Comments

Distribution of Planned Independent Requirements in MRP

By Kowboy | Published: July 23, 2009

Distribution of planned independent requirements can be key in getting your MRP results exactly right. This post is about how to break down your Sales and Operations Plan and schedule it for MRP. E.g. Assume your SOP is planned in monthly buckets, but you plan your production in weekly buckets and you use forward scheduling for your production orders. In this case you want independent requirement quantities show on the first day of the week. Another example: since you plan production on a daily basis you want your monthly forecast spread out on a daily basis throughout the month. Distribution of planned independent requirements can help you achieve this.

Posted in MM, PP | Tagged MM, PP | Leave a comment

MC44 – Inventory Turnover (2)

By Kowboy | Published: July 23, 2009

In MC44 – Inventory Turnover (1) I explained the concept of Inventory Turnover and how it can be used. In this post I will explain the transaction itself. The transaction is mostly self-explanatory, but there is one option of particular importance.

Posted in MM, Process | Tagged MM, reporting, Stock | 1 Comment

Forecasting – Copy history

By Kowboy | Published: April 6, 2009

In forecasting it is fair to say that most forecast models only sensibly apply to high volume materials and that for low volume materials (although specific models exist)more manual intensive forecasting practices apply. A lot of customers prefer to use historical data one on one for the future predictions: May 2008 – 120 boxes sold hence May 2009 -120 boxes sold, June 2008 – nothing sold hence June 2009 also nothing sold, and so on. In a lot of situations it is desirable to manually adjust some of the forecast values. So if you wish to use last year’s actuals as your forecast for the upcoming year you can do the following:

Posted in PP | Tagged Forecasting, PP | Leave a comment

MC44 – Inventory Turnover (1)

By Kowboy | Published: February 26, 2009

Inventory Turnover is a prominent KPI in a lot of businesses. This post will give you some understanding on the concept. In another post I will give details on how the SAP report MC44 can be used to measure inventory turns and what data is used to calculate this ratio.

Formula

Inventory Turnover = Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) / Average Inventory at value

If you are not familiar with the term Cost of Goods Sold, this is the cost of your revenues.

Average Inventory is measured in value and not in volume.

If you divide both elements you know how often you sold you’re average inventory. “So what?” you ask. I will explain next.

Posted in MM, Process | Tagged MM, reporting, Stock | 10 Comments

MD04 – Download planning to Excel

By Kowboy | Published: February 16, 2009

Sometimes a planner wishes to share the planning status of a particular material with colleagues or partners that are not SAP users. In this case it is useful to download the planning overview to Excel and perhaps pimp the lay-out with some colorful headers.

To do this -from within MD04 or MD07- go to Menu > List > Variable Print.

MD04 - Variable Print

Immediately a new overview opens up that may look less attractive than the overview you are used to. On the screen ‘Print list – variable’ you can change the lay-out and save it as a variant like you are used to in standard SAP reporting.

MD04 printlist lay-out

To get the best Excel results export the report directly to an Excel table, as opposed to first store it as a local file and then open it in Excel. This way the lay-out is optimized for direct filtering and sorting.

This is all there is to it. Sometimes SAP life is that easy.

Kowboyz BV / CC BY-ND 3.0

Posted in MM, PP | Tagged MM, MRP, PP, Tools | 2 Comments

Batch determination for IM

By Kowboy | Published: February 6, 2009

This blog offers a quick guide on how to use standard SAP Batch Determination for a material transfer. For an internal goods movement we need SAP to pick the batch from stock with the earliest Shelf Life Expiration Date (SLED). We don’t want our fresh products terminate themselves from stock…

1. For this we will be using standard IM search strategy ME001 – Standard Search Procedure.

IMG > Logistics > Batch Management > Batch Determination and Batch Check > Batch Search Procedure Definition > Define Inventory Management Search Procedure

IM Search Procedure

Posted in MM, PP, SD | Tagged Batch, MM | 7 Comments

Unblock SD Documents

By Kowboy | Published: January 23, 2009

This post is an extension to a previous post on Credit Checks exceeded. When you are in a testing environment it is common that it’s difficult to quickly process sales orders and/or deliveries because the credit check is exceeded for a customer. Credit is building up, since so many sales orders and deliveries are entered but are usually not going through the whole process including payment processing. To quickly clear a blocked order got to transaction VKM1.

VKM1 - Blocked SD Documents

In the main screen enter a common criterion like Credit account (usually sold-to) and hit the execute button (F8). In the report screen that follows, select the document to be unblocked and press the green flag button followed by saving the approval. Now you can continue processing the order or delivery.

Kowboyz BV / CC BY-ND 3.0

Posted in SD | Tagged SD | 1 Comment

SQVI – Create quick report

By Kowboy | Published: January 23, 2009

In an earlier post I promised to give a quickguide to creating a query in SAP based in transaction SQVI. I’m going to show you how you can quickly build a custom report for reporting Sales Schedule Lines based on different filter criteria and multiple tables (VBAK, VBAP and VBEP: header, item and schedule line data resp.):

Posted in Basis | Tagged Basis, reporting | 8 Comments

Test standard LIS analyses with different source versions

By Kowboy | Published: January 14, 2009

There are wonderful reports available in standard SAP’s Information Structures (E.g. MCxx reports). It can be so cruel though when data gets corrupted. You usually end up comparing report figures with whatever reasonable value you find elsewhere in SAP. If you want to be sure about the Information Structure’s reliability it is worthwhile to update an infostructure (say S021 – Production Order), store it under a temporary version ‘&(1′, and finally call this test version in a report that default uses version ’000′.

To call up another version than ’000′ go to System > User profile > User parameters and enter the parameter ID ‘MCR’ with the value ‘X’.