SAP Blog

MTO with AFS

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:46:21 +0000

When it comes to SAP AFS, most of the users I know of adopting a MTO (Made To Stock) setup. In most of the apparel and related industries, people produce for an order unlike in some other industries like vehicle manufacturing where they manufacture mainly on the expected demand not for an actual order.

AFS has a design edging towards MTO rather than MTS or Made To Stock. This mentality of AFS can be seen in the inability to use various MRP types. Even the simple minimum stock level ordering is not possible through the MRP type relevant for the AFS materials in the stable versions of AFS. This suggests, AFS is more like to be deployed with the MTO mindset than a MTS mind set.

Use of MTO with AFS presents a set of unique challenges. All the demands and supplies are allocated to a customer orders like Sales Order (SO) or a Sales contract. This multiplies the amount of transaction data. For an example if you are going to produce 10,000 pieces in a MTS scenario, you may use one production order for the quantity of 10,000, while in the case of MTO, if there are 10 small customer Pos making the demand of 10,000 with 1000 pieces each, you will have 10 production orders instead. This will increase the number of data available in the system. But on the positive side you will gain more and more control over the order. You are much leaner in manufacturing, as you always try to only manufacture in the quantities customers need.

Data multiplies further with the use of sizes too. If each of the 10 SO had 5 grid values each, the number of table entries in the relevant at the detail levels will increase by 5 times. This again accounts for the increase of data in the system. Increase in the data will slow down the system, if frequent archiving is not done.

Although AFS in my opinion is more inclined towards MTO, I believe there are some areas needs to be modified to better cater MTO business. One of these areas is the subcontracting of goods. Subcontracting is a very common in specially the apparel industry. But unfortunately AFS solutions are not geared to the replicate the physical scenarios in the system in MTO. But when it comes to MTS, they have excellent features. But the good news is there are well established work around available to manage MTO subcontracting in AFS.

There are few other limitations when it comes to MTO as well. One of these is the use of Scales to maintain different discounts for different quantities. Although behavior of scales do vary depending on the configuration, in a pure MTO scenario, you can maintain Scales in purchasing not for the entire PO but only for the particular LI of the PO. If you are using AFS, you may have more insight to these problems. Please leave your thoughts as a comment to this post.

Please note, these are just my thoughts depending on what I have seen over the years. There may be differences in your experience. You can always leave your comments below.

I am Back!

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:45:48 +0000

Hello to all SAP AFS readers. Thank you for being a SAP AFS reader for this long, specially even when I didn’t update the blog for over a year. I thought this is just a regular blog, but I was wrong.

I visited SAP Labs India, two weeks back. It was an awesome experience. People were very nice and kind both inside and outside SAP Labs. I really like their working environment. It was a beautifully designed and beautifully maintained. Importantly I had the opportunity to meet most of the SAP AFS development and support team members, people behind the SAP IS AFS. Interestingly, I was surprised to see most of them knew my blog and me at least by my name. Almost all of them knew I was not updating this blog for a while now. They gave me the push I was looking for to regularly update this blog. So I am going to update this blog regularly hereafter. I must thank all the people in SAP Labs for their support and encouragement.

If you are a consultant or a SAP AFS user, I am more than willing to give the opportunity to share your ideas on this blog. Please write to me on azwath@yahoo.com . We will discuss an important AFS topic in our next post.

Have a Great Day!

A Dream – A Reality

Azwath Mohammad — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:51:00 +0000

I want to keep this note on this historic day of May the 17th of 2009. My dream of living in a united country, free from war is not anymore a dream. Today it became a reality. Throughout last night I was looking at my mobile screen to see any news update about the situation in the country, I was virtually sleepless like most of the Sri Lankans I know of. Early in the morning today entire country was filled with the sounds of fire crackers for the historic moment of HE Mahinda Rajapakse, beloved president of Peoples Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka arriving to country from G11 summit. As he promised, he stepped in to a country which is free from terrorism and united after 500 years.

From the day I was born, I was hearing horror stories about the war and lived in fear. When I was small I remember how nervous I was when we knew there was a bomb blast in Colombo. We used to pray till my father came home from work. I know many people died in the trains and buses and on roads due to the bomb blasts. Among those died there were Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils. Of course the bomb did not know to target only people it wanted. I know many people died for the motherland in SL Army. Although I know most of them by their name and most of them I know personally very well, Raja Ayya is one of the closest to my heart. He is the one used to take me to the school when I was small and he loved me very much. Later he joined army. He visited my place and he liked food cooked by my mother a lot. He made the ultimate sacrifice for the motherland after helping some of the wounded in the battle field. I wish today the nation paid him the due respect. I feel very sad for all the Tamil youth died too, although they were fighting an unnecessary war. Probably they might not had any choice.

As most of my close friends would know, I wanted to see the change in this country and wanted to be an eye witness for that change. This with some other reasons I refused most of the offers came to me from all over the world. I am proud today to achieve what I wanted to achieve.

I must Thank the HE the president, Secretary of Defense and Commanders of Army, Head of Police and each and every soldier fighting, fought and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Lets work together and make the country proud. Sinhalese, Muslims, Tamils all are children of mother Sri Lanka. We are one nation.

SAP AFS 6.0 – Are you there?

Azwath Mohammad — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:50:00 +0000

SAP AFS 6.0 is not the latest version to talk about. But most of the organizations are looking at AFS 6.0 due to many reasons. The process of migrating from earlier versions (like 3.0 and 5.0) of AFS to this version is simplified with the use of simplified upgrade process. Unless if you have a real requirement to change the processes of your business and reporting, migration will help you to change your version without much trouble. This makes much more business sense since there is no much of a cost involved. It also will help businesses to change their SAP versions within a limited period of time without major cutovers and transition downtimes.

As I have discussed earlier in this blog major benefit from an operational point of view is the addition of Quality Management module in AFS 6.0. While this is a macro level benefit AFS 6.0 comes with one very significant change in category structures (if you are migrating from 3.0 environment to the6.0 environment). Configuring categories is simplified in this version. But the operational use will not change. This change will throw you some complications when you try upgrading the system. Standard categories in particular will not be transported (or you will have to make additional efforts in doing so) as you would like them to do. So I advise all of you to read the related notes before you attempt a migration from 3.0 to 6.0.

Another problem we encountered is on screen sequences. You might find some standard screens like AFS Valuation and costing 1 and 2 missing when you try creating materials after you complete your upgrade. This is because some of the settings related to screen sequence are not getting transported properly. You can check the screen sequence configs for understand this. Again SAP has a note addressing this question. It will populate the values to required tables in order to make the additional screens to appear. This error might occur even in fresh 6.0 installations with our experience.

Please always remember these problems can be sorted by SAP with their subsequent upgrades. So by the time you read these advise you might not need them

I think this information will save you at least few days which will otherwise be wasted in searching and figuring out the problems and answers. If you faced any other issues please let me know. Please leave your comments by clicking the comments link below.

SAP AFS Solutions for apparel industry

Azwath Mohammad — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:11:00 +0000

SAP solutions needs money, time and effort. This can be a small investment for some organizations, but for most of the apparel manufacturers and even for some retailers this can be quite a big investment. So in SAP AFS, the cost factor and recovering that cost can be much more significant than in some other industries. As an AFS consultant we should be aware of this.

Apparel trade is very volatile in nature. Markets are affected by many factors and the trade needs to adjust very quickly. Fluctuations can be high and hence the predictability is low. Industry changes day by day. SAP AFS needs to be very flexible in this aspect. Solutions need to be developed in reasonably short timelines.

With the challenges unique to the industry, the solution development has its own set of challenges. By its nature apparel industry is very labor intensive. Industry also works on a shorter cycle times. Changes are higher between products and even within the same product. All these together creates the requirement for a system which is simple to use, easy to maintain and highly flexible.

Every SAP AFS consultant must have these in back of their minds when they design a system for the apparel and footwear industry. Simplest systems will run longer with minimal intervention. Identifying the key reporting requirements and key processes and their requirements, analyzing them will give any consultant a good insight to the customer’s requirements. An AFS consultant can add great value in explaining and convincing the customer by weighing their complex reporting and operational requirements against the complexities created in the system and long term sustainability of the system. Simple systems are generally easy to maintain and upgrade. They are very flexible and can be automated easily.

I will go for a simpler system if it can cover 80% of my requirements, if accommodating the remaining 20% is going to complicate my system by another 80%. Here the customer will have to do some compromises as well. But they will enjoy more benefits in long term like accuracy of data, ease of maintenance and flexibility for the business to grow with a simpler solution.

How to write an InfoSet Query

Azwath Mohammad — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:53:00 +0000

As I promised last time, I am going to teach all of you about writing queries. There are three main types of SAP queries. They are;

SAP Standard query
SAP InfoSet Query
SAP Quick Viewer Query

For this exercise I am going to create an InfoSet query. We will be pulling data about purchasing which are in three tables using this query. Every step is explained with a screenshot. So I do not think anyone will have a problem in following the example.

When I started taking the steps down and attaching the screen shots to the document, it became too large to be published on my website. So I compiled the data into a PDF document. This is the link to download the ebook.

If you have any question about SAP queries leave a comment or contact me.

Some interesting special features of SAP AFS

Azwath Mohammad — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:01:00 +0000

At last found some time to write about SAP and SAP AFS. I was little busy last few days. I have been doing some experiments with SAP and AFS special features. I had few fundamental questions to answer for some time. I tried answering them for past few weeks.

In the apparel industry one of the main raw materials is the fabric. Fabrics are characterized with many subjective parameters like color, color shading and the types of fabric faults. On the other hand when it comes to storing of these fabrics we store them in rolls, while all the other transactions like purchasing and payments happens in length(M, Yd) or in weight(Kg, pound) units. Also we have an interesting question in classification of these materials.

I was working on warehouse management module of AFS. And found a simple and creative way of answering one of my questions listed above. In WM I was able to configure the roll level stock handling capability using Storage Unit management functionality. So there is no requirement to have one to one relationship between the roll and the length it contains. We can manage them separately.

It is not possible to have AFS special features enabled in quality management for the AFS versions before 6.0. But the basic quality allocation and releasing and blocking can be made available using simple IM functionality. Although very simple technically this is a very important functional step for the business.

On top of all these I was invited by ITToolBox to start an AFS blog there. So you can read my blog posts on ITToolBox by visiting this link ( The SAP AFS Blog ).

So some thoughts about the future posts. Most of my friends have asked me how they can write a query in SAP. So I though of publishing my next few posts on the topic how to write a SAP query. See you with interesting blog posts in near future.

Another SAP AFS Special feature: AFS Categories

Azwath Mohammad — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:08:00 +0000

In apparel and footwear industry it is very important to categorize materials based on various common features. For an example if you manufacturer a shirt, it can be categorized into high quality and low quality based on the quality of the product. If you manufacturer the same product for two or three countries the common industry practice is to have the same style, color and construction but the languages on the label, or packing items might vary according to the country the product is shipped. In this case the products are categorized by country.

It is very important to differentiate the different categories of products within the same product range. This is achieved with the usage of categories in SAP AFS. Basically categories can be used to group any set of data which have common features. For an example Quality and Country of shipment are features that can be used to categorize the product manufactured in above examples.

Categories need to be configured in the IMG. Then category indicators need to be assigned to the materials in order to make the materials category relevant. When this is done, the stock keeping strategy for these materials will change. Your stock will be categorized with the category it is assigned to. In other words there will be an additional level in defining stock. For an example if you had a finish good stock in batch “XS”, Special Stock “E” for the order “23000” in storage location “1100” of Plant “1000” with the introduction of categories you can further classify your stock to “Quality A” and “Quality B” for an example.

On the other hand the requirement calculation in MRP will also be based on the category. You can define requirement fulfillment strategy in customizing. For an example you can ask your MRP to fill the requirement with “Quality A” goods and then with “Quality B” goods in customizing.

Category is a functionality which can be used very creatively based on the requirement. On the other hand usage of categories must be evaluated very carefully. This change the stock and requirement creation strategy for the category enabled materials. On the other hand there are some limitations to the category enabled materials. Customizing of categories involved many steps. I will discuss this in my future posts.

If you have any problems you can email me on the email address shown in the introduction. Or leave your question as a comment to this post.

SAP Industry Solutions

Azwath Mohammad — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:28:00 +0000

By S.Suren

It is a known fact that SAP caters to different industry verticals by providing industry specific solutions. In this post I would like to give you an insight into how these industry specific solutions are developed for the different product offerings SAP have.

For instance when it comes to SAP Business One solution, when there is a need to cater to the requirements of a particular industry vertical, the separate add on for this vertical needs to be purchased by the customer. This add on is often a separate development of one of SAP’s Development Partner who have been doing SAP Consulting for the industry clients. This add on developed by the partner is later sent for approval to SAP AG where the solution is tried and tested before being available as a genuine SAP Add on for the particular industry vertical.

For SAP All in One solutions, that is for the higher end of the medium sized companies, the requirements (best in class practices) of the particular vertical is also preconfigured into the solution. This preconfiguration is submitted to SAP AG by the relevant development and/or channel partner and a certificate is obtained from SAP AG, certifying that this preconfigured solution is accepted to cater to the best in class practices of the proposed industry vertical.

As for R/3, the industry solutions are seamlessly integrated with the standard SAP components. This is then configured based on the requirements of the particular client. Therefore the client when purchasing SAP will be buying the relevant SAP Industry Solution suite.

Hope this post provided you with an insight into how SAP IS works.

Send in your comments and suggestions at ssurenlk@msn.com.

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

Grid value conversion facility in SAP AFS

Azwath Mohammad — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:20:00 +0000

This is another AFS Special article in the series on Grids. I have already introduced you to the grid functionality and usage of 3D Grids. There is another special functionality in AFS which solves a unique problem to the apparel and footwear industry.

Apparel is a global industry. Orders comes from one part of the world, manufacturing of raw material happens in some other place and garment manufacturing will happen in another part of the world. Some buyers refer their product sizes as “Small (Size S), Medium (Size M),…” and so on. Some refer their sizes as “10, 12,…). On the other hand some suppliers of raw materials will call Size S as 14” depending on the product you order and the place from which the supplier operates. So every apparel manufacturer faces the problem of communicating with external parties in the same language they do.

AFS has adopted a creative method of solving this problem. This is by using grid conversions. We will maintain grids internally as we identify them. But displayed grid values will differ based on the Customer, Supplier or Material. For an example supplier will refer the product size as 14” and customer will see their document as Size S while we maintain it as ST internally for manufacturing purposes.

This requires maintaining the grid conversion in the customizing. Here in customizing all the conversions will be maintained for Customer, Vendor and Material. Then we have to make the conversions available for particular customer, supplier and material in master data maintenance. If all three are maintained system will take the Customer as the first preference then the vendor and material in last and grids will be displayed accordingly.

I find this function really useful in operation. But again I do not think this functionality is used for its fullest potential. If you are using it and if you have any comments leave it here by adding a comment to this post.

I will show you how to configure this functionality in my future posts. If you have any questions or suggestions pleas contact me on the email in the introduction above.