An effective people and process design are critical to attaining business goals. Most S/4 implementations could expect a period of stabilization before all users adapt to the new system. While this may vary widely across S/4HANA implementations because of industry, process complexities, and organization culture, everyone can gain tips from another company’s implementation journey. These insights can help determine how to best leverage these lessons to reduce their own post-implementation difficulties for faster stabilization. One of the most common reasons implementations take more time for stabilization is attributed to designs focused on technical aspects without considerations of after-go-live data maintenance, people, and processing. Few of the processes and people related modifications that could be of value in Production Planning and Execution are summarized based on a medium-level engineering industry manufacturing company implementation. These are categorized under Production Master Data and Production Transaction Data.

1. Production Master Data:

Production master data considerations included Material Master and Production Version. (A) Material master creation and release with cost estimate consideration: Normally, medium-level companies do not consider including all SAP modules or functionalities in their SAP implementations. Most of the time, a comparison of value with cost considerations plays a role in these decisions. SAP MDM with all workflow setups is one such functionality that most, if not all, medium-level companies would consider adding to SAP system much later after initial implementation. Hence, it helps to have some ideas on how to leverage existing enhancements SAP provides to get desired functionalities. One such area is to address the common problem observed where new master data created are put to use before its costing run occurred. If the new material created is used for sales, production, or purchasing business processing without carrying out the cost estimate, the transactions in progress would be without a standard cost, which adversely affects costing and financial reporting. This is an area where system constraints need to be introduced through a custom change, as this is not provided as a standard feature. This constraint is to make sure only the Costing team sets the material to Release status, since a material can be put to use only if it has a material status as released. Using a material master change BADI such as BADI_MATERIAL_CHECK with method Save, it is possible to control the ability to set material status: any user other than the Costing role shall be able to set the value as 02 (design) only and the ability to set value 03 (released for production). The Costing team would then set status 03 only after a Costing run, which ensures business process transactions for this material can progress only after the standard cost estimate is complete. The technical field name for Material status is MARA-MSTAE(B) Production versions with priorities: Another area where a brief consideration should help streamline the Production Master Data is assigning suitable priorities for different production versions of the same produced material. An earlier adopted practice involved the creation of complex alternate sequences and using an enhancement to assign different priorities to different alternate sequences of the same Routing. This is because there is no feature in S/4 HANA to assign priorities for Production versions when the business wanted to use different combinations of BOM or Routings for the same validity periods. An easy way to address this is: Since the Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS), which was part of SAP-APO, is integrated with S/4 HANA, SAP functionality to assign priorities for different PPDS ‘Product data structures’ (which is called Production versions in S/4 HANA) should resolve this. This saves much time for users and relieves the master data team from their efforts to create complex load files for routing alternate sequences. An example is provided below where Production versions 100A, 100B, and 100C are provided priorities 0, 1, and 2 respectively, where 0 is having the highest priority. Maintain Additional PDS Data Fig. 1: A sample of Priority assignments to different Production Data Structures

2. Production Transaction Data:

(A) Use of right Production order parameters by different non-Production Departments: Production orders are used for many other organization requirements, such as for Engineering, R&D etc., and the specific needs of these areas are often overlooked. Added to that, the users in these departments may not be savvy with system use when compared to users in production execution who carry out daily production transactions in S/4. Business process warrants use of parameters by the departments to capture costs incurred in the right cost buckets. These could be Profit Centers, Settlement Receiver, etc. One such example could be that the Engineering Department and R&D need to select their own specific allowed Profit Centers; or another possibility could be that settlement receivers in a production order need to be ORD (Internal Order) and not Cost center (CTR). An enhancement using ‘BAPI_PRODORD_CHANGE BAPI: Change Production Order’ could easily check the compatibility between the Order Type, Profit Center, and Settlement Receiver Type parameters and ensure right values are used by different departments and introduce this constraint. (B) WM Material staging of components for goods issue to Production order: A Warehouse Management picking strategy often requires very well-streamlined stock management, where the system assumes put-aways are carried out to bins strictly as per first come first bin or any other strategy business adopts. Because of various reasons, such as delays in stock movements after a quality hold or release from blocks, operator errors, etc. stock quantities shown by system bins may vary from an accurate representation of actual stocks in real time. Hence, this affects the automatic picking strategy, by while the system attempts to pick up from the bins where ideally stocks are expected to be per preceding transactions. The warehouse employees have close to actual status information on stocks and their locations and this should help to pick up the right stocks and eliminate potential errors in WM staging with an automatic picking strategy. With this in mind, a custom screen design similar to the one shown below where actual stocks in bins are listed and shown for the operator to pick up is very useful. A sample of the simple screen development is shown below. Fig. 2: A sample Production order components picking based on actual stock availability Here, one component material for the production order is picked at a time by selecting the component using selection indicator shown. Similarly, bins from which it is picked up can be selected by the user. After picking, system refreshes and user could move on to next material and proceed to complete picking of all components. The BAPIs to be considered are – BAPI_WHSE_STOCK_GET_LIST: The result of this BAPI is a list of quants where this material has stocks. BAPI_WHSE_STOCK_GET_DETAIL: This BAPI helps to reads stock data per quant BAPI_PRODORD_WM_MAT_STAGING BAPI: To execute WM Material Staging for Production Orders once stocks have been picked up. (C) Restrict the ability to do goods receipt unless goods issue occurred S/4 HANA provides flexibility to carry out the goods receipt of a Production order, whether goods issue of all components used to produce the components have been carried out or not. However, this may lead to overlooking production order goods issue requirements, leading to the incorrect actual cost of productions recorded in system. This is unacceptable for Finance and Costing. A solution that could be considered is to have a check in the system during goods receipt whether goods issues of non-back flushed components have been completed in system or not. Only if goods issues have been completed, are goods receipt to be allowed otherwise provide an error showing goods issues are not complete. This check compares the Production order component quantity requirements shown in RESB table and see if the goods movement documents show the same quantities have been issued or not. Now, it is possible that for some components, less than planned quantity sufficed to produce the finished product and this could be true for materials such as chemicals. S/4 HANA provides an option to manually specify if goods issue for a component has been completed (even if less than planned quantity is issued) by flagging the indicator ‘Final Goods Issue’ during the transaction (table field, RSEB-KZEAR). The program could accordingly consider goods issues completed for this specific component. A Production Order Information System report could be used to periodically check components goods issue of orders with Final Goods Issue indicator flagged, and the user who flagged to follow up and check this indicator is used judiciously. This should help to make sure the on-going success of the overall process. Enhancement object that can be used: EXIT_SAPLMIGO_001 The above modifications are summarized in the following table –

Improvement Scope	Issue Detail and Consequences	Modification Approach and Rule	Result
Master data- Material status	Materials used for transactions before its cost estimate	Finance role only to set material status as released	Finance would set status only after cost estimate; std. cost estimate is always available for transaction data such as production orders
Master data- Production versions	Leverage PPDS functionality to assign priorities to Production Versions and eliminate complex Routing modifications	Use PPDS provided tile to set different priorities of Production versions (PV) especially when multiple PVs are valid for same periods	Good time and effort saving on master data maintenance as different production methods can be used with simple standard routings
Transaction Data-Engineering and R&D Production orders	Ensure costing needs for specific profit center and settlement rules for non-production production orders are addressed	Have a check between order type, profit center, and settlement receiver before production order save	Non-Production Production order costs are correctly allocated to cost buckets
Transaction Data-Warehouse stock selections for goods issue to order	Stock availability for picking to be user friendly and ability to validate actual stock and pick from available bins	Provide available stock bins list in screen below per production order component to be picked one at a time dynamically for easy pick	Easy visibility and ability to pick actual stock from bins appropriately. Picking error messages eliminated.
Transaction Data- Ensuring completeness of components goods issue before product goods receipt for orders	Many times operators do not carry out all goods issues for production orders causing incorrect cost variance calculations	Restrict ability to do goods receipt of a production order unless goods issue is completed or Final Goods Issue indicator is manually flagged	Stream lined process ensuring goods issues are always carried out as per actual consumption resulting in correct values for cost variance calculations

There could be other incremental changes possible that can be unique to specific customer implementations. A periodic review of business process design, data analysis, and a collaborative approach for improvements could hasten the path to better stabilization of S/4 system. Consider the above case examples. Start thinking towards such initiatives attempting towards stabilization post S/4 implementations.