I got a panic-type phone call from an R/3 site the other day: "The (standard) WIP (work in process) report has a column for the production order material’s short text, but in our system, we see nothing. The column is always blank!"

Of course, it becomes a lot easier to evaluate R/3’s month-end production cost and WIP calculations as too high or too low when you can see the text description of the material that the production order is requesting.

In this case, figuring out two relationships cleared up the mystery:

1. The short text of the material that you see when viewing a production order is not actually there. In a strange arrangement, data for each new production order is actually recorded in two header tables (unlike a sales order or a purchase order, which have only one), and neither of these stores the text. When you display a production order, R/3 actually has to fetch the text from the material’s material master each and every time.

2. The caller was still using R/3 release 4.0B. The standard WIP calculation report at that time did not include the same little "text fetch" routine that the Production Order Display transaction did (at least not in his 4.0B system). As a result, although the report has a column called "Short text," the value was blank every time.

With most SAP sites now using R/3 release 4.6, the relationships mentioned in numbers 1 and 2 might not be worth much more than a chance to win a free beer at the next company Silly Facts & Trivia contest. On the other hand, in regard to production order accounting (costs, WIP, variances), a lot of sites still feel the need to go beyond R/3’s standard reports and create custom reports. If this is the case, knowledge about where those material texts are hiding—as well as where they can be copied to so that all reports (custom and standard) have easy access to these descriptions—can be useful.

The rest of my article should take no more than five or six minutes to read. I will begin by offering some screenprints that demonstrate why this particular Release 4.0B user was experiencing the mystery of the blank short text WIP calculation standard report column. I will then describe how to copy your material master’s texts to the place where R/3 stores all the other CO module header data concerning PP production orders. The 4.0B WIP calculation report reads from that table. Also, anyone making custom reports about production orders’ costs, variances, or WIP almost certainly needs to use this table.

By the end of the next few pages, readers with even mild ABAP skill should be able to create the needed "text copy" program. Or, you can download my example program at the bottom of this article.

Where Are the Short Texts?

Each time an end user saves a new PP production order, header-related data is recorded in not one, but two places.

The first of these places is table AFKO. It does not have any field that can store a text. It stores the production order number, the material number, the start date, the planned finish date, and other data that’s useful to production people.

The second place is table AUFK. This is the CO module’s copy of the production order’s header data. Figure 1 shows an example entry. Notice that the field called Short text is blank. This may cause you to wonder why SAP bothered to put a field in this table if no text is actually stored there. However, this blank value phenomenon is only the case for orders that originate in the PP module. Texts are always stored in this field when orders originate in the CO module (i.e., the internal order).

You can see the impact of this relationship on the unsuspecting end user in Figure 2, a screenprint from the caller’s R/3 4.0B system’s standard WIP calculation report. Notice that the Short text column is blank, just like the Short text field was in Figure 1’s example AUFK table entry. (Not shown in Figure 2 is the unhappy expression on the end user’s face when viewing this blank spot).

Figure 1

Sample entry in table AUFK

Figure 2

Screenprint of the caller's R/3 4.0B system's standard WIP calculation report

Workaround: Copy the Texts from the Material Master to Table AUFK

Rather than force a dynamic text fetch instruction for each and every production order, you can create and run a simple program to copy the needed text from the material master’s text table (table MAKT) to the Short text field of order header table AUFK.

You can run this copy program once a month or so for any given range of order types. You would restrict its processing to only PP-related order types and/or any other selection criteria you find useful. My example selection screen for such a custom report is shown in Figure 3.

The program then looks for any PP orders in the AUFK table that still have a blank short text field (technical name is KTEXT). For those records, and only those records, the program finds a match in the PP module’s header table (i.e., AFKO) as a way to obtain the material master number.

At that point, it becomes a simple programming task to use that material master number to look up a text in table MAKT and copy it into table AUFK. You also might want to put some "write" commands in the program at the end, as a way to show the end user which texts were copied to where. An example output is shown in Figure 4.

Of course, messages to the end user are one thing, and functional workarounds are sometimes another. So, did the panic-stricken caller get resolution from my suggestion? In other words, did the copy text program actually copy the correct material text into the correct spot of the CO order header table, and did that, in turn, lead to a positive change in the WIP calculation report?

See Figures 5 and 6 for the answer. Figure 5 shows the same AUFK entry from Figure 1, but this time, it is after I ran my custom "text copy" program. Figure 6 shows what the (now smiling) end user sees in his standard WIP calculation report.

Figure 3

Example selection criteria to use with a copy text program

Figure 4

An example output to the end user after the copy text program finishes

Figure 5

An example entry in table AUFK after the text copy program runs

Figure 6

R/3's 4.0B standard WIP calculation report after the text copy program runs

Conclusion

Because of changes to how the standard program gets the material master’s short text, WIP calculation report readers using SAP R/3’s 4.6x release are perfectly fine without taking the workaround step mentioned in the prior section.¹

However, for at least some sites still using 4.0B, and for any site that might want to create custom WIP or production cost reports, having the short text of the material from the production order physically saved in the CO module’s order header table might be very helpful. At a minimum, this avoids the need to program your PP order cost, variance, or WIP reports to read from the material master merely to go to a text.

Kurt Goldsmith

Kurt Goldsmith is a senior business consultant for Enowa Consulting, specializing in the diagnosis and resolution of productivity-related integration issues between a company’s division of labor (end users, managers, executives) and SAP software (R/3, BW, APO, CRM). He also has a lifetime performance record of one win and two third-place finishes from five career starts as a thoroughbred racehorse trainer.

You may contact the author at kurt.goldsmith@enowa-consulting.com.

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