Overview
Normally, the postings of overhead, WIP, and variance values are linked with business events like goods movement, activity confirmation, and technical completion of manufacturing orders. No period-end activities are needed.
However, if necessary, adjustments can be made, even if event-based production cost posting is activated. Indeed, exceptions may occur. This can primarily be due to two reasons, such as the following:
- Errors in event-based postings for order exceptions, for example, in work in progress (WIP) calculation or variance postings.
- Transactions, including journal entry postings, allocations, and settlements from other objects, which trigger postings not managed in an event-based manner.
Error Handling Process
First, you can check the event-based production cost postings and discover whether some problems are to be solved. For this, you can use the following apps:
- Order Exception Monitor – An event-based app that gives you an overview of the latest problems per type. You can then navigate from one of its cards to more detailed apps.
- Manage Product Costing Errors – An app that enables you to list event-based posting errors, identify source transaction details, simulate the impact of corrections performed, and manually delete errors.
Then, it is still possible to review event-based errors that need to be reprocessed. Therefore, you can use post-process Fiori apps, to ensure that the costs of goods manufactured are capitalized as WIP or posted as variance correctly.
Depending on the situation, you can run jobs through the following:
Postprocess Event-Based Postings—Overhead Calculation app: This app helps detect and correct errors (such as errors due to goods movement, confirmation, data out of validity in the overhead costing sheet, or blocked postings). A new overhead calculation is run after correction.
Postprocess Event-Based Postings - Product Costing app: This app helps detect, simulate resolution, and correct errors due to exceptions (such as postings out of the event-based posting scope) or incorrect master data/configuration. From there, you can run jobs for unsettled orders to valuate WIP or variances or reevaluate already settled orders for adjustments in the calculation.
After this last step, you can check again to ensure that there are no more errors and that all calculations have been performed. In Order Exception Monitor app, the errors have disappeared.
AI-Assisted Error Resolution
It is also possible to include Joule in the error handling approach.
It can help the cost accountant (Business role SAP_BR_PRODN_ACCOUNTANT) to reduce the time spent on identifying and resolving errors in production cost postings. It minimizes manual effort by having proactive error notifications and helps clarify resolution.
A typical scenario can be:
Situation handling: event-based notifications are generated and displayed on the My Home page for recipient users. Beforehand, situations (Trigger objects and events) have been identified. For example, an error from event-based order posting (WIP posting) can trigger a situation with an error that is displayed.
Error explanation: When prompted, Joule gives input about the errors’ context, displays event-based errors and explains their root causes. For example, the user can prompt "Show me errors for company code 1010". Joule provides the G/L accounts that are blocked or wrongly assigned and caused errors. A link to explain the error is available.
To start error handling from a situation on your home page, you can select the situation and the details will be displayed. You can also ask Joule for more details.
The prerequisites are:
- Activation of the scope item 3F0: Event-Based Production Cost Posting
- Joule with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is activated
For further details, please refer to the following: