Describing SAP Ariba 2311 Release Features

This feature supports the following:

• Decimal points up to three decimal places in shipped quantity values in ship-notice advanced packaging, instead of rounding a decimal to the nearest whole number. This makes it possible for shipped quantity values to match the quantity values in the related purchase order that use decimals.
• Decimals at the level of packed material.
• Decimals for Auxiliary materials.
  Note

  • Decimals are not supported for upper level packaging material, in case of multi level packaging.
  • Three decimal places are supported if the supplier adds more than three decimal places at the point of ASN creation. Before they reach the packaging step, rounding to the next higher number for three decimals occurs.
• Assignment fields in default packaging instructions for Excel upload.

The following fields are updated:

• Packed/shipped quantity on Confirm Packaging screen
• Quantity field for capacity in Define Instructions screen
• Adds support for decimal points in the Capacity and Maximum Capacity fields of packaging instructions, in Excel and json API formats.

This feature adds the Order Confirmation Excel template to the document-type choices of customization projects that a buyer administrator can create with the Customization Self Service tool. A buyer administrator can choose this document type to revise and enhance the standard Order Confirmation template for Upload/Download.

A buyer administrator might decide to make the following changes to the standard Excel spreadsheet in a customization project for the Order Confirmation template:

• Hide optional standard attributes.
  Note

  As shown in Figure 1, optional standard attributes display with a blue checkmark. You can uncheck any optional standard attributes you do not want to remove them from your customized template.

  Required standard attributes display with a greyed-out checkmark. You cannot remove any required standard attributes.

• Rename standard attributes.
• Add custom attributes.
• Change the order of the columns.
• Give standard and custom attributes a different column name, including for translations.
• Make optional standard attributes required.

When a buyer assigns a customized Order Confirmation template for Upload/Download to a supplier, and the supplier runs an Order Confirmation job for information from that buyer, the downloaded Excel file shows the buyer's customizations of the template. This customization might include a different order of the columns or additional columns that are not in the standard template.

This feature adds the following functionality to Upload/Download jobs for job types Forecast, Inventory, Replenishment, and Manufacturing Visibility:

• Exclude planning items that do not have time-series planning data.

  When you create a Forecast, Inventory, Replenishment, or Manufacturing Visibility job, the Upload/Download Job page now displays a checkbox with the label Only download planning records with positive or negative time series data. When you check this checkbox, the downloaded Excel file only includes planning records that have at least one positive or negative value in the specified time window.

• Explicitly specify a time window for downloading planning data.

  With this feature, when you create an Upload/Download job with job type Forecast, Inventory, Replenishment, or Manufacturing Visibility, you must define the following fields to specify a time window for downloading the data:

  • Time bucket: The available time buckets are Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. The following table shows the maximum date range for each time bucket.

    Time Bucket	Maximum Date Range
    Daily	1825 days
    Weekly	260 weeks
    Monthly	60 months
    Quarterly	20 quarters
    Yearly	10 years

  • Start: The starting date in the time window. You can define the starting date in the following ways:
    • Current: The starting date is the current date for the time bucket.
    • Previous: The starting date is a previous date in the time bucket. An additional field displays for you to enter a numeric value.
    • Custom: The starting date is a custom date. An additional field displays for you to enter a custom date.
  • End: The ending date in the time window. You can define the ending date in the following ways:
    • After: An additional field displays for you to enter a numeric value. The ending date is the date after the number of time buckets specified by this value. For example, if the Time bucket is Daily, and you enter 250 for the value, the ending date is after 250 days. If the time bucket is Weekly, and you enter 26 for the value, the ending date is after 26 weeks.
    • Custom: The ending date is a custom date. An additional field displays for you to enter a custom date.

  The read-only Report period field displays the time window.

  The following table shows some examples where the current date is May 1, 2023.

  Time bucket	Start	End	Report period
  Daily	Current	After 365 days	From Current to (Current + 365 days) 5/1/2023 to 4/29/2024
  Daily	Previous 10 days	After 10 days	From (Current - 10 days) to (Current - 10 days) + 10 days 4/21/2023 to 4/30/2023
  Weekly	Previous 1 weeks	Custom 10 May 2023	From (Current - 1 weeks) to 5/8/2023 4/24/2023 to 5/8/2023 The Weekly time bucket begins on the Monday of the week.
  Monthly	Custom 1 Mar 2023	Custom 1 May 2023	3/1/2023 to 5/1/2023 The Monthly time bucket begins on the first day of the month.
  Quarterly	Previous 1 quarters	After 1 quarters	From (Current - 1 quarters) to (Current - 1 quarters) + 1 quarters 1/1/2023 to 1/1/2023 The Quarterly time bucket begins on the first day of the quarter.
  Yearly	Previous 1 years	After 2 years	From (Current - 1 years) to (Current - 1 years) + 2 years 1/1/2022 to 1/1/2023 The Yearly time bucket begins on the first day of the year.

  In Figure 2, the time bucket is Daily, Start is three days prior to today, and End is 300 days after today.

  

• Include time bucket granularity in Excel file.

  This feature adds the time bucket granularity to the end of the heading in cell A3 (row 3, column 1) in the Excel file. For example, the value in cell A3 for a Replenishment job with the Daily time bucket is Ariba Supply Chain Collaboration - Replenishment - Daily.

  Caution

  Review the scripts you use on Excel files created from Upload/Download jobs to determine if you need to make any edits to address this change.

Previously created Upload/Download jobs with type Forecast, Inventory, Replenishment, or Manufacturing Visibility are migrated using the new time-window format to maintain existing behavior.

• Time bucket: The Time bucket is set to the same time bucket.
• Start: Start is set to Current.
• End: End is set to After the number of time buckets defined by the job.

Prior to this feature, the length for all time buckets was defined in years. With this feature, the length is defined using the time bucket's granularity. To convert the length to the new format, the time window is converted to the number of days (*365) for Daily, weeks (*52) for Weekly, months (*12) for Monthly, or quarters (*4) for Quarterly.

This feature adds additional options for default packaging instructions. These options provide more flexibility to suppliers for packing specific items.

The following rule is introduced in the Handling Unit supplier profile that enables default packaging instructions as a default in addition to specific instructions:

• The Allow suppliers to choose default packaging instructions for buyer parts that already have part specific instruction rule is added to the handling unit supplier profile in Create handling unit profile for Ship Notice. When buyers check this rule, their suppliers can determine how to pack items that the buyers have already provided part-specific instructions about.

These enhancements provide the capability to use the assignment information for generic packaging instructions. Earlier, this was limited to material-specific packaging instructions.

There are now more determination options available for generic packaging instructions, like those based on Vendor ID or Plant information.