Using Plants

The Bike Company, a well-known manufacturer in the bicycle industry, is proud of its reputation for delivering high-quality bicycles to customers. With a strong commitment to excellence, the company aims to control and optimize its production processes by implementing SAP Digital Manufacturing. The company operates a single manufacturing facility and currently focuses on producing a single bicycle model. The facility is equipped with the necessary tools and staffed by skilled personnel to ensure efficient bicycle production.

In SAP Digital Manufacturing, a plant is a specific, discrete area where you manufacture a product and want to gather and track information. A plant can be one of the following entities:

• An entire area where you manufacture a product.
• A separate, smaller facility at a plant where you manufacture a product.

The Manage Plants application is used to set up plants. Each plant operates independently and maintains its own elements, such as Users, Materials, Bills of Material, Routings, and so on. To begin using the system, you must create at least one plant. For instance, you can start by creating a single plant, such as the Bike Manufacturing plant.

SAP Digital Manufacturing supports both discrete and process industries. Since both industries use different terminology, this setting allows tailoring the terminology of the system to the industry. 

The time zone is used to identify the geographic location and to use the plants local date and time. You can have several plants running on the same server, but these plants may not always be located in the same time zone. For example, one plant could be in Tokyo, Japan, and another in Berlin, Germany. The system reports use the time zone value specified for a plant.

A plant can be either local or remote. If it's a local plant, this means that execution is done in SAP Digital Manufacturing. If it's a remote plant, this means that execution is done in another system such as SAP Manufacturing Execution.

Each user in SAP Digital Manufacturing must choose the plant where they are operating.

The shop floor is where we further subdivide the plant into smaller organizational areas. In the following lessons, we'll explain the shop floor objects within the plant that help describe it in more detail. Most master data and configuration are specific to a plant, as each plant can have different manufacturing processes and products.