Recipes detail the specific activities required to manufacture a finished or semi-finished product. The Master Data Specialist also determines the order in which the Shop Floor Personnel must perform these activities. For example, a recipe for producing a carbonated beverage includes the operations, Mixing, Bottling, and Packaging and Final Inspection, to be performed in the sequence illustrated in the following figure:
In process industries, operations are divided into smaller steps that are called phases. A phase describes the physical steps an operator or a machine must perform. For example, the mixing operation consists of three phases: adding premix, mixing, and cleaning of the reaction vessel. As shown in the figure, the three phases are performed sequentially, meaning that the operator must first complete the phase adding premix before they can start mixing. The third operation of our example recipe (packaging and final inspection) has two phases. To perform the final inspection of the product, it is not required that the worker waits until all bottles have been packaged. Therefore, the packaging phase branches and the final inspection phase start while the machine is still packing the bottles on the transport pallet.
To define the physical location where the Shop Floor Personnel must perform each activity, the Master Data Specialist assigns a work center to each activity in the recipe. In our example, the Shop Floor Personnel perform the "Mixing" activity of the beverage at work center "Mixing I," the "Bottling" activity at work center "Bottling II," and so on. In process industries, work centers are often also called resources. In our example, you can interpret the work center "Mixing I" is a reaction vessel in which an operator mixes various ingredients for the beverage. Usually, reaction vessels can perform multiple activities at the same time, for example, mixing, heating, weighting, and so on.
Also, the Master Data Specialist can assign work instructions to an activity. For instance, a work instruction for the "Bottling" operation is a document illustrating the safety measures an operator must respect when performing this step.
Recipes describe not only the default make-to-stock manufacturing process of a finished good or an assembly. The Master Data Specialist can also set up special recipes in SAP Digital Manufacturing, for example, a customer-specific production process when creating prototypes or special variants: For example, the mixing and bottling process are the same as for the make-to-stock routing. However, since the customer wants a different label and the bottles must be packaged in a special way, the third operation is different to the make-to-stock recipe. It considers that the bottles are not packaged on the usual pallet, but into sixpacks.
The Master Data Specialist can also define recipes for rework. The first activity in this recipe is an inspection activity where a qualified Production Worker investigates the defect, for example, labels were incorrectly attached to the bottles. Based on their findings, they route the good to a repair station where another Production Worker carries out the repair, for example unpacking, relabeling, and repacking. Unlike a make-to-stock recipe, which the Master Data Specialist assigns to the material master of the manufactured product, they assign such a repair recipe to a list of potential defects. When a Production Worker records a defect, the system automatically routes the product to the repair recipe. The SAP Digital Manufacturing system tracks the entire flow of goods through all production activities for subsequent analysis.
To maintain a recipe, the Master Data Specialist uses the Manage Recipes/Routings app in SAP Digital Manufacturing. Similar to the material master, the Master Data Specialist can transfer a recipe from SAP S/4HANA and enrich it in SAP Digital Manufacturing with manufacturing-specific information. Alternatively, they can directly maintain a recipe in SAP Digital Manufacturing and assign this recipe as the default recipe in the material master. For example, since detailed work instructions aren't required in SAP S/4HANA, the Production Master Data Specialist can create work instruction records needed by the Shop Floor Personnel. They can attach the records to a recipe after transferring the master data record from SAP S/4HANA to SAP Digital Manufacturing.
When imported from SAP S/4HANA, the recipe also contains the BOM information and the materials that are manufactured using this recipe.