Explaining the Life Cycle of Process Orders

The following figure shows a typical lifecycle of a process order in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Digital Manufacturing:

It starts with the creation of the order (1) in the SAP S/4HANA system. At creation, the Production Supervisor specifies how many units of a product to manufacture with this order, for example 1000 liters of carbonated beverage. Then, they release the process order in SAP S/4HANA and the integration component automatically transfers the process order to SAP Digital Manufacturing.

When all necessary production preparations are completed, for example, detailed resource planning, component staging, and cleaning the reaction vessels, the Production Supervisor releases the order to the shop floor (2). The order release authorizes the Shop Floor Personnel to produce the specified quantity of the material. You can release the entire quantity or less to the shop floor, to balance, for example, production capacity load or resource and material availability constraints. When you release less than the entire quantity, you can release one order multiple times until the sum of all released quantities reaches the ordered quantity.

At order release, the system creates Shop Floor Control (SFC) numbers according to the quantity settings of the material master of the produced good and the SFC number creation rules. From a business perspective, you can interpret the SFC number in the process industry context as the production batch number or production lot number.

Note

What is a Shop Floor Control (SFC) number?

An SFC is a unique identifier representing a specific instance of a particular material being built during the manufacturing process. In practice, if you manage your manufactured material in batches, you interpret one SFC number as one production batch in SAP Digital Manufacturing. For example, in SAP S/4HANA, you plan to produce 1000 x 1-liter bottles of carbonated beverage in one process order. Due to capacity constraints, the bigger reaction vessel that you initially planned to use is not available. Instead, you must use the smaller reaction vessel and perform the production process twice with half the quantities. You split the order into two parts, with each part producing 500 x 1-liter bottles of carbonated beverage. Technically, you release the process order in SAP Digital Manufacturing two times with half the planned quantity per release. You don't want to track each individual bottle, but you want to know whether the bottle was manufactured in the first or second partial order quantity. Therefore, you create one SFC number for each of the two partial orders. If there are quality problems, you can only track the SFC number, but you can’t identify individual items (bottles) in the SFC number.

Furthermore, the system references a BOM and a production recipe. Usually, both come from the SAP S/4HANA system and are automatically transferred together with the order. Alternatively, you can enrich the BOM and/or master recipe in SAP Digital Manufacturing and use that information instead of the information imported together with the process order.

Based on the identified recipe, the system puts the SFC into the queue of the first manufacturing phase (3). The Operator who is responsible for the execution of the first step reviews the queued orders using the Production Operator Dashboard (POD) for Order Processing. In the POD, the operator enters their work center and logs the start of the manufacturing phase by choosing a respective button. If necessary and maintained in the master data, they display work instructions that explain details of the production process or safety instructions. Then, the operator records which and how many components of which component batch they consumed during the phase (4). They then collect extra data (for example, data about the manufacturing process and information about the produced batch, 5) that are required to document the production process.

If in-process quality inspection is required, the operator records the respective data in the POD (6). If non-conformances are detected, the operator can maintain the respective data (for example, type of defect and a description, immediate actions, and so on) in a nonconformance record (7).

After the operator has finished their work, they document the yield and scrap quantity of the phase, and how long they needed to perform the phase. They then complete the SFC at this phase and the system routes the SFC to the next phase (8) of the recipe. The production process continues until the SFC has gone through all production phases (9). When the operator at the last manufacturing phase completes the SFC at this phase, the SFC status changes to done. The system puts this product to inventory by creating an inventory record (10).

Note

Since the process order was imported from the SAP S/4HANA system, all component consumptions, yield, scrap quantities, and production times are automatically transferred to SAP S/4HANA.

The POD is the user interface (UI) that users use to perform a multitude of activities on the shop floor against the SFC/production lot. You can adapt the UI and the underlying functions to your company's use cases: From a simple production process over capturing of assembly or quality data, to the display of 3D working instructions.