Confirming Process Orders

Let's continue with the next step in the production process: Manufacturing the bike paint and executing order confirmations. After the shop floor personnel at the Bike Company has taken the necessary materials from the warehouse, they mix the bike paint and fill it into cans as stated in the recipe. For each phase of the order, they have to, for example, keep track of how many liters of paint they have mixed and how many cans they have filled, report when they began and completed the work, and how much time they've spent on the entire order or on the individual phases of the order. In SAP S/4HANA, this process is known as process order confirmations.

Confirmations are the premise for progress control and the basis for cost charging of internal activities performed for the order. For this reason, confirmations should be carried out by the shop floor workers as promptly as possible. You can confirm individual phases of one order or entire orders. As a prerequisite, the orders and/or phases must be released.

The following image shows an example of a confirmation on the phase level of an order, and the effect of the confirmation posting to the order:

The phase confirmation provides the following information:

• Phase quantities: Yield and scrap

  The yield quantity is the amount of the partially manufactured product which was produced during this phase and can be processed in the next phase. The scrap quantity is the amount of partially manufactured products that had to be scrapped when the shop floor personnel executed this phase.

  Let's apply this to our paint manufacturing example: In the second phase of the first manufacturing operation (→ see unit "Analyzing Master Data" of this course) , we add the pigment to the basic paint in a mixer. When discharging the mixer, some residue remains on the walls of the mixing resource due to the high viscosity of the liquid. Therefore, from the total 1000 liters, only 995 liters proceed to the filling operation. The residue of 5 liters must be scrapped when the production personnel cleans the mixer.

• Actual dates: Start and finish

  You enter the actual start and finish date of a phase which the production supervisor can use for analysis purposes or rescheduling of subsequent production.

• Machine time and labor time

  The time elements machine time and labor time correspond to the various time elements of a phase. Machine and labor time define the working time of the resource and the operator, respectively, that is required to execute the manufacturing phase. Usually, these times depend on the number of items that shall be manufactured.

  In the paint manufacturing example, the automated filling machine needs 15 minutes to automatically fill 100 cans with red paint. The worker needs 5 minutes to package the 100 cans on a pallet. Furthermore, a fixed preparation time of 1.5 hours is required to clean the resource before and after filling. When filling 500 cans, the shop floor personnel post a total machine time of 5 x 15 minutes = 75 minutes, a total labor time of 5 x 5 minutes = 25 minutes, and a fixed preparation time of 1.5 h for this phase of the process order.

After posting the confirmation, the order, operation, and phase status values update to either partially confirmed (PCNF) or confirmed (CNF): An order is partially confirmed if the shop floor personnel has confirmed at least one, but not all of the phases (operation/phase status PCNF or CNF). An order is finally confirmed when the shop floor personnel has finally confirmed all phases (status CNF).

As stated above, the Bike Company has two main options to confirm process orders in the SAP S/4HANA system:

Depending on the Bike Company's business requirements, the system offers various variants for order confirmation. From all available options, the following two are most frequently used:

• Process order confirmation on order header level

  In this scenario, you enter a confirmation for the entire order. From a business perspective, you usually use this scenario for orders with only one or few phases, or for orders where you are not interested in the detailed order progress. If you enter a confirmation on order header level, the system automatically confirms all phases. You can either confirm the order in one confirmation posting, or post multiple order confirmations until the order quantity was reached. After posting an order confirmation, the system sets a respective confirmation status on order header level.

• Time ticket confirmation on phase level

  In this scenario, you enter a confirmation for each phase in the order. From a business perspective, you usually use this scenario for bigger orders containing many manufacturing steps where you want to get a detailed overview about the progress of each manufacturing phase. Similar to the previous case, you can either confirm each phase in one confirmation posting, or post multiple phase confirmations until each phase of the order is fully confirmed. After posting a phase confirmation, the system sets a respective confirmation status on phase and order header level.

Due to the different requirements that arise in practice, SAP provides several confirmation apps, for example:

• Confirm Process Order
• Confirm Process Order Phase
• And other variants for confirmation

If you made a mistake, you can of course also cancel a confirmation (see Canceling of confirmations).

As shown in the lifecycle figure above, you can also upload data from a process control or manufacturing execution system (MES). If your company uses an MES system, the shop floor personnel interacts with the MES instead of the SAP S/4HANA system. However, confirmation data is also available in the SAP S/4HANA system since the MES automatically transfers data recorded in the MES via an interface to the SAP S/4HANA system.

You now know that there are two options to confirm process orders. Let's get to know how these options are executed in SAP S/4HANA. In the following demonstration, you will learn how to confirm a process order on header level and analyze the effects of the confirmation.

In the following demonstration, you will learn how to confirm a process order on phase level and analyze the effects of the confirmation.