Releasing Process Orders

The next step in the lifecycle of a process order is the order release. From a business perspective, the Bike Company releases process orders that are ready for production execution. This means that, for example, all required components are available (→ availability checks) and the manufacturing resources have enough free capacity to execute the order(s) as planned (→ capacity evaluation and leveling). As you can see in the figure, you release an order after performing availability checks and/or capacity evaluation:

We already discussed the Material Availability Check and the Batch Number Assignment in unit 4, lesson 1: Planned Order Conversion.

What happens during capacity evaluation? Similar to component checks, the manufacturing resources, for example, a reaction vessel, must have enough free capacity so that the shop floor personnel can execute an order operation on that resource. Capacity evaluation compares the capacity offered by a resource to the capacity required by an operation/phase. If there is enough capacity, you can execute the order as planned. Otherwise, the production supervisor must reschedule orders that are currently allocated to this reaction vessel so that enough free capacity is available to execute the order in question.

After the production supervisor has performed all foreseen checks, they release the order. Only then can you execute the subsequent processing steps, such as order printing, goods issue postings, confirmations, and goods receipt postings in the SAP S/4HANA system.

If you configured the SAP S/4HANA system accordingly, the system automatically prints the shop order papers upon order release. Your shop floor personnel might require the shop order papers to process an order if your company does not follow a paperless production process, for example, using a manufacturing execution system. Here are some examples:

• The shop floor personnel documents production efforts on time tickets and confirmation slips.
• The shop floor personnel uses pick lists or goods issue slips to withdraw components from inventory. Sometimes, warehouse personnel uses these documents to execute material staging.

Finally, the lifecycle image shows the optional step, download to process control: You use this functionality in SAP S/4HANA if you execute your production process leveraging a manufacturing execution system (MES), for example, SAP Digital Manufacturing or any other third party MES. After order release, the SAP S/4HANA system transfers the order and related data to the MES that takes over execution from that point in time. During production execution, shop floor personnel interact with the MES by confirming produced quantities, efforts, component consumptions, and so on. Then, the MES transfers this data back to the SAP S/4HANA system (upload from process control) to ensure that data across systems is consistent.

The SAP S/4HANA system offers various options to release process orders. From a business perspective, releasing an order (or parts of it if you release phases) informs your manufacturing personnel that they can now execute the process order as specified. In our Bike Company, a released order for 1000 cans of Red Bike Paint triggers the production of the respective quantity. Review the following figure for more information:

You must first decide whether you want to release the entire process order or individual phases of the order. If you release the entire order, the system automatically releases all phases of the order. If you release individual phases of the order, you must respect the sequence of phases. Note that, although it is technically possible to release operations of a process order in SAP S/4HANA, this variant is rarely used in practice.

In most cases, you release the entire process order so that the shop floor personnel can execute all production steps without additional system constraints. However, if you want to ensure that a subsequent phase can only be executed after a previous phase was completed, you release the phases of a process order one after the other. From a business perspective, you typically choose the latter approach for complex orders (with many phases) that require that the sequence of phases is strictly followed.

After you have decided whether you want to release entire orders or phases of one order, you must decide how you want to do the release in the SAP S/4HANA system:

There are two options:

Here, you release the objects, that is the process order or the phase, separately in the system. For example, if you receive an express order from a customer and you immediately want to start production of the ordered product, you manually create and directly release the express order so that the requested product can be immediately produced. If you must strictly follow the sequence of phases, for example in pharmaceutical production, you can release the next phase of a process order after the production supervisor validated the previous phase.

Note that the production supervisor must execute a high number of manual steps in the SAP S/4HANA system if you decide to use individual release. Therefore, this approach is not often used in practice.

Here, you select multiple process orders (if you opted to release orders) or phases (if you opted to release phases) and release them collectively, for example, using the Manage Process Orders or Mass Processing: Process Orders app. To select process orders to be released, you can specify various selection criteria, for example, plant, production scheduler, release date, material, and so on. In our Bike Company example, the Production Supervisor releases all orders that are due for execution in the week prior to execution.