Early Inspection lot for Batch activated material

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Dear friends

I have a process order for a month,where in PP is confirming production on daily basis( partial confirmation).The material is activated for a batch and I have activated early lot in inspection setup.On the first day I got the early lot after release of process order for the month.But as and when our PP is confirming the production on daily basis I am getting the new lot .Now my requirement is I have to get early lot for each batch so that quality results will be entered for the same.

Please help me how to go about it.I am in ECC6.0.

Thanx in advance.

Kavita

[Craig]

Look at inspection control in the 04 inspection setup for the material.

Craig

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Hello Mr.Craig

Thax for U R reply.

Control Inspection lot : Early lot creation for order item

I am getting the inspection lot for every partial confirmation by PP.But the requirement of early lot will not be helpful as confirmation will be done on next day and new lot will be availble after confirmation only.

Regards

Kavita

[Craig]

What are you making? If you can use PP-PI you can use paritial lots and record results for different batches.

In PP you don't have that same functionality.

I believe your going to have to have separate PP orders for each batch in your case.

Correct me if I'm wrong... I bet your using a single production order, but you change batch numbers daily yet you want to continue to use the same order. On what frequency or basis do you generate new production orders?

Craig

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Mr.Craig

Thanx a lot.

We are making ABC chemical and using PP-PI.
As rightly mentioned by you we are creating one process order for a month and daily partial confirmation will be done.Each days production is considered as batch eg for 1st it is 01102007 and for 2nd 02102007.But I am getting the Insp lot after confirming the production by PP, then what is significance for early lot creation control.How to get early lot in these cases.

Regards

[ask]

Kavita,
Early lot is useful when you intend inspect the abcth you are producing prior to its GR. Upon GR, the quantity gets credited the the inspection lot if open, or goes to unrestrictd if the lot was accepted.
If you are creating a new batch (diff than that in the order header), the system will create a new lot with the GR, becuase it s a quantity of the material that is never inspected. I am not sure, how do you intend to utilize Early GR if you have one order for the month and new batches are created with GR every day.
May be you want to state what you want to achieve rather than just saying early lot function does not work.
Let us know

[Craig]

Without really knowing your process and product it's hard to comment. But.......

I had a client like yours that was doing one process order per month per product and they changed the batch daily. A program ran at the end of the month and all current orders were closed and a new one opened for each material number they produced. The ONLY reason they got away with that is that they implemented without QM long before I got there! I was brought in a few years after the fact to implement QM. This process caused all kinds of problems!!! Had I been there early on I would have fought tooth and nail against it.

I think if you posted this process to the PP forum you would get consensus that it is not a good thing to do if you can at all avoid it. Because of this process, in their case, it meant that all the inspection lots had to be created manually and were never stock relevant.

One of the other bad things is that you can never assign batch numbers to your orders and interface with plant labelling equipment. Maybe your not doing that now but someday you might want to. It also means you always really on person doing the GR or confirmation to not make a typo when enterring in the batch number.

You also won't have good tracablilty in the batch where-used structures. If a bad raw material is found, your minimum recall amount would be a full month of production. SAP won't be able to tell you what particular batch it went into. As far as it sees, it went into all 30 batches.

Since your using one production order and thus one inspection lot, no dynamic modification functionality can be used. You also will never be able to use inspection lot characteristic values in certs, all results will have to come from the batch. Defect notifications are usually set up as one per lot. Your utilization of notifications and the resultant statistics will be greatly impaired.

There is also no formal UD for the batch and no good mechanism to hold material in QI for additional investigation. No accountablity for approval.

If this is not a totally continuous process you might lose the ability to identify issues and problems. I.e. if you produce product A for five days in the begining of the month and 3 days at the end of the month, in SAP it will look like one run. If one run used excessive amounts of raw material and had high waste amounts, you won't see it.. it will be averaged in with the other run. So true costing of the product/batch would be suspect.

None of these might be major concerns now, but someday, you might find additional functionality and expanded use of SAP greatly limited. Also, if your supplying chemicals to the food or pharmaceutical industries, you would stand a good chance of failing a vendor audit with this process.

If you are newly implementing, then the PP-PI person should reconsider this. No doubt.. it makes things easier on PP people. But it is usually not in the best interests of the company overall or the SAP system.

But since you might be stuck with this already and you are using PP-PI, you could use parital lots and inspection points. Each inspection point is basically a new batch. Use the inspection point identifer to capture the batch number as well. Since each inspection point can have multiple operations, use an operation 10 for in-process testing, and operation 20 for final approval testing. When you manually (you'll have to manually do this), valuate the inspection point the lab tech person will have to make sure they are using the right batch number in the confirmation of the inspection point. This could be a prime place for errors and typos.

The other very simple work around, is that at the begining of every day someone receipts 1 kg or lb of the material being produced that day. Then your lot is created in the begining of the day for you.

If you can, push back hard against this one process order a month concept.

I would really like to hear thoughts on this from others in the forum. Maybe I'm way off base. Or maybe others can think of other reasons this should or shouldn't be done. I can maybe see this process being needed primarily in a distillery or refinery.

Craig

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Mr.Craig and Mr.Anand

Thanx a lot for your valuable comments,but I could not able to come out of the problem.

Regards

[ask]

Hi,
I don't know whether you answered this already...Can you not use inprocess inspections and set up the routings / master recipe to create partial lots and a new batch with each partial lot? That way, every day when mfg confirms the quantity, a new partial lot and a new batch can be created. You can inspect the partial lot and give the usage decision for it. Though it will not control stock movements, being inprocess, you may be able to put other controls like operation confirmation by QC personnel etc..
does this make sense? Have you explored this or is it too late in the design process?

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Mr. Anand

The quantity has to come to Quality stock and then it has to be cleared by QM ie means stock relevant.We are getting the lot after confirmation of production by PP but the requirement is early lot for batch activated material.We do not want to use 03 inspection type.


Regards

[Craig]

What about the suggestion of just doing a GR for a very small qty at the begining of the day? Since you probably have a standard batch number for each day, why can't the person doing the final GR at the end of the day, just go in and do small receipt for the next day's batch number while they are confirming?

Craig

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Mr.Craig

PP is doing process order for the month only.They are confirming the production partially on next day.

Regards

[Craig]

But I am getting the Insp lot after confirming the production by PP, then what is significance for early lot creation control

Yes.. I know its once a month. But you said in a earlier posting, (see quote above), that you got lots but they weren't early enough since the confirmation was done at the end of the day.

So why can't you confirm a small insignificant amount first thing in the AM? Or better yet, do it the night before right after confirming the day's production.

Craig

[Kavita Kulkarni]

Mr.Craig

Thanx a lot.

PP is not ready to confirm small bit of production if that was the case then they could have done daily process order.

My question is ,if a material is treated as batch and if we are doing partial confirmation then what is the significance of early lot creation.

Regards

[Craig]

This no significance because your not using it the way SAP intended. Since your not using process orders as SAP intended, then you can't expect the inspection lots to work as you think they should.

PP is not ready to confirm small bit of production if that was the case then they could have done daily process order.

No... by confirming a small portion they are still avoiding the need to create, plan, schedule and release all the individual process orders.

I still believe using monthly process orders is a bad design and was never a process that SAP supports or endorses as a best practice. I am sure that it will cause or does cause additional integration issues to be addressed and will limit reportig capabilities.

Again, almost all my experience has been in chemicals and pharm and I can guarantee that this process is not used very often. I know its not used at DuPont, FMC, Lynodel, Rohm&Haas, ICI Chemicals, BMS, or Millenium Chemicals. I know that these are not the end-all and be-all of chemical companies but it is certainly a very good cross-section and probably covers the vast majority of the various types of chemical manufacturing you can have.

The one company I know it was used at was a small botique, privately owned chemical company. They implemted PP-PI by itself in their initial rollout. When additional functionality was added, they paid the price.

Craig