Gain Performance in Scheduling Agreement Processing for Just-in-Time / Just-in-Sequence Suppliers

The solution for Analysis and Copying of SD Scheduling Agreements (transaction SACO) has been released as of SAP ERP 6.0, Enhancement Package 2, as part of the industry extension Discrete Industries & Mill Products (ECC-DIMP 602).  This solution is very beneficial for suppliers running their Order-to-Cash process based on scheduling agreements, a process well-established in automotive and other manufacturing industries.

The sales document flow tends to grow massively over the lifetime of a scheduling agreement, reducing performance when processing delivery documents or scheduling agreement releases. The SACO solution addresses this challenge. Specifically, when copying a scheduling agreement, all the header and item data are copied (except the header and item data copied from master data) together with the most recent scheduling agreement releases, but not the document flow entries. Thus, the new scheduling agreement starts with only a created correction delivery, ensuring the same cumulative delivered and issued quantity as for the existing scheduling agreement. For the purchasing scheduling agreements, it is required that there is no activity at the customer. 

Unfortunately, the SACO solution had been enabled only for normal scheduling agreements with releases (standard document type LZ).

For Just-in-Time (JIT) or Just-in-Sequence (JIS) processing, suppliers use JIT scheduling agreements (standard document type LZJ or LZJQ) and face a considerably faster growth of document flow entries due to more frequent shipping. Especially in JIS processing, complex products supplied can have hundreds of different components shipped together, accumulating millions of document flow entries to be considered in delivery document processing.

Report program RJITCOP001 enables the copy of JIT scheduling agreements. However, it is structured differently from SACO, where SACO provides more convenience in selecting relevant documents (e.g., by organization, by number of document flow entries), more options in parameter settings and more detailed logging. Thus, the functionality of report RJITCOP001 has been merged into transaction SACO, for simplification and optimization, allowing companies to process normal scheduling agreements with releases and JIT scheduling agreements together and in the same manner.

Based on customer feedback, a few usability and security improvements have been added to SACO:

• User Notification. Users can be informed when the copying of all selected scheduling agreements has been completed. For that purpose, a distribution list with assigned users can be specified on the entry screen. As soon as the copying process is finished, a message is sent to each recipient defined in the distribution list. Based on communication settings, a message can be sent in different ways,  such as system message accessible via the SAP Business Workplace, email or SMS.
  
• Enhanced authorization check. All selected scheduling agreements are checked for create and change authorization, and even for display authorization in foreground mode, before the copy execution starts. Documents for which the user is not authorized will be filtered out and the missing authorization message will be added to the application log.
  
• Cosmetic improvements
  

With SACO, scheduling agreements to be copied can be selected by organizational data, according to the responsibility of dedicated users, and by the size of the respective document flow.

In online / foreground mode, a list of scheduling agreement documents based on the selection and filter criteria is displayed, and the user can analyze the data before picking documents from the list and starting the copy process.

The copy process itself is done in background task, as it uses batch input to create and adapt each new scheduling agreement as well as to reject the existing ones. Depending on the number of documents to be created and changed, this may take some time. With the new user notification, the user does not need to access the application log to check progress, but will receive a message when the copy process is complete.

Configuration

Necessary configuration for SACO

• Setup of copy control for sales documents
  For any document type and item category you would like to use SACO, copy control needs to be available. 
  See SAP Customizing Implementation Guide: Sales and Distribution > Sales > Sales Documents > Maintain Copy Control for Sales Documents. 
  For the copy control of item categories, set the parameter ‘Update Document Flow’ to value ‘2’ (“Create doc. flow records except for dely/goods issue/billdoc”). 

Further hints

Remarks to the parameters of SACO:

• The minimum size of the document flow on header and item level helps select only scheduling agreements with massive number of entries in the document flow that significantly reduce performance.  The value of this limit depends on the area of the runtime that is causing complaints. The maximum number of documents for an info message should give an indication to the user  to further restrict the selection to avoid extensive copy processes. It is a rough count of documents selected by the selection criteria on header level. Therefore it does not consider selection criteria on item level (e.g., material or customer material) or filter parameters (e.g., minimum size of document flow).  The user can ignore the message and continue, or accept the message and return to the entry screen to start again.
• Report parameters can be pre-set with the following user parameters:

Remarks to the SACO report log:

• SACO uses the general application log to store selection criteria, parameter settings, messages and results from analysis and copying scheduling agreements
• Each log is stored under object ‘SACO’; the different log entries are separated by sub-objects, which have to be defined before using transaction SLG0, if not available (see also SAP note 2037976)
• The application log is be accessed directly from SACO and from the user notification message

References

SAP Notes

SAP Note 1896120 – IS-A-ESD : Enhancement of SACO for JIT scheduling agreements

SAP Note 1986853 – IS-A-ESD : Improvements to SACO (Scheduling Agreement Copy)

SAP Note 2033809 – SACO : No user notification when the log is complete

SAP Note 2037976 – SACO: No authorization check on Sales Organization

SAP Note 2095807 – SACO : Unable to implement note 2037976  

SAP Note 2100963 – SACO: Performance issues due to delete of JIT shared buffer

SAP Help

Application Help on Analysis and Copying of Scheduling Agreements

Automotive Innovations for ECC-DIMP 6.02 (including Analysis and Copying of Scheduling Agreements)