SAP PLM Recipe Development Basics – where have all the nutrients gone?

[Simon_Z]

This blog belongs to a series of blogs regrouped on the SCN page “SAP PLM Recipe Development for Beginners”.

This blog explains SAP PLM Recipe Development basic functionality. Today’s topic is “Nutrients in Recipe Calculations Results”.

Let’s assume you are lucky and get hold of a good SAP PLM Recipe Development demo system. You finally manage to log on the system and type transaction nwbc in the SAP-GUI and the “SAP PLM Recipe Development” system appears. You even make it a step further and you manage to open a recipe which actually contains some data.

In the recipe you then click on the tab “Calculation Results” on the “Nutrient” tab. Then you see a nice overview that almost looks like the nutrient statement on the bottom of your frozen pizza box. You then wonder: “where does all this data come from?”

Trying to understand where all those nutrient values come from, you click on the Recipe Formula.

You think that the Formula (or Formulation) should give you some idea where those nutrients actually come from. But instead of nutrients of find all kinds of packaging material (plastic foil, boxes, …). Well, the packaging material certainly does not contain all those nutrients. Then you see that there is also an INGREDIENT “finished pizza without pack”. But where are all the other ingredients (flour, salt, yeast, cheese, …)?

You then click on the tab “Calculations Results – Scientific Ingredients” and you finally find an entire list of ingredients and it looks somehow similar to the official ingredients statement on the bottom of your pizza box.

You understand, that this recipe is the highest level recipe in an entire recipe structure, which might look somehow like this:

Finished Pizza in a box with packaging (recipe)

• Packaging material 1
• Packaging material 2
• Finished pizza without packaging (recipe)
  • pizza dough
    • flour
    • yeast
    • seasoning
    • ….
  • pizza sauce (recipe)
    • tomato sauce
    • seasoning
    • ….
  • pizza toping (recipe)
    • cheese
    • onions
    • olives

To see if this is really the case, you click on “You Can Also” – “Display in Object Navigator”.

In the Object Navigator Screen you click on “Structure” and you see that your assumption was correct. There is an entire recipe structure below the recipe you are currently in.

Having understood this is very nice, but we still do not know where the nutrients come from.

Therefore we navigate back to our recipe and now click on one of the aggregated ingredients in the Scientific Ingredients overview.

When we click on the specification of this “mozzarella cheese” ingredient, a new screen opens up.

We are now in the specification database for this ingredient and navigate to the property tree. In the property tree we find the section “Nutrient Composition”. Here we can select a Nutrient Group (e.g. BIG) and we finally see the maintained nutrient values per 100 grams of mozzarella cheese.

You now start to understand how this whole recipe system works. You change some nutrient values in the “mozzarella ingredient”, you save and navigate back to the Recipe Calculation Results. You see how according to your changes in one of the ingredients of the recipe, the entire nutrient overview of the finished product is impacted.

You then might also become interested in the “process loss” and “storage loss” functions. And you try to manipulate other ingredients. You now try the whole procedure again and again … with the “tomato sauce”, the “onions”, and finally even with the “ham” …

I hope this helps a bit and helps to "demystify" SAP PLM Recipe Development.

Have a nice day and “bon appetite”.