Inserting operation in Business ByDesign Production Bill of Operations using Cloud Application Studio

Dear Readers,

Many of our manufacturing customers integrate their ByDesign tenants with other SAP systems, which they use as the base master data system where they handle the relevant production master data such as Bill of Material, Bill of Operation, Production model.

In their base system, when they modify these master data objects, they would like to perform the same modification in ByDesign solution. Considering manual modification can result in errors, the ask is to have the modifications automatically done. While there are certain web services to cater to these master data elements, there are certain actions which cant be performed with web services at the moment. An Add-on can be built in such cases.

In this blog, one such use case will be discussed.

Disclaimer : Please note that the blog is primarily for demonstration purposes and the users should apply their discretion in adopting any suggestions provided in blog. This is purely an educational blog, primarily giving directions on achieving a certain use case. The main intent is to showcase the functionality and hence the typical guidelines of CAS development in relation to naming conventions, code optimisation, error handling etc are not followed.

Use Case : At present, other than UI, there is no way to perform certain modification like inserting a specific operation or activity in an already existing production bill of operation. 

Solution Approach using Add-on:

Relevant nodes and actions of ‘Production Bill of Operation’ are exposed for consumption via PDI. Hence an add-on can be built.

In this demonstration, I primarily took the following steps.

Step a) Create a custom business object, where relevant input parameters (for inserting operation) are modelled as elements of this business object

Step b) Create an action, which will be called to insert operation, as per the elements defined in custom business object.

Step c) Sample UI against this custom business object, where the user can provide required elements and trigger the action.

Lets get into those steps now..

Step (a)

Defining custom business object ZBOO, with relevant elements and actions.

Step (b)

Action logic : System will retrieve the details of the BOO and then performs the actions to insert operation in that BOO.

Step (c)

Generate screens for the custom business object (in this example ZBOO). Post that on the UI, you can create instances for custom business object and then trigger action for a certain instance.

Here is the Sample UI, where user can input the relevant details and click on action ‘Update’, which performs the ‘insert operation’. For the data given below, when the user clicks on ‘Update’, the add-on solution will insert operation OP4 (with activity ACT4) after OP1. For the inserted

Similarly certain other actions can be performed in relation to modifying an existing Bill of Operation in Business ByDesign solution. User can as well build a custom web service to perform the modification and consume the same.

Hope the above helps.

Regards,

Krishna