S/4HANA 2021: Improvements for Segmentation in Process Orders

SAP Demand and Supply Segmentation is a solution that was originally developed for the fashion industry, allowing companies to segregate demands, stock and supply elements in individual segments. With segmentation, companies can fulfill unique requirements of different markets, creating rules to segment the stock using different characteristics, without increasing the total number of materials, BOMs and routings in the system.

Those business requirements, however, are not unique for fashion companies and companies in the life-sciences industry share similar requirements to segregate the stock into different segments. The main business requirement for life-science industry is to fulfill compliance requirements across different markets and at the same time avoid additional master data maintenance. Several pharma companies started to explore the segmentation solution to fulfill those requirements, however, segmentation was not yet fully integrated to process orders, until SAP S/4HANA 2020.

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA 2021 brought improvements for segmentation focused in process orders and, as stated in SAP note 3083589, the following process are now supported:

• Creation, Change and Display of Process orders,
• Creation, Change and Display of Master Recipes
• Conversion of Planned orders to Process orders via COR7
• Goods movement via MIGO

This blog provides an overview of the new features available for segmentation in process orders, as of SAP S/4HANA 2021:

1 – Segment selection during manual process order creation

As of S/4HANA 2021 users can manually select the segment when manually creating a process order in transaction COR1. When creating a new process order for a segmented material in transaction COR1, a popup screen will be shown, where the user can choose the value for the different segmentation characteristics or the valid segmentation combinations.

2 – Segment is now displayed in the process order

Besides the possibility to select the segment during the order creation, process order transactions (such as COR1 and COR2) now bring a field where the segment is displayed and where it can also be changed.

3 – Process order segment copied to manually created batches

In previous releases, the segment was only copied to the batch if the batch was automatically created during the process order release. As of S/4HANA 2021, if a segment is determined for the process order, it is now automatically copied to the batch, even when it is manually created in the process order transactions.

4 – Segment selection in the master recipe

In previous releases it was already possible to determine the segment for the bill of material components, defining if a specific component should be used or not when manufacturing a product for a specific segment.

As of S/4HANA 2021, the master recipe transactions introduced a new button where we can determine the validity of a master recipe for specific segments. With this option, besides the different components, we can also have different manufacturing processes for each segment.

As shown in the figure below, it is now possible to determine that the Master Recipe will be valid for specific segment or to define that it will be excluded for specific segments.

https://help.sap.com/viewer/9905622a5c1f49ba84e9076fc83a9c2c/2021.000/en-US/5f49493f2686435e8278411c99a03352.html

Helpful Links:

Additional details of this app can be found in the following links:

SAP Help – Process Orders with Segmentation

SAP Note 3083589 – SAP S/4HANA On Premise 2021 release: Fashion and Vertical Business Restriction Note 

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG and Customer Care team.