Day in the life of a Material Buyer – 10 – Reports

Purpose: The purpose of this blog post is to bring the real-life day-to-day scenarios of a material buyer based on my own domain experience as a material buyer. These blog posts are mainly for material buyers (end users), however, new MM consultants can also get benefited by knowing the buyer’s role better.

This is the tenth blog post of the series – Day in the  Life of a material buyer. Please go through the previous blog posts to understand other activities of the buyer.

This blog post will focus on reporting (Custom reports). For standard reports, I will detail them in another blog.

The buyer role holder should always ensure master data quality to ensure good procurement health of the company.

–Review and ensure quality data for the following.

• Vendor lead times
• Safety stock levels (Consumption history)
• Purchasing Group
• MRP Controller
• Missing purchasing info records

Below are some custom reports I was using to ensure good quality data

1- Detailed material report.

Use: Shows planning parameters for purchased materials of a specific purchasing group to a specific plant (Lot Size, Safety Stock Levels, MRP Controller, Purchasing Group)

2- Missing /incomplete pricing on info record.

Use: Show materials with Info Records missing pricing.

3-Vendor lead time for the materials

Use: Show vendor lead times for materials for a specific purchasing group.

4- Analyze vendor delivery lead times (MC$6)

Use: Shows the ‘Mean Delivery Time’, and ‘Mean delivery time weighted by quantity for a vendor’s deliveries to a specific plant over a period of time. Drilldown to the vendor’s materials level.

5- Inventory turns report.

Input: Plant, material number, and a few other parameters

Output: MRP controller, Inventory turns, Gross requirement, Average Daily usage, Qty on hand, Days on hand, Base UOM.

Quantity on Hand =MMBE – Unrestricted stock

Average Daily Usage = Sum of Gross Requirement for X upcoming days / Number of next days to be considered

Days om Hand = Qty on Hand / Average Daily Usage

Inventory turn = Working Days per year / Days on Hand

Thus apart from using standard SAP reports, based on your Industry specific needs buyers use reports that help them to manage their day-to-day activities.

It would be interesting to see how you are using /created your own custom reports to make buyers’ life easy. Do give feedback.