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Displaying SAP production data in easy to read Summary Plan

 

Exec Summary

SummaryPro provides a powerful tool to display planning information from SAP in a “plan on a page” format providing more information than standard SAP reports in a clear and easy to read report. 

To manipulate the standard COOISPI reports an additional “Date Preparation” workbook is used.  This also allows the current plan data to be compared to a historical baseline set to display “conformance to plan" (CTP).

We were also able to integrate additional data from another source into the same report.

Situation

The factory migrated to SAP as part of a global initiative.  In doing so the existing production planning tool which used a graphical interface with colour coding for different products was discontinued and all planning moved into SAP.

The SAP tool provides the following standard reports / transactions / screens which present some challenges.  The details of product and assets etc have been obscured or changed at the client’s request.

SAP report showing production summary

 To view the plan in across one section of the factory the plan is crushed into single lines removing any ability to see what product is being made.  This can be expanded (below) however then the high-level view is lost.

SAP report showing detail for asset

In this screen the difference between “planned” and “process” order is shown using purple and red respectively however there is no differentiation between products.    It is also not possible to understand the relationships between manufacturing and packing lines.

SAP is a fantastically powerful product and brings a wide range of benefits however the client wanted to be able to see a set of reports showing manufacturing and packing lines on one page and allowing easy discrimination between products. This was not possible with the current installation of SAP – note that we are not able to say that it is not possible with all instances of SAP, just not in this case.

Solution

We were able to design 4 reports to cover the whole factory:

  • 1 summary plan showing conformance to plan (CTP) for all fill and pack lines across the factory. This compares current progress against a saved baseline plan.
  • 3 summary plans, one for each section of the factory; showing the current plan for each manufacturing unit and its fill & pack lines.

This suite of reports is produced every day and distributed to the factory staff to ensure that everyone has the same plan in a graphical format which is clear and easy to understand.

SummaryPro summary showing all assets in detail

Method

Two standard COOISPI reports were setup to provide the information that needs to be displayed.

  • The primary report displays the resources used, the material grouping, product details, quality, dates and times etc.
  • The second report displays all Process Orders with their original Planned Order reference. SAP generates Planned Orders which are then converted into Process Orders when the factory is ready to produce the product.

These are then fed into an initial Data Preparation workbook.  This is required as

  • SAP cannot output all the information needed as SummaryPro needs a unique reference for each entry in the plan (numbers 1-300)
  • Whilst the Planned-Process COOISPI report identifies most of the relationships between planned and process orders some manual intervention is needed to ensure that CTP can always be displayed.
  • The Data Preparation workbook also ensures that all information of each asset is assigned to the correct row on the summary plan and correctly displays % complete for orders which start or finish outside the reports data range.

Data flow from SAP into SummaryPro

Once the Data Preparation workbook has extracted all the information for each summary report SummaryPro is used to produce the graphical “plan on a page”.  Data is moved from COOISPI via the Data Preparation workbook into each SummaryPro report using copy and paste.  Refreshing the reports uses macros triggered by buttons so is simple and easy to use.

Once the report is produced labels can be used for orders where the text will not comfortably fit inside the matching box on the summary report.

Where the plan is stable the update process is very quick, if the plan is more fluid the process can take up to 15 min per report if a lot of work is required to allocate “missing” process orders or in the formatting of the final report.  In the specific example of this client the production of the 4 reports typically takes 30-60 minutes a day.

Additional functionality

Once the report function was up and running an additional request to display maintenance and downtime date from a separate source was successfully delivered using SummaryPro’s inherent ability to combine data sets.

Data flow including new source

This data was simply added to the bottom of the existing production data (asset, dates etc) and was displayed using the included “overlay” feature which displays a thin bar over the top of the production data

SummaryPro production summary including downtime

 

Miles Goodchild

Miles Goodchild has been a Program and Programme Planner, PMO lead and Project Manger since 1998.  He enjoys using MS Office, especially Project, Excel and Visio to make life easier and simpler.  In the course of this he created SummaryPro.  In this blog he shares some of the tips and techniques he has learnt over the years in the hope that they will be useful to you.