Potential Red Flags

How do you know whether your system has been set up optimally, whether your users are not using the system the correct way, or whether you have outright errors in your configuration? 

Sometimes, It's a difficult question to answer - especially because of integration!

Here are some specific SD pointers that may help guide your investigation:

• Interfaces are destroying your responsiveness and hiding errors

  • In my experience, interfaces cost you money.. big time!

  • They break integrated visibility of your business processes

  • They're extremely costly to maintain and upgrade
     

• The system behaves differently from one day to the next, or between different transactions for the same product and/or customer selection (this was a real-world 'worst case' example)!

  • This could be caused by configuration changes being moved to production

  • Master data could be missing or inconsistently set up
     

• Availability checking just does not make sense (or isn't even switched on...)

  • ATP is the function that integrates your logistics processes

  • Without it, an enormous opportunity is being wasted to coordinate your business

  • if customer service and shipping are often at odds about what's really available to ship, consider that a wake-up call!

  • While the availability screens (Availability Overview, transaction CO09) are certainly not the easiest to read, they really can make sense - they'll match "real world" if set up correctly!
     

• Increased backlog

  • If the orders on backorder begin to pile up, you may have one of the following problems:

    • (obvious) Business supply or production issue

    • Availability checking problem

    • Allocation problem in the way the delivery due list is being run

    • Data entry issues in either sales, production or inventory management
       

• Your users perform manual tasks that SAP completely supports automating

  • Users have to click [Update pricing] after making a critical change in the order

  • Users manually enter output triggers (conditions) in SD transactions to activate output

  • Any condition line in pricing is manually calculated outside the system before being entered into SAP

  • Users have to check the status of an order before printing it.

  • Users manually process delivery due lists (shipping & billing) 

  • Users manually create new orders that could be created with reference to an existing order
     

• Users are "individual transaction" rather than "worklist" focused

  • Users manage their workload by remembering individual order numbers or keeping a paper list of

  • Users don't use SAP's worklists to find individual transactions
     

• Users keep and rely on filed transaction printouts to get their job done

  • Users keep hardcopies filed because they 'don't trust' the system.

  • Either your system is still undergoing changes in critical output areas, or you have users stuck in the ways required by a previous, older, non-integrated(?) system.