Your organization’s supply chain management requires continuous monitoring of activities related to order processing. Sales managers look for vital signs from order processing data to make their groups perform even more effectively. They need reports that inform them whether orders are fulfilled and delivered on time.

I will show you an SAP NetWeaver BW data model you can use to report on sales-related key performance indicators (KPIs) such as fill rate and cycle time. The model uses standard data sources from sales and distribution. You can customize it to align with your organization’s business processes using ABAP transformation.

Fill Rate and Cycle Time Reporting

Fill rate measures the service level for an organization’s sales orders against the expectations of the organization’s trading partners. You can use fill rate to track the cause of delay in order fulfillment and to capture the effectiveness of inventory management and distribution centers. Cycle time is the amount of time required to complete the order to cash process from order receipt to processing, order processing to ship, and ship to delivery.

To understand the data model and reports I developed, it helps to know about the KPIs for this example and what they measure. Fill rate reporting shows you what is contributing to order processing delays, such as inventory or shipment shortfalls. A BEx report shows the count of sales order line items filled and not filled along with the reason for shortfall (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Sample of fill rate report

Cycle time reporting is closely related to fill rate (Figure 2). While fill rate analyzes the performance of supply chain in terms of quantity, cycle time reporting covers the time parameter.

Figure 2

Sample of cycle time report

Transportation carriers use electronic data interchange (EDI) 214 to provide shippers, consignees, and their agents with the status of shipments, dates, times, locations, route, identifying numbers, and information concerning shipments in transit. When you integrate this data with the sales and delivery data from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC), you see a complete snapshot of the entire transaction (Figure 3). This helps your organization assess the performance of its supply chain.

Figure 3

Breakup of order processing time

Depending on how the business process is set up, you can measure internal processing and customer satisfaction by using cycle time. When using it as a customer-facing attribute, the measurement criteria would be delivered on time. For internal analysis, the criteria could be shipped on time.

Approach for BW Data Model

Depending on specific business requirements and scenarios, there are multiple ways to approach the data model. I successfully deployed this data model at multiple clients ranging from a medical supplies manufacturer to the consumer goods division of a pharmaceutical major. This approach uses ABAP transformations that provide the necessary flexibility to introduce logic that is typical of an industry.

The data model covers both fill rate and cycle time analysis (Figure 4). It uses standard business content data extractors for SD along with a custom extractor to bring details of EDI 214 transactions into SAP NetWeaver BW.

Figure 4

BW data model including EDI 214

I used the following data sources in the build of the data model:

• 2LIS_11_VAITM (sales order-item data): It is possible that details of EDI 214 are not available for all the shipments. To effectively determine the date the goods will be delivered to the customer, you enhance the VAITM data source to include a field to hold the number of days required for customer delivery based on the route information available on the sales order.
• 2LIS_11_VASTI (sales document item status): This extractor pulls out the details of the various statuses associated with the sales order item.
• 2LIS_11_V_SSL (sales document order delivery): This extractor pulls out the details of dates and quantities at the schedule line level. This data is useful to determine the cause of delay in sales order line item processing.
• 2LIS_12_VCITM (delivery item) and 2LIS_13_VDITM (billing item)
• Custom data source for EDI 214 transactions

Data from these sources is brought into a staging layer comprising of DataStore objects (DSOs) and is loaded into a custom sales KPI InfoCube using a series of transformations to achieve fill rate and cycle time reporting.

Custom Development for Fill Rate Reporting

In this section, I explain how to set up the business rules using BW transformation to track the cause of delay in order fulfillment. Cause of delay can be attributed to inventory shortfall indicated by the letter I, or shipment shortfall, indicated by the letter S. Values I or S are stamped on an indicator flag field available in the sales KPI InfoCube while updating from the sales line item DSO (Figure 4).

Data from the sales document order delivery stream (2LIS_11_V_SSL) and the sales document item status (2LIS_11_VASTI) is merged with the sales order line item DSO. Data from integration DSO goes through an ABAP routine transformation which populates the indicator flag field. The logic for the ABAP routine depends on the business process and can be developed by using the business rules mentioned in Table 1. You can download the sample logic online at the bottom of the article.

Table 1

Business rules to determine the cause of delay

Custom Development for Cycle Time Reporting [Subhead 1]

In this section, I discuss the important transformations and BEx formulas required to set up and generate the cycle time report. This report is also built on the Sales KPI InfoCube (Figure 4). As the InfoCube is updated using multiple data streams, I recommended you update the time characteristic 0CALDAY in the InfoCube using the order date from the entire integration layer DSOs (sales order item, delivery item, and billing items). You can use this characteristic as a selection parameter while running the query.

Because you are staging data from multiple streams into InfoCubes, data alignment will be an issue while trying to design the report. It can be addressed by creating key figures for all the date characteristics and setting the aggregation type to maximum (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Storing date fields as key figures in InfoCube

Cycle time calculation is carried out at the query level with the help of conditions in the BEx formula editor. For example, you can calculate the order receipt to delivery as shown in Figure 6. In this calculation, if you calculate either the delivery date or the customer purchase order (PO) date as 0, then the number of days can be defaulted to a fixed value based on the client’s business requirements (12 for the report I developed). Figure 7 shows the BEx formula for calculating the number of days between order receipt and delivery.

Figure 6

Example order receipt to delivery calculation

Figure 7

BEx formula for calculating cycle time components

Similar formulas can be set up for calculating the remaining components of the cycle time. These key figures help you analyze the time spent by an order in different stages of processing.

Anuj N. Babel

Anuj N. Babel is a senior specialist with Deloitte Consulting. He has seven years of technology management experience. He is an SAP-certified SAP NetWeaver BW solution consultant and specializes in designing and deploying information management models. His project experience includes designing and implementing data and reporting framework for Enterprise Asset Management, Channel Management, Logistics, Revenue Management, and Enterprise Consolidations.

You may contact the author at anuj.babel@gmail.com.

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