Maintain Order Hierarchies (SAP Library - Product Cost Controlling)

Maintain Order Hierarchies

In this IMG activity, you create the structure for order hierarchies to enable you to use classification to summarize the values of individual orders. This is only useful when you want to summarize using characteristics that are not available in the definition of summarization hierarchies in the step Maintain Summarization Hierarchy.

You define order hierarchies so that you can summarize the values of individual orders upwards across the hierarchy structure.

No master data fields are used to define the levels of a hierarchy, as is the case with summarization hierachies. Instead, the levels of a hierarchy consist of the characteristics defined in classification. The system uses these characteristics to select and summarize orders. The system calculates a total for each characteristic value (such as plant 1000 or plant 2000) and updates it to what is called a summarization object. The values on the individual summarization objects can be analyzed in the information system.

You use order hierarchies for such purposes as summarizing the costs by period that have been incurred for the orders to produce a particular material in a particular plant.

You can use order hierarchies to summarize the following data:

Planned costs

Actual costs

Target costs

Variances

Work in process

Input quantities

Output quantities

Scrap

Notes

The highest (root) level of the hierarchy is always the controlling area.

If you enter a status selection profile when you create an order hierarchy, the system only selects the orders for summarization whose status matches the selection criteria in the status selection profile at the time of summarization.

Once a data collection run for a hierarchy has been performed, the hierarchy can no longer be changed. If you want to change the hierarchy afterwards, you must first delete all data in a deletion run.

Prerequisites

You are using the classification system for orders. This requires that classification be activated for the respective order type.

You have already selected and generated reference characteristics and defined user-defined characteristics. For more information, see the following:

Choose and Generate Characteristics

Define User-Defined Characteristics

If you want to use status selection profiles, you must first process Define Status Selection Profiles.

Actions

To define a hierarchy:

1. Choose New entries.

2. Give the hierarchy a name and a description.

3. If desired, enter a status selection profile.

4. To summarize the input quantities, select Summarize input qty.

5. Save your entries and choose Back.

This brings you to the overview of all summarization hierarchies.

6. Select your hierarchy and choose Hierarchy levels.

7. Choose New entries.

In the column Hierarchy field you can specify a characteristic for each hierarchy level. If you want to create a hierarchy level through a part of a characteristic, enter values for the offset and length.

8. Select "Initial" if you want to group orders for which a characteristic is not filled under a node called "Other".

If you want to exclude the summarization of particular objects, choose Data scope.

9. To improve performance, you can summarize the records of the totals record file without an origin. Note that some data will be lost in this case. To do this, select No origin .

Further Information

For more information on order summarization, see the documentation Product Cost Controlling Information System .