Material Staging for Components 

Use

You use this function to transport warehouse-managed components used in production from the warehouse to the production supply areas.

Integration

The system generates a transfer requirement (TR) in the Warehouse Management (WM) system. WM is then responsible for staging the required materials by creating a transfer order from the transfer requirements.

In an SAP AFS system, material staging triggers automatic creation of batch assignments, but only for AFS components in the production order. This is required to keep the stock situation up to date if there is competition for component stock from other production orders (with manual batch assignments) or from the Allocation Run.

Prerequisites

You must have set up the Warehouse Management – Production Planning interface (WM - PP interface).

For more information, see WM – PP Interface

Features

The following are AFS-specific features that differ from the standard WM/PP interface:

●      In an SAP AFS system, material staging triggers automatic creation of batch assignments.

●      If a batch assignment already exists for an AFS component, subsequent material staging will consider this first, before it considers other batches for staging.

●      The staging quantity for an AFS warehouse-managed component is limited by the quantity that is still available for the creation of batch assignments, that is, the unreserved quantity of the batch.

●      If there are date changes in the production order due to scheduling done in Production Order Change, Capacity Levelling or Mass Processing of Production Orders, the system automatically updates the dates of open transfer requirements associated with the order. In a non SAP AFS system, open TRs will be marked as processed and you need to perform WM staging once again to create new TRs with the new dates.

Deletion of a transfer requirement does not result in deletion of batch assignments associated with it. The batch assignments have to be manually removed from the production order, if required. On the other hand, if batch assignments are cancelled, the open TRs associated with them are also marked as processed.

During material staging, if there are multiple valid batches at SKU level for an AFS component, the system chooses the batch with the largest unreserved quantity for staging. Then it chooses the next largest batch and so on and creates the batch assignments accordingly.

 

Activities

In SAP Easy Access screen choose, Logistics  ® Production  ® Shop Floor Control  ® Order  ® Create  ® With Material  or Order  ® Change  to do the following:

●      To simulate material staging, choose Functions  ® WM Material Staging -> Simulate.

Here you can see the component staging requirements at SKU level, the batches that will be considered for staging, and the staging quantity.

●      To execute material staging, choose Functions  ®  WM Material Staging  ® Proceed.

The system performs the staging in the background. No screen is displayed to show the results of staging. The transfer requirements are created only when you save the production order.

●      To view the batch assignments, choose Component Overview  ® Batch Assignment.

You can also view the batch assignments in the AFS Stock Requirements list, on the F – Assignment Fixed: Open for Delivery tab page.

You can also execute material staging by going to the SAP Easy Access screen and choosing Logistics  ® Logistics Execution  ® Outbound Process  ® Goods Issue for Other Transactions  ® Prepare Production Supply  ® For Order. You can use this option to transfer quantity which is more than the original requirement quantity. This is however not possible from the production order.

 

For more information, see Material Staging in the standard documentation.

 

Limitation

In SAP AFS, only Pick Part is supported. Crate Part and Release Order Part are not supported by SAP AFS.