Currently, my organization uses SAP ECC V6, we have run into a bottleneck as we scale to offering customers more variants and configurations across our products.
Process for each new product family when introduced:
1. Collect requirements from Sales, Marketing, and Logistics
2. For each product in the family, create the sales BOM by listing all the possible items
3. Add in all possible "variants" into the same bill of material (e.g. different colors of parts)
4. Create dependency in ABAP for every part that needs to be configured. some have simple if X then Y dependencies, some have quantity dependencies
Scaling issues:
- Each product family can have 50 items offered to the customers
- Each item can have 100-200 materials in each BOM
- There is a high number of materials that need dependencies
- There are a lot of "similarities" across the materials in the same family, but it is impossible to copy and paste in the SAP front end
- I see there is a possibility of using "global dependencies" but I am not too sure if that solves all the dependencies scenarios
Maintenance issues:
- Late inputs will create a high amount of repetitive rework (tried to minimize but still exists)
- Difficult to check if the configuration is done right till the customer orders that variant
- ECOs later on which causes another round of rework
- Needs to be well documented and reproducible when shared with other people who maintain the sales BOM
Considered Solutions:
1. SAP S4 does not seem to be roughly the same when I looked at dependencies using AVC
2. My thoughts: is it possible to maintain the code in python with git and write a library of SAP GUI scripts to bulk change? Has anyone tried this?
3. Open to any other suggestions
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