How difficult is it to create a new Plant?

[Former Member]

I requested from the 'powers that be' to create a new Plant reason being that the Delivery address for items in the PO defaults referenced Plant. There is a new warehouse in the city and the request to create a new additional Plant would improve efficiencies for the user community instead of overwriting the delivery address every.single.time. The new Plant will be referenced by a specific group of users for POs going forward so there is not issues with transferring info previously posted to the 1 and only Plant currently there.

The response I got was:

"Creating a new Plant in (SAP) is a big undertaking and is not something we will embark on for this requirement"

Instead they created a new address master record that requires the client to still change the Deliver Address in the Items and searching for the address they created. OK this just saves typing but still inefficient where the client can program their personal setting to always reference the new Plant and reduce the amount of errors or even the cost of shipping to the new warehouse if the delivery address was not updated.

I don't believe this is a 'big undertaking' however I'm not knowledgable enough to counter their rejection of my request.

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

you should have asked your colleagues who have rejected your request to know the exact reason as I doubt that a request is rejected because it is too difficult to create a plant. Your request probably did not fit with the local design of what a plant is.

Technically is a plant not much more than another entry in a table with a couple of fields along with an address. Something that can be created in lets say 5 minutes.

But this entry alone is usually not sufficient. There are several tasks in customizing that also need to be done to get it closer to work. e.g. if you want to store a material there you would also need storage locations, you would need to make it a valuation area, you would need to extend the material types quantity and value managed for that plant, you may have to add plant specific number ranges. And if you use other modules than just MM then you may have to perform additional task for them too, e.g. creating shipping points in case of using deliveries, defining picking locations. Not to forget that you also need to change and add new roles which grants authority to the people who will work with that plant and restricts others from using it.

So at this point you can already be close to a full day or already beyond that for this plant creation (which is usually be done from several consultants in case of several modules).

Now we do not even know anything about your company, if you use SAP already for a long time and have eventually thousands of Z programs and Z-tables for own developed extensions, where also extra entries may needed to keep the system running when a new plant is set up.

And usually a plant does not operate independent of other plants, so you may need to customize relations for stock transfers between your plants, eventually additional setup for intercompany invoicing with EDI in case plants belong to different companies.

You already said your request got rejected, so we have to assume that you have a change request process where also people spend time to discuss about the requests and their impact on the overall design.

At this point we had not yet mentioned anything about master data. You can't work without master data. Do you start with one product or do you need to start with a big bang of several hundred? Does this require a kind of migration, mass extension of already existing materials?

Do the people who will work there know SAP or do they need to be trained?

We have more than 1000 plants in our system, so I would say it is not difficult to create a new plant even with a long list of activities, but we have this list prepared in a several day project, so we know exactly what needs to be done and from whom. People not knowing about this task list would despair.

[Former Member]

Thank you for the reply.

There will no stock held at the new Plant and only 4 authorized people would require access authorization. The only requirement for the new Plant is to pre-populate the delivery address into a PO on a go forward basis. That's it. The person rejecting the request is a sole person. Our experience is that there is no or little consultation from a integration standpoint to determine if a request is valid or not and it is based on this senior person's knowledge or lack there of. In our organization, there are 1 senior functional analyst for every module with a junior analyst and these team rotate from one module to another. I would love to ask a past analyst the exact same question to determine if my request is unreasonable but I'm unsure who I can leverage in my organization. Logically, the request seems simple enough and my assumption that it be added to a table to fulfill my minimal requirement is correct.

[JL23]

Honestly, if that is the only requirement then it would also not pass in our company