How to handle pulp manufacture on Paper making machines in SAP

[former_member473962]

I work in a paper manufacturing company , which uses SAP. Now they want to make pulp on some of the machines and sell it as the finished good. So,we need to set up the SAP for that.

This is a new functionality for my organization. so,I am looking for some guidance , as how this should be handled. Any suggestions, documentations or info about either standard or best practices in this regard, will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

P.R

[former_member473962]

Hello everybody,

This is just to add that in my company , we are using VC for handling the combination of various characteristics, defining a particular kind of paper type. It is just that I have no idea as how pulp should be treated as a material.

Any help, even conceptual explanations , will be greatly appreciated.

Take care

P.R

[alfred_becker · Accepted solution]

Hello P.R.,

Of course, it is always difficult to explain such concepts in a few words, but I'll give it a try...

It's a good idea to reflect the combination of various characteristics of pulp with variant configuration, so this is in line with our recommendation for this kind of business process.

Usually we see pulp being modeled in product groups because this would allow to replace (and track) any changes or replacement of pulp as input material for paper making later on. But especially the 'interchangeability' of different kinds of pulp will be a very custom-specific issue and you have to to clarify if you want to allow replacement by same material (master) with different characteristics only or if you allow replacement of different material.

Also the input for pulp making, fibre and chemicals, should be reflected as BOM components. Fibre may be modeled in product groups, too, as there could be interchangeability, too. Then there is always the question if energy, probably steam, is to be handled as BOM component, too - but there is no clear recommendation possible and you should discuss with your colleagues what is their view and their needs around steam (availabilty, cost settlement, etc.).

A huge issue will be the required flexibility of recipes (or BOMs). You can't know exactly in advance what will be needed to achieve a certain grade. So usually it starts with a recipe (or BOM) which needs to get updated regularly with actual consumption data. This BOM is used to plan production, but actual consumption is done via backflushing because of the ever-occurring variance in actual consumption.

The question remains if and how to model by-product such as black liquor. Some customers do not reflect it at all in SAP, for others it was important to have a sophisticated process in place to record by-products (and use them later e.g. for energy creation). Especially in the US there were huge tax savings possible if one could show that black liquor was used for producing bio fuel. Again there is no recommendation from us.

In these days RFID tags are good enough to be read even when attached to a metal pot. So there are solutions in place where the fork-lift handles a pot, and reads and writes batch information to/from the RFID tag sticking to the pulp pot.

This may give some guideline, but deeper insight will be available through talking to experienced consultants only. Let me know if you want me to establish such contact for you.

Best regards,

Alfred Becker

Solution Manager Mill Products

SAP AG

[former_member473962]

Hello Alfred,

Thanks for your reply.

Maybe I framed my question a little bit too generic.Let me be more specific.

We have VC for configuring different kinds of paper products. Now, we are going to treat pulp as the finished product.The pricing of the pulp is done in ADMT(air dried metric ton).

Pulp, being a wet substance, has a moisture content involved. Industry practice is that any pulp shall be considered to be having about 10 % water. So, if my order qty is 1000 lb, then I should  be getting 900 lb of actual substance(which is the ADMT qty) and 100 lb of water.The customer shall be billed for 1000 lb however.

However, in real llfe, things are not so perfect. So, istead of 10 % ,my pulp ends up having ,say 7%.water.So, it is 930 lb of mtrl and 70 lb of water.In that case, I shall bill the customer for 1033.33 lb (1000 * (93/90)). Dont ask me why but that is what will happen.

Now, I need a SAP field, where I can enter this moisture % (call it P) value and also an arrangement, so that i can do the above calculation and arrive at the qty of 1033.33 lb (qty * (P/90)). This is the qty, which shall be used for billing the customer.

The Mill execution system presently has no provision for passing this kind of data (moisture % and ADMT value). There is no QM module implemented.

Without going for heavy customization (like adding new fields etc), how can we achieve this? is there any existing field in SAP, which we can use? is it possible to add moisture % as a characteristic of the batch/material and arrive at this ADMT value?

In a nutshell, what I am looking for, are the following:

1. A SAP field to input the moisture %

2. System to generate this ADMT weight (1033.33), that we can use, for our billing purpose.

Any suggestions shall be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

P.R

[alfred_becker]

Hello P.R.

I think I got your point - and at least two options come to my mind you could use to address this issue.

There is so called non-ferrous metal pricing functionality, which is nothing else than pricing based on percentage of content of certain components in a material (e.g. a cable with 35% copper, and the copper dictates the price).

Another option which is commonly seen would be the use of additional characteristics in VC and for batch valuation. You can easily add fields for moisture content, weight, ADMT weight, and for conversion factors, etc. Not all characteristic fields need to be visible to the end user, and you can calculate in the background (using so called object dependencies) the value for one characteristic out of several other characterisitics. In this case it would mean to enter moisture content and weight, and the system would calculate based on your formula the ADMT weight. And SAP offers to perform charactersitic based pricing, so that the calculated value can influence the price. If the ADMT need to appear in standard fields of the sales order (e.g. as the order quantity) you can even update certain fields of the sales order with the values from VC characteristics (using structure VCSD_update).

We have customers in wood business who want to even extrapolate the expected moisture content based on shelf time. So they take into account the moisture for quantity and price calculation, but they want the system to guess-timate the moisture content for planning purposes, while you can easily enter the value based on your measurement.

Best regards,

Alfred

[former_member473962]

Thanks Alfred.

You have given me a pretty good idea as what can be done. I shall now work on it and maybe come back to you and other SAP experts later , if I need further help.

Thanks a lot.