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How Standard SAP Tweaking Transforms Materials Management
Inventory management is a realm unique to every company. In most companies, there are always two types of materials namely 'Stock' and 'Non Stock'. Materials that are constantly kept in stock are, as the name suggests, 'Stock' materials. Stock materials are all valued and have a written material master record.
On the other hand, non stock materials are those which are purchased and consumed immediately. Their shelf life is actually less. These materials may or may not valuated.
Why Information is Key to Inventory Management.
The information about stock and non-stock materials is mainly required when initiating a purchase order. In Non Stock purchase, order there are two important data elements associated with it. These are:
- GL account (general ledger)
- Cost center. This information is accessible to all the authorities in Standard SAP.
Restricting the Information to Only Relevant Authorities
Companies want to restrict the authority of certain confidential material's information only to particular employees who are initiating the purchase order. Therefore, they want the employees to have their own particular credentials in order to permit them to initiate the purchase order. Now, the employees can only access the transactions that they have made with no other access route. The authorities also wanted to restrict the amount each person would spend on the purchase order. But standard SAP does not allow this feature.
Why is it Important to Restrict Information to Select Employees?
When excess information flows to various channels, it can be detrimental to the data security of the company. Hence, it is important to restrict information flow. It is done:
- Mainly to restrict the authority of the employees accessing this data.
- To track what a particular employee is purchasing and at what cost.
- To help them in budgeting for non stock materials.
How Information Access is Restricted Traditionally?
Organizations use hard copy to maintain such material data. This was not feasible as it is difficult to maintain the physical data. They create G/L accounts for every employee who was responsible for initiating the purchase order. Such an approach is laborious as well as time consuming.
Standard SAP facilitates us with default G/L in SAP screen but anybody can easily edit or update it. Companies create separate G/L accounts but such a methodology does not work in Standard SAP.
How We Tweaked the Standard SAP to Resolve Issue?
We undertook an enhancement in the SAP standard screen. This was done by making a combination of GL account and Cost center and associating a particular user id to it. Therefore, each user had his own credentials to access this information.
How Companies Benefit with Improved SAP Screen?
There are many ground level benefits of this tweaking. The primary being:
- It helps in checking the purchase history for future use.
- Aids in tracking the transactions done by the employees.
- Helps in budget control.
- It helps the accounts department in planning the budget allocation for purchase order.
- Knowledge of how much budget is assigned to a particular employee and how much is used. Budget allocation for future is synchronized as well.
When inventories are managed with improved SAP features, companies save not only time but also human resources. Our consultants work their way out of such standard SAP issues only to help firms improve their bottom line.
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