Big4Guy

In SAP MM materials management, Plant represents a location where valuated stocks are maintained. In other cases, plant can also be looked at as a location for maintaining or servicing. Transaction code OX10 can be used to define a plant in SAP. However, SAP MM requires certain pre-requisites before a plant can be defined in SAP. The three maiin requirements for configuring plant are country keys, factory calendar and region keys.

Country Key - The SAP system comes preinstalled with country keys, however if country key does not exist for the client's country, the same will need to be defined.

Factory Calendar - The second requirement before defining a plant is configuration of a factory calendar. The factory calendar contains the workdays, public holidays, and company holidays. Even though the system has pre-defined factory calendars, these are required to be tailored based on the needs of the customers.

Region Keys - Region keys are similar to country keys, however, the region keys identif the province associated with the country.

All the above three criteria needs to be configured in the system before a plant can be configured. The menu path to define a plant in the system is available through: IMG >> Enterprise Structure >> Defintion >> Logistics >> General >> Define, Copy, Delete, Check Plant.

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The ASAP implementation methodology lays down the step by step guide to implementing SAP. The transition from ASAP to ValueSAP and finally to SAP Solution Manager has been quite smooth. SAP Solution manager has the accelerated SAP implementation methodology built into it so it is available online to all project team members. ASAP and ValueSAP contain the same information, but are in the form of CD documentation. The transaction 'RMMAIN' in the solution manager can be used to access the ASAP implementation methodolgy steps. As I said in one of my earlier posts, the ASAP methodology contains 5 main areas starting from Project preperation to go-live support. One of the important deliverables within the project preparation phase is the 'Lessons Learned' log.

As a good practice, all learnings during the SAP implementation project can be collected and managed to be used later on in the implementation so that the same mistakes are not repeated and also that this knowledge can be used in other ASAP implementation projects. Though documenting lessons learned may seem a trivial thing and is often ignored by implementation project members, it can prove to be immensely useful in the long run. One point to note is that the implementation log should be updated throughout the lifecycle of the implementation. The ASAP guide comes with a template for the implementation lessons learned which contains descrption, improvevment suggestions, ASAP / PM phase etc. More often than not, it is these small things that make the difference in a successful SAP implementation project.

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