What is Variant Configuration in SAP?

The easiest way to understand what Variant Configuration means is using the example of a car manufacturing. Let’s say a specific costumer orders a BMW Model X5 with the following Characteristics:

- Exterior color: Blue
- Interior color: Beige
- Internal Trim: wood
- Transmission: automatic
- Package: Premium

Given those Characteristics the system will need to able to:

- Place the Customer order (Make to Order)
- Calculate the price (Variable Pricing)
- Plan the work in the manufacturing site (Planning/Scheduling)
- Create Production orders to start the production utilizing all the variants that the customer asked for i.e. Colors, Trims, Transmission, etc
- Create purchase order to purchase all required materials to produce the car

So, the brand and model of the vehicle remain the same, but the characteristics are different. Based on the characteristics, some rules will need to take place. In SAP, those rules are called dependencies.

An example of a rule (dependency) could be: if characteristic package = Premium therefore, the car will have a Sunroof, heated seats and 19” wheels. Based on this dependency, many other dependencies can be triggered. It will depend on the manufacturing process and how the business process works. As now we know that the car will have a Premium Package, we will need to capture these information and send them to the purchasing department so they can supply all raw materials required to build it.

Also, the production area will need to plan and schedule, when and what is the best way to build the car, considering their manufacturing capacity and their lead times. After the plan is in place, the production process can start based on all given information taken from the customer order.





This is fairly high level explanation. Variant Configuration can be very easy or extremly complex depending on the process and rules applied for a specific manufacturing industry.

SAP Perfect Plant

Through a product called XMII, SAP brings together the shop floor controls to integrate directly with R/3. What that means??? remember in the old days that you have to create all sort of ABAP programs to link PLCs, SDCDs, other databases like Access, SQL to SAP? well, now you can connect all of them (or whatever you need to connect) directly to MII which links to SAP R/3 (through IDOCs or BAPIs). A nice feature with MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) is you can create a cache database where if the connection with SAP R/3 is lost, your manufacturing can keep operating normally. Within this cache, you can have all information required to keep on going such as: production orders required, routings and BOM linked to the production orders, etc.

XMII is web-enabled which facilitated the development of new functionalities.

Find bellow an overview of XMII. This picture was taken from SAP website:





In the next couple of days, time permitting, will be going through some more details about how this technology works. If you have any information to add, please, don't hesitate to send your comments.

SAP Books

You can find excellent SAP books on SAP Press website. All books on this website are SAP approved http://sappress.com/

How to Identify an Order Status?

In SAP you can identify an order status by utilizing table JEST. Now, in order to identify the text for the status, use table TJ20T. This table will give you all the text statuses in multiple languages. Just select the status ID you need and the language required. Hope this will give you a hand if developing an ABAP program that requires the status to be identified.

Materials Management (MM) Tables in SAP

For who uses SAP R/3 MM (Materials Managements) module, bellow you can find a full list of tables the system uses.


Table Description
EKKO Purchasing document, header
EKPO Purchasing document, items
EKPV Purchasing document, shipping data
EKBE Purchasing document, history
EKBZ Purchasing document, delivery costs history
EKAB Release (order) documentation
EKKN Purchasing document, account assignments
EKET Schedule lines
EKES Confirmations
EKAN Addresses for once-only vendors
EKUB Index, stock transport order
KONV Document conditions
KONH Master conditions, header
KONP Master conditions, items
KONM Master conditions, quantity scale
KONW Master conditions, value scale
A016 Master conditions, outline agreement, items
A019 Master conditions, outline agreement, header
A068 Master conditions, outline agreement, plant conditions
EKPA Partner roles
RESB Reservations
SADR Delivery addresses
NAST Message records
EIKP Import data, header
EIPO Import data, items


MM module deals with all inventory movements and purchasing in the SAP R/3 system.