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.

List of Transactions

Do you want to search all SAP R/3 transactions? call transaction SE16 and use table TSTC where you can find all transactions used in the system. Table TSTCT has all the descriptions. Give it a try and let me know if you liked it by placing a comment.

Product Costing

The flow above describes how product costing (SAP R/3 system) works behind the scenes at the same time that a production order is getting created, confirmed and closed. This is how it works in a discrete manufacturing process without profitability analysis. In the next few days, I will be explaining the differences between the various production processes with and without PA.

Forecasting with SAP

Before we start looking into what the technology can offers you, let's understand how forecasting can help your company from a business perspective. Here are some aspects:

- Better relationship with your customers (product availability)
- Better relationship with vendors and of course costs reduction by maintaining long-term supply contracts
- Costs Reduction by lowering raw materials and finish goods inventories
- Better manufacturing planning which also result in cost reduction by optimizing your resources (Machinery and Labor)
- Better costs management

These are some of the main benefits of forecasting. Of course the longer you can forecast the better. 5 years forecast gives you a long-term view in where your company intends to be, but of course yearly and quarterly revisions will be required. There is some confusion in many companies in carrying out the financial forecast separate from their Supply Chain forecast. Would it be doable, of course it is, but would it make sense? Well, this is where the split between finance and logistics starts.

R/3 can help you a lot in improving and monitoring this process from the beginning until the end. But, the same way you can have bad processes utilizing spreadsheets, you can have bad processes using R/3. To help improve this process, bring logistics and finance teams together and let them work hand in hand.

Forecast that changes on a weekly or daily basis, shouldn’t be called forecast and will never bring the results expected.