A typical requirement from multiple clients that I had in the past, was to be able to send, copy or propagate Material prices (costs) from one Plant to another. In certain manufacturing scenarios that is not a problem, because one Plant might be manufacturing one product to a certain stage and the other Plant picks it up and continues manufacturing this Material. In this case, the 2nd Plant has a BOM (Bill of Material) that includes the Supplying Plant. This way when you do the Cost calculation, everything flows automatically.
But ...
- What happens when you reach the final Production Plant and then you send it to other Plants that are just Warehouses or Distribution Centers ? (with no transformation here)
- How do you update the prices in those DCs when your standard costs changes in the Manufacturing Plants, so you can revalue your inventory ?
- Is there a way to do it for hundreds or thousands of Materials and multiple Plants without having to develop a mass upload program ? (There is a new Fiori App to upload Material prices from XLS, maybe I can talk about it on another post. But it is not the same as this solution and requires manual work and one XLS per Currency Type that you might have).
- How can you avoid doing manual MR21 price changes and tons of copy & paste in that screen ?
- How can you avoid doing a custom program development to do this ?
- How can you avoid doing an LSMW out of MR21 to automate this ?
This Transaction is designed to be used with Distributed Systems where you need to send Material Prices to other SAP systems, but with a few 100% standard tricks, no code modification, you could use it within your same system.
This Transaction triggers and Outbound Idoc (Message Type MATERIALVALUATION_PRICECHANGE) that contains all the necessary info for price changes. The Idoc will go out from your system and come back right into as an Inbound Idoc. Once successfully posted, your Target Plant will have its Price updated. It will trigger one Idoc per Material. You have to execute it individually per Target Plant. You could do it for all Materials, or for certain ones, Valuation types, Stock Type, Material Type and many other filtering options.
How ?
Step #1 - Do config in Table VCKML_PRICE_SEND (SM30)
The Target Plant needs to have an entry in this Table, so you need to add it here manually and save it in a Transport. This is the only step that needs to be done in your Golden configuration Client. All the other Steps need to be done individually in the all the Transactional environments (Unit Testing, QA, pre-PROD and PROD).
Step # 2 - Define a Logical System
Tcode SALE or BD54 directly, to create a "fake" Logical System. (This depending on your environment you might be able to do it yourself as an SAP Finance Consultant or you will have to ask your Basis Team to do it for you).
This fake Logical System will be used later in the Distribution Model. We need a "fake" one because within the Model, you could not use as Source and Target the same Logical System, so that is why we have to fake it. If you understand what I am talking about, you might be guessing already how this all ends .... If not, keep on reading ...
In my case my real Logical System is SX4CLNT050, so I created a fake Logical System called SX4CLNTX50.
Step # 3 - Create an ALE Distribution Model
As I mentioned, this needs to be done on each environment as it is specific to the Logical System names that you will have on each environment.
Tcode SALE
Create the Distribution Model
Method PriceChange
Step # 4 - Create a Port that calls the RFC of your own Client
Tcode: WE21. Before creating the Partner Profiles, you need to define a Port that will be used by the Outbound Idoc. In this case, the Port needs to be pointing to an RFC for the same Client that you are in. In my case SX4CLNT050. By doing this, you will trick the system to send the Idoc to a Port that it is also within the same system (go out, to come back in within itself). This is the KEY part of this whole Solution to make it work.
Step # 5 - Maintain Outbound Partner Profile for Logical System
Tcode: WE20. Here the Partner System (LS) will be the same I input in my Distribution Model and fake Logical System "SX4CLNTX50" as Receiver with the Port that I just created that points to an RFC of the same Client.
Step # 6 - Create Inbound Partner Profile
Now we will create the Inbound Partner Profile for the real Logical System (SX4CLNT050).
Process Code It could be BAPI or BAPP
Make sure this is ACTIVE, because it could become INACTIVE in some cases.
An Outbound IDOC will be created and then another Inbound IDOC will be created as well. The Inbound will end up posting the PRICE CHANGE Document.
Note:
- This process will still work if the Sending Plant Material has Price Control S - Standard (or V - Moving avg.) and the Target Plant Material has S or V. It will still update it. For sure, this does not apply to a Target S Price where it is a Costed Material with a Cost Component split. In that case you still need to execute a Cost Estimate calculation.
- Each MATVAL_PRICES IDoc segment will represent the Different Material Valuations / Currency Types active in the system (Ex. In my case 10, 30, 31)
- This process only works within CoCodes that have the same currencies. You cannot transfer a price from one CoCode that has Currency 10 = CAD to Currency 10 = 10 USD. It will not work, you will get a currency error because the Outbound Idoc contains CAD and the Inbound Idoc too while it should have 10 - USD, there is no transformation in between. So the only way for you would be to pass it through a Middleware, and recalculate with the new Currency, if needed.
- For an unknown reason, my Inbound IDOCs are not getting process automatically, instead I have to go and trigger the process to post them manually based on their actual status. So you can always schedule the program that posts them periodically to remediate this situation.
Once the Document has been posted, you could verify it by Displaying the Material Document (CKMPCD) or the Material Master Accounting View or the FI Document too.
