You use this business process to create a sales order to respond to specific customer requirements by using variant configuration to select the right product characteristics to produce a product that is individually manufactured for a particular customer. Variant configuration helps you to configure complex industrial products. The variant configuration improves the data exchange between the different departments such as sales, engineering, manufacturing, and after market service. It also reduces the failure rate of sales order entries.

You can use this business process to create an order bill of material (BOM) if you work in make-to-order (MTO) production and want to respond to specific customer requirements, or if you are manufacturing a product that you have never produced before in that form. After making the engineering changes you need to replicate the order BOM in the production planning system.

You can use this business process to determine a feasible delivery date for the order based no the current material and capacity situation. 

In make-to-order production, the in-house production or procurement of products is only started when the sales order has been received. This business process is suitable for products with short replenishment lead times for the finished product and all incoming assemblies and components. This business process is useful if the costs of procurement and production of assemblies and components is very high; additional storage costs can be avoided in case of incorrect forecasts.

In case of long replenishment lead times for assemblies and components and low costs, forecasting for assemblies is useful in order to reduce the delivery time for the sales order. This business process is used in discrete industries.

You can use this business process to perform production scheduling and capacity leveling. The production planner can evaluate alerts of assembly orders for sales orders sorted by delay to detect the most critical assembly order. By detecting the critical path for the complete order context, reducing minimum intervals between operations and orders, and performing multi-level rescheduling of the order context, the production planner can solve the delay or find a new feasible end date. After evaluating the capacity load situation, the production planner can reduce capacity bottlenecks by rescheduling, planning overtime or additional shifts, splitting orders, or switching from internal to external procurement for specific orders.

By comparing different simulation versions, the production planner can find the best solution for orders with delay or capacity bottlenecks. The decision is supported by the plan monitor, where key figures for the different simulation versions can be compared.

SAP xMII enables real-time transactional integration between plant floor and enterprise (SAP ERP) systems out-of-the box through:

• Universal Connectivity to the data, functionality and processes of existing plant floor systems
• Business Logic for creating automated events, KPIs and alerts
• Workflow to synchronize plant and Enterprise business processes
• Message mapping between MES, SFA, legacy apps. and the ERP system based on industry standards (like ISA-S95, ...)
• Manufacturing Intelligence: Near real-time analytics engine that aggregates and delivers unified visualization of events, alerts, KPIs and decision support to production personnel.

Manufacturing visibility manages events throughout the production process from release of a manufacturing order through transferring the data to the data warehouse, where it is analyzed. During production, process steps but also exceptions are reported, ensuring a transparent manufacturing process and the possibility to take counter-measures immediately. It is also possible to provide information on events to external parties such as customers, subcontractors or sold-to parties, using various channels to provide the information quickly and to ensure transparency of planned and actual events and to continuously improve the manufacturing processes.

Checks the correct combination of all machines and components during start-up, after the partial components have been checked. Creates activity confirmation in accordance with the contract. Enters technical findings, and deals with measurement documents. Confirms successful start-up with an acceptance protocol from the customer that forms part of the order documentation..

Initiates billing according to the procedures stated in the order. Allows for both resource-related and fixed price-related billing. Maps down payments appropriately, including those involving security deposits. Creates invoices for partial delivery; for example, preliminary acceptance by the customer following a successful start-up that triggers the payment of an installment as stipulated in the contract. Determines and updates shared overhead costs. Calculates the project's interest rates based on payment and cost information. Determines the costs of sales, and assigns them to the revenues incurred and to the stocks of goods in process or in provision using various methods, including results analysis based on the determined percentage of completion. Creates completion confirmations from all elements of the project within the framework of a central planning and controlling system. Guarantees complete entry of all in-house and external deliveries and services, and avoids double entries.