My blog has been going for a few months and I must say that it has been quite popular based on the number of downloads of the lessons. One of the most downloaded lessons was on the Interface Design so perhaps that is an area that is hard to find information on.
Most of my hits come from Australia, as it is an Australian site, but most of the downloads are from the US, but that is probably just the size of the US market compared to Australia. We only have 20+ million people.
So with Christmas and Holidays, a break in New Zealand there may not be any new lessons until later in January. Always like to hear if there is a lesson in particular you may want so drop me a comment and I will see what I can do.
Well all the best for Christmas, and I wish you a Happy New Year. May next year be a good one.
This lesson completes our simple Box configurator. It is not the last lesson, but we have now built something that selects a component. This is using class items.
You may have noticed, or perhaps not, that I have shown ways that keep object dependencies to the minimum, and used variant table, and now class items, to simplify ongoing maintenance.
When I was learning Variant Configuration, I learnt constraints and class items last. But really I think it is better to know about them first as you will end up with a better design, that is easier to maintain.
I just want to update you with a couple of useful sites relating to Variant Configuration. The first I want to tell you about is a blog by Steve Schneider. Steve is very knowledgeable in the Variant Configuration area and has very hands on experience based on what I know of his activites. You will find the information on his blog very interesting as he covers areas about the direction, different aspects of VC, the Configurator user group etc. So I recommend you have a look so go here.
The next one is for the Configuration Work Group. This is very useful as they hold conferences at various times, host a forum, have useful information, and have input into the direction of the configurator with SAP. I would like to go to one of there conferences, but as I live at the bottom of the world it is a bit difficult as they tend to be Europe based. However a working holiday… Anyway check it out here.
Lastly if you want the SAP documentation on Variant Configuration then go to EasyMarketPlace as they provide a link to get the help in PDF format from SAP. It is 4.6C but is very useful. Here is the direct link to the document at SAP here.
I am suprised I got this lesson ready tonight. Somehow a possum got in the house last night and we couldnt find it during the day as they hide and sleep. But it left a few tell tale signs so we knew it was somewhere. Well as night fell out he came, so it was a bit of fun getting him out of the house without seeing the cat, and destroying anything else.
But here we are with a new lesson. This covers creating a better interface for our users to select characteristics and values. Otherwise on some projects you may have 20, maybe 40 characteristics, so you need to organise them. So here is the lesson.(2.23mb)
In this lesson I want to show the use of a simple contraint to restrict our values. This is explained by the screen demo in Variant Tables in Part 5. But basically we are enforcing this relationship.
Small Box – Red, Green, Blue
Medium Box – Red, Green
Large – Green
The Constraint looks like this.
OBJECTS:
BOX IS_A(300)A300_BOX
Just a quick entry as I just resolved an issue with pricing updates today.
The situation is that we had a development that needs to update a discount amount for an item in the sales order. Using the BAPI and following the help we found that instead of the condition being updated, it was being duplicated.
Tried using deletes etc, but still no luck. But in OSS there is note 593246 that relates to functions available to BAPIs valid from Version 4-70.
In simple terms there is a new parameter setting in the BAPI under LOGIC_SWITCH. In there you set COND_HANDL = X and this allows different logic for updating pricing and discount conditions so they are updated and not added to.
This lesson is all about variant tables. What are variant tables all about? Well the best way to perhaps see the benefit of them is to see the end result of what can be achieved with them.
What I am showing here is what I described in the first lesson.
We are going to order boxes. The boxes can be ordered with the following relationship.
Small Box – Red, Green, Blue
Medium Box – Red, Green
Large – Green
In the configurator we are going to get this.
So as you can see whether you select the colour or the size it will propose the allowed options.
So to do this we need to set up a variant table, then in the next lesson a constraint.
Here is the lesson. (4.5mb)
If you are working through the Variant Configuration lessons you probably know that the menus are buried away in SAP. I have posted a zip file that you can upload into SAP.
Extract the file to your hard drive and then in the SAP main screen goto the menu > Favourites > Upload from PC.
Tonight I have just finished the latest lesson. It is pushing 11-00pm here so am rushing to load this up and get some sleep. This lesson is starting to get to the stage where we can do the real stuff with variant configuration. The setup is a bit tedious, but relatively straightforward.
The configuration profile is the heart of things. It links the KMAT to the class, plus controls many other aspects. Later we will assign a few object dependencies to it.
So hope you are following this so far, but let me know if you have any questions.
Hi again. Todays lesson is looking at maintaining a class. This class will contain the characteristics BOX_SIZE and BOX_COLOURS and the user will see these in the sales order after we hook everything up.
I have added audio to the lesson in the pdf link for this lesson. Makes the file size about 2 meg but should be ok. Give me some feed back on whether the audio helps.
Once we get past this lesson it will get more interesting as we will be doing some cool stuff with constraints, have some ideas on constructing BOMs etc.
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