Peraison's Expertise in SAP Data Analytics
Peraison has been assisting enterprise SAP clients worldwide in maximising the value of their SAP investments by building flexible, high-performant data analytics solutions, particularly for MD4C report replication.
By unlocking SAP data and making it accessible on powerful cloud-based platforms, we create customized views that not only enhance operational capabilities but also significantly reduce overhead and reporting time for our clients.
What is the SAP Multi-level Order Report?
The SAP MD4C report is a multi-level order report used in the SAP ERP system. It provides a display of multilevel order information for planned orders, production orders, or process orders. This report is essential for ensuring that all components required for production are available and helps in identifying and resolving any bottlenecks in the production process.
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Within production planning, the Multi-level Order report does a collective availability check for all the components in an order rather than for an individual order component. The collective term is used as it is run against multiple orders at the same time rather than for a single order. The benefit of the SAP report is that results are displayed multi-level style in the same manner of an exploded Bill of Materials.
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The report is the result of checking the production plan, a stock check for each required component and all replenishment events for those same components. The result is basically a list of errors that need to be resolved, Purchase Orders that need to be expedited and a reschedule of all relevant production orders and planned orders that make input components to fulfil an order.
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The MD4C report is used extensively by those that use it.
Running the report against a large set of open orders takes a significant amount of processing power and there are common instances of this report taking more than an hour to run.
Additionally, the SAP user interface provides limited capability to filter, search and analyse the data in the report. Hence why many SAP customers wish to replicate the MD4C report in their business intelligence platform.
Replicating the Multi-level Order Report (MD4C) outside of SAP
The SAP MD4C report is a critical tool in the SAP ERP system for ensuring all necessary production components are available, performing collective availability checks across multiple orders, and identifying production bottlenecks. While replicating MD4C outside of SAP is complex due to its reliance on intermediary reports and configuration options, using cloud-based data platforms with Massively Parallel Processing can significantly reduce refresh times, allowing for up-to-date and flexible data analysis.
Replicating MDC4 outside of SAP
Replicating MD4C outside of SAP is a complex process. It's not possible to generate it directly from SAP's raw tables; rather, it necessitates the creation of several intermediary reports.
Moreover, MD4C encompasses a range of configuration options within SAP, and grasping their effects on the displayed data is essential.
Additionally, MD4C is susceptible to becoming outdated swiftly, as minor alterations in upstream data can compromise the report's accuracy.
Consequently, the capability for prompt updates is critical to preserve MD4C's utility.
Streamlining the MDC4 Report
To streamline the MD4C report generation outside of SAP, it’s essential to first produce the BOM (Bills of Materials) and then the MD04 (Stock Requirements List Report).
This can be achieved through direct construction from SAP’s raw tables or by integrating BAPI extracts with these tables. While BAPI extracts simplify data modeling, they may increase refresh times, and their use is sometimes discouraged by system administrators.
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The list of tables are the main tables required from SAP.​
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In terms of execution, a broad spectrum of SAP tables is required. A lakehouse architecture with a medallion design is recommended for storing and processing SAP data. Cloud-based data platforms like Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, or Databricks, known for their Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) capabilities, are ideal.
They offer the computational strength needed to update SAP reports swiftly, reducing the time from hours to minutes.
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Our clients have successfully replicated MD4C outside of SAP, gaining the ability to create tailored views as per their requirements
