I feel there is a dearth of discussion on the SAP Quality management functions and processes which are prevalent in the Oil and Gas Industry. During an implementation in the industry I had to face some scenarios which I would like to talk about.
The first case I would like to talk about is the usage decision scenario. A fairly simple one but since this involves the Oil and Gas Industry (Downstream) - Hydrocarbon product management – QCI (Quantity conversion interface).Whenever a UD is about to made and the stock is to be sent to either Un-restricted or blocked, it requires the QCI value to be entered; this is the normal scenario when operating in the foreground but if one need to process in the background then the BAPI provided by SAP- BAPI_INSPLOT_SETUSAGEDECISION does not fulfill the requirement.
Simply because it has no parameters for oil; this is a similar case to the goods movement BAPI; for which there is an alternate BAPI FOR Oil. Even if you run the BAPI in the background and allow it to make the stock posting automatically, the system will ask for the QCI parameters. There is no current setting within it to provide the aforementioned parameters. Will an alternative BAPI be provided by SAP to cater for this requirement in the future?
Another scenario was related to a storage location. If we were to talk about a single location or a petrol tank; we would test the quality of the product on the entire tank. Why? When liquids mix, they can create further changes in the composition of the entire stock present in that tank/location.
Therefore, one must conduct a test on the entire available stock to verify that the quality indeed meets the pre-set requirements. For this procedure, there is no way to manipulate the existing un-restricted stock within a storage location. To cater for this requirement, one needs to make a further action to move all the existing stock into quality. This inherently is done by triggering another goods movement, thus another quality inspection and thus the need to create a link between the original stock movements with the movement done for the remaining tank. Therein the need to look at the QCI values comes again at this point
There is the third scenario of actually inventory posting but that is correctly handled by SAP through MI10; whenever there is a posting of actual stock for correcting the actual quantity; it makes an adjustment to the quality stock held by an inspection lot. These are just some of the discussions which I wanted to talk about; ASUG held a joint SAP QM improvement suggestion at the end of March. There are other consortiums & seminars which handle process improvements to the current set of functionalities. I believe someone would have already made the suggestions mentioned above but I wanted to highlight it to the community
