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udo_werner
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Configure CO-PA for configuration
2 times the same word (configuration) for completely different things…

In reaction to my last blog on  Including Product Configuration into AnalyticsI was asked how variant configuration integrates into the ERP-integrated  drill-down reporting application CO-PA, or profitability analysis.

This is a problem that is solved fully integrated in standard and therefore just a matter of configuring it. We of the IBU Mill products haven an example for that in our IDES demo since quite a while. I will summarize briefly on that showing examples from the IDES environment IDES).  We begin with creating a customer order entering configuration properties for a steel sheet with grade as the property I will focus on:

  I follow the make-to-order scenario in the IDES script, create a process order, consume components, deliver the material and finally create the billing document.

During the billing the info on cost and revenue are transferred to CO-PA to be collected in the info structures. In our example the CO-PA info structures were extended by fields from the variant configuration.  We see that when we have a loo to the CO-PA line item that was transferred:

 

How did we set the system set up to achieve that?
Here is the part in the help where you find the description: SAP Docu

if sales order items are entered with configurable materials, then you may often wish to determine characteristic values for CO-PA characteristics independently of the values in the variant configuration. You can also create derivation steps that have characteristics from the variant configuration as source fields.  When defining the source fields, you can enter as a source field name all the characteristics from the variant configuration system that have character-based or numeric names.

To show that in our steel example: These are our specifically created charactersistics:

And here is the derivation we assigned to the characteristics:

You see here that characteristics from variant configuration is transferred during billing as fields in the structure VCONF. The technical name of the coating property is MM_TYPE_COATING in the setup of the variant configuration. In the derivation the contents of that field is moved to the CO-PA characteristics WWM2, called the Coating Type.

Result:
With that set-up each billing document transfers not only the costs (from the sales-order costing) the price conditions and the standard characteristics like sold-to and material number, but also the selected properties from variant configuration like ‘Coating Type’ and ‘Grade’. CO-PA reporting directly in ERP or in BW is ready to include that characteristic to show for example the margin for last month of sales of zinc-coated sheets in North America compared to uncoated sheets.
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