Improve Performance of SAP Material Ledger Closing Cockpit

By Ashish Sampat

If you experience long run-times during SAP Material Ledger close, this blog is for you.

How much your products cost is essential to determining actual profitability. Yet most decisions are based on the standard cost since it is not easy to determine your actual costs.

SAP Material Ledger Actual Costing bridges this gap. It provides you the ability to capture actual costs by tracking variances at the material level.

SAP Material Ledger Actual Costing

For materials that are valued at a standard cost, the Material Ledger tracks all the goods movements and price and exchange rate differences for that material within a period. Then, at the end of the period (actually sometime during the subsequent period), the actual costing run calculates an actual cost (also known as the periodic unit price PUP) by taking the value of the cumulative inventory at standard cost, adding the price (or exchange rate) differences, and dividing by the cumulative inventory.

Closing Cockpit

You run SAP Material Ledger closing cockpit every month to perform actual costing with transaction CKMLCP or via menu path Accounting • Controlling • Product Cost Controlling • Actual Costing/Material Ledger • Actual Costing • Edit Costing Run

The first step is to create a costing run and assign plants. After selecting plants, the Material Ledger closing cockpit requires several steps as shown in Figure 1.

 Figure 1: Actual Costing Cockpit

Process Steps

    1. Selection: all materials for the given plants are selected.

    2. Sequence Determination: the sequence of costing is established, starting with the lowest level material and going all the way up to the highest-level material and goods movements.

    3. Single-Level Price Determination: prices are calculated for each material.

    4. Multi-Level Price Determination: prices are calculated for the entire production stream.

    5. Revaluation of Consumption: adjustment posting of actual costs at month-end, where all variances are transferred to the receiving object (which can be a material, cost center, internal order, GL Account, etc., depending on where the original consumption occurred).

    6. Post-Closing: all calculations performed in prior steps are posted during this step.

       Multi-level price differences are transferred to the next level.

       Revaluation of consumption is posted to cost objects.

       Inventory is revalued in FI for the period being closed.

    7. Mark Material Prices: this step is optional. You may decide not to use the periodic unit price as a standard for the next month. If so you use the standard price for goods movements and revalues at the periodic unit price only at month-end.

Performance Improvement with Parallel Processing

Large run times and low system performance may become the norm, given that Material Ledger processes large amounts of data in the closing cockpit. Parallel processing can be used to address this performance concern.

You have an option to run the close steps on multiple servers, as shown in Figure 2.

 Figure 2: CKMLCP

Parallel processing on multiple servers

This feature is often referred to as parallel processing. You can see at the bottom of the screen, server group parallel_generators has been selected, with the additional selection of maximum number of parallel processes as 10. This means that, instead of the usual single server, this job will be executed in parallel on 10 servers. This implies there could be a significant at times, 85-90 percent performance improvement for this job.

Parallel processing setup requires collaboration with your Basis team.