building a much better basis for Inventory Analysis with SAP's Add-On "Material Document Aggregation"

have you ever wondered if you can exclude certain movements from your consumption history, when you analyze your inventories? As an example: very often I am asked if we can exclude transfer postings from being included in the consumption history of a material, because it distorts the result.

Well, in standard SAP you have two sources of consumption history. Either table MVER or info structure S031. And neither one lets you exclude certain movements or objects.

This is where Marc Hoppe and his team from SAP Consulting with their Add-On tools come into play again.

With their Add-On tool MRP Monitor comes a Material Document Aggregation tool which can provide the basis for your Analysis. This tool allows you to fill a table with consumption history to your liking. There are many selection criteria as you can see in the screen print below.

But more than that, it also allows you to calculate stock levels and dead stock. It is important that only the movements you selected before, are taken into account to calculate KPIs like average inventory, turns and dead stock. Standard SAP (and those inventory reducing analyzers out there) can't give you this.

Below an explanation on how the MDA stock calculation works.

So when the MDA (Material Document Aggregation) is done, you have a table filled with the consumption history and inventory KPIs that are including only those movements, special stocks, transactions and materials (you can exclude No-Movers or extreme slow movers, materials marked for deletion or zero stock items) that are relevant for your analysis.

This table is usually initialized for a period of two years into the past and then you set up a job that runs every months to append the recent values. 

It is also possible to create several variations of the MDA for ad hoc and What If Analytics.

Once you're done with the MDA, you will have the appropriate data basis to perform Inventory Analysis and Optimization with the Add - On tools MRP Monitor, Inventory Cockpit or Service Level Monitor and much more.