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Industry
Solution - PDC Gateway ™ - PP-PDC
Overview
Integration Software for Kronos® and
SAP®
The SAP® PP
(PP-PDC) Interface
The SAP® PP (PP-PDC) Interface
The PDC Gateway PP-PDC interface integrates Kronos® labor systems to SAP®
PP. The SAP® PP-PDC (Production Planning – Plant Data Collection)
interface allows labor time tickets that have taken place on
existing Production Orders into the SAP® system thus triggering subsequent
functions such as modification of a work center's remaining capacity
requirements, back flush of components, automatic posting of goods
receipt, valuation of confirmed activities for actual costs, the transfer
of payment-relevant actual data to an HR system and so on. The entries are
confirmations of Operations on a given Production Order. The interface
supports all confirmation activities including cancellations, partial, and
total confirmations. With the
PP-PDC interface, operation data relating to production orders and
PDC-relevant master data are downloaded as needed (generally as a timed
task) from the SAP® system.
These downloads are transferred
from SAP® to Kronos® via ALE IDOCS. The PP-PDC download does not support
any other protocol. The PDC Gateway listens to the SAP® system for
incoming updates via it's ALE Component and transfers the IDOCS asynchronously
when a message is determined to be a valid PP-PDC message type, such as
Operations. Upon receipt, the IDOC is processed in PDC Gateway as
the configuration dictates, executing any scripting at run-time, and
forwards the data to the Kronos® system for immediate use.
The PP-PDC downloads
include:
- Operations
- Employees
- Work Centers
- Units of Measure
- Difference of Variance
- Cost Centers
- Production Orders
- Confirmations
The PP-PDC
uploads include:
- Time Ticket
Confirmations
- Confirmation
Cancellations
PDC Gateway periodically queries the Kronos® system for completed "Activity Events". Any new or changed records found are queued up in the interface for transfer to SAP®. The PDC Gateway includes a PP-PDC module that handles all of the SAP BAPI communication for checking, cancelling and uploading confirmations. Since Kronos can sometimes edit the record repeatedly during internal processing, the interface must determine if the record is new and relevant to SAP, or if it has changed since it was previously uploaded. If an event is determined to require a change in SAP then a cancellation is performed on the previous confirmation and the new one is then sent.
Any SAP returned error messages are handled via a robust error handler process. This can automatically resend error records later or it can send emails to a distribution list to warn of an error condition. The PDC Gateway Monitor tool includes a utility that can display the activity events captured from Kronos and the actual SAP confirmation counters that are associated with each. Comparison reports can be performed for ranges of records and any differences found can be highlighted.
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