Distribution of Usage Variance in SAP

In this blog, I will be covering one of the uses of the Distribution of Usage Variances in a practical scenario. The concept of "Distribution of Usage Variance" (Henceforth DUV) is widely used in Actual Costing. It has immense benefits on the entire component of Product Costing. Now coming to one of my real-time Project Exposure where I had to use the DUV in computing the actual energy cost distribution. Here I am mainly focusing on activity units (say for example Power in KwH or NG in SCM) that are not getting confirmed by Production Plant users while confirming production Order, process Order or Production Cost Collector. (i.e. by T Code CO11N etc.)

In a highly automated industry (like in manufacturing units which are using Industry 4.0) with the help of SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition), the consumption units can be captured & interfaced into SAP via OPC. In the practical scenario in the case where production units are not fully automated & integrated with SAP, it becomes difficult to get the EXACT Actual units data captured in the Equipment Cost Centers & eventually absorbing it over respective Cost Objects. Generally, Energy costs are captured in the Cost Component Structure of a Product in the following ways:

A. Some percentage of Value Add & captured in the Machine Hour rate.

B. It can be maintained in the Operation which can be confirmed with the actual units of Consumption (DUV not required in this case) or can be updated with calculated Units (DUV can be used).

Now coming to the practical scenario process flow. See the below Diagram.

The details mentioned here carried out during the entire month. Now the question is whether the total units of consumption will exactly match with the actual units of the Electricity bill ????

It must not be, as the units are based on the calculated figure only (Actual Production * Standard Consumption Units) not the actual units ( Actual Production * Actual Consumption Units as per Bill). Now at the month-end facility management receive the Power bill as 9000 & 11000 KwH respectively for Machine 1 & 2 as shown below.

Now the biggest question is what about the delta KwH units & how to distribute it over the Production Orders ??? To get rid of this problem we can take the help of DUV. The following steps can be used in SAP to distribute 500 KwH of Machine-1 over three production Orders & -250 KwH of Machine-2 over two Production orders.

Post Production Machine-1 Cost Center must have absorbed 8500 KwH units to the Production Orders. Now the Actual units we have to update in the Cost center through the T Code CKMDUVREC. Refer to the below screenshot.

In this screen Activity Type 1000 represents Power. We need to update the total Actual Consumption Units (i.e. 9000 & 11000 KwH against Machine -1 & Machine-2 Cost center respectively).

After entering the Actual quantities, the next step is to distribute the delta units over the Production Orders. Refer to the below steps. (T Code - CKMDUVACT)

Once you execute the Distribution button, the system automatically gets all the Production Orders that would have used the Cost Centers Machine-1 & Machine-2. Once you get the details & verify it you can post it. The system distributes the units as per logics showed in the below screenshot.

Post distribution the Actual KwH Consumption Units can be shown in the cost center report T Code - S_ALR_87013611 & the Production Orders would also get the actual consumption units against the calculated one.

I hope this will help in capturing Actual Consumption Units & solve your issue to a maximum extent.

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