Synchronization of resource capacity / usage between Build / Produce / Inspect and SAP Business One

While in Cloud Apps resource capacity / usage is invariably specified in hours, minutes, and seconds, SAP Business One lets you choose the unit of measure for this purpose. Besides time units, such as hours, minutes, or seconds, you can also opt for any proprietary – though time-like – unit of measure, e.g. turns, cycles, etc. Not using “real” time units directly may facilitate capacity planning with certain resources. However, as SAP Business One also needs to calculate the “real” run or consumption time for each resource, it has to apply some kind of conversion to the values that are expressed in such proprietary units. For this reason, the Resource Master Data form in SAP Business One uses three fields to specify resource capacity:

• Unit of Measure Text – The name of the proprietary unit of measure you wish to use. As said above, you can enter here the name of the unit that best fits the characteristics of the resource. By default, this field is empty.
• Time per Resource Units – The time it takes for the resource to process the number of units specified in the Res. Units per Time Period field (see below). (“Units” here refer to the unit of measure specified in the Unit of Measure Text field.) The field’s format is <h:mm:ss>, and the default value is <0:00:00>.
• Res. Units per Time Period – The number of resource units consumed during the time period specified in the Time per Resource Units field (above). (Again, “units” refer to the unit of measure specified in the Unit of Measure Text field.) By default, this field is set to 1. A value of 0 is not allowed.

Remember that if the Unit of Measure Text field is left empty and/or the Time per Resource Units value remains <0:00:00> then a production order containing this resource cannot be processed by Produce.

To calculate the “real” processing time of a single unit of a resource, SAP Business One divides the Time per Resource Units value by the Res. Units per Time Period value:

<”real” processing time of a single unit of a resource> = <Time per Resource Units> / <Res. Units per Time Period>

When you open the Resource Master Data form in SAP Business One to create a resource, you can see the default values as shown in the red frame in the screenshot below:

• Unit of Measure Text = <empty>;
• Time per Resource Units = <0:00:00>;
• Res. Units per Time Period = 1.

When you create a resource in Build, the first two of the above default settings will be overwritten as SAP Business One is automatically synchronized with Build: The “real” processing time of a single unit of the resource will be 1 minute:

• Unit of Measure Text = min;
• Time per Resource Units = <0:01:00>;
• Res. Units per Time Period = 1.

This case is illustrated by the following screenshot:

As “real” processing time is calculated by division, you can describe any real-life scenario by keeping the Res. Units per Time Period value at 1, and just change the Time per Resource Units value as and when needed. In this case, with Res. Units per Time Period = 1, the “real” processing time will simply be equal to the value specified in the Time per Resource Units field. In practice, this is the most widely used setup.

In the related Help center articles we assume that the resource master data are set to the defaults triggered by Build:

• Unit of Measure Text = min;
• Time per Resource Units = <0:01:00>;
• Res. Units per Time Period = 1.

For other cases, see Resource time management in Cloud Apps with proprietary resource master data in SAP Business One.

For an overview of resource time concepts across members of the Cloud Apps family and SAP Business One, see Equivalences of resource related time concepts across Cloud Apps and SAP Business One (SBO).