Back in July, I suspended my series on the SAP B1 Web client due to some frustrating deficiencies in the production module. SP2508 was supposed to fix some of these. Unfortunately, SAP fixed none of them.

Instead of suspending this for another few months until more bugs are fixed, I’m going to review those issues and use this as an opportunity to explore something I usually do in the LucaERP newsletter: describe why companies and developers make decisions when building an ERP. I don’t know SAP’s reasoning, but I can give you some ideas about what I’m thinking about writing these modules.

The Bug of Materials

We start with a bug in the Bill of Materials (BoMs). Entering the selection page for BoMs, it stares you in the face, though you might miss it.

For other such pages, we have entries from the parent or father tables. I discussed the parent-child relationship of one-to-many tables last time in the bizoneness newsletter. The parent table here makes sense: it is the one connection to all the line items associated with it. In the Bill of Materials, the preant child relationship is OITT for the Bill of Materials parent and ITT1 for the items in the Bill of Materials, such as inventory items, subassemblies, routing, and more.

However, the bill of materials section shows ITT1, the children’s line items, not the parent. That makes a lot more repetitive items to pick through.

Since I can’t think of any good reason to do this, this is a bug. Most likely, this is the case of the developer not knowing their tables or making a simple typo. It’s the kind of thing I expect from Vibe coding through AI, which lacks sufficient context of the database tables.

What irritates me is that it is such a glaring bug, breaking user expectations of product functionality, and it still isn’t fixed.

You can click on a row to get the correct bill of materials, including both parent and child information.

I can edit and create new BoMs, and the web client has buttons to filter by Route stages, Items, resources, and texts.

While earlier versions did not let you save a BoB, the create and edit buttons are now available. I didn’t try to save a new BoM; I was afraid of what I would find.

##Production Orders.

I’ll then go over to the production orders. What you find is disturbing — this is read-only.

The selection page works correctly, giving us the parent table to access the rows.

When you select a production order, you have no way to edit or add more production orders. The function bar is gone. This, of course, means you cannot release the order to production or close a production order from the web client.

Any method you think of for adding or editing a production order doesn’t exist.

This is more than a bug; it is either a feature or a missing feature. The question becomes why it is missing.

The simplest answer is that production is not a high priority for SAP. Production is not a “sexy module.” Not everyone uses it. Those involved in the service industry won’t, and many in the distribution or Retail do not need it. That brings it down towards the bottom of the TODO list compared to Finance, or Sales, or Dashboards.

The standard SAP B1 Client can attest to this possibility as well. Coming from a shop that did both mass manufacturing and custom jobs, I’m well aware of the deficiencies. The number of features missing from SAP B1 is quite high, including fixed cost calculations, job costing, production variance, quality measures, etc. Some features, like routing and resources, are tacked on as extras.

Another possibility is that the production orders module in the web client is intentionally read-only, requiring any changes to be made on the RDP client only. There may be ways to share user IDs on the web client that are not possible in the RDP client. If there is any case for sharing user IDs, it’s most likely in production, especially in a small business environment that can’t afford many licenses.

However, the bug in the bill of materials leads me to choose option 3 in this case as well: the code is poorly written. Whether this is due to AI vibe coding, bad programmers, or bad architecture is something I cannot know for certain. My biggest clue is the lack of context in the action bar. Every module, even those that have no use for it, such as the bill of materials, has an “Add activity” button. That points to bad architecture. An error like that would not be so consistent across the system.

Again, this is speculation. I cant read the mind of SAP, or really understand thier roadmap.

Sadly, the production module is worthless in the SAP B1 web client. If it worked, I could see a lot of use for it based on my background in medical device manufacturing. Production is ideal for use on tablets running web browsers instead of desktops. I spent four years waiting for a fixed costs feature in SAP B1, only to be told it was in the next build. From that experience, I’m skeptical about whether a functional production module will show up in SAP.

I’ll revisit this once the module actually works. In the meantime, for my next column, I’ll continue to find what works in the Web client.