Before we begin, let’s clear up some confusion on what “drilldown reporting” with the SAP S/4HANA Material Ledger actually is.
The term doesn’t quite reflect what this functionality actually does, because to drill down into a report normally means to double-click a line of the report to get more detail. In SAP, drilldown reporting means something a little different, even though it does relate to getting more detail out of a report. Drilldown reports normally contain two major attributes:
The difference between drilldown reports and ABAP list viewer (ALV) reports is that drilldown reports provide more flexibility for analyzing data by different dimensions. You can think of ALV reports as two-dimensional and drilldown reports as three-dimensional.
Drilldown reports have been available in other functionalities, such as controlling (CO), profitability analysis (CO-PA), general ledger (G/L) financial statements, and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) reporting. In the Material Ledger, drilldown reporting can be used to create material views that are similar to the material price analysis, but for multiple materials. These reports are available due to a combination of reporting tables (FCML*) and SAP HANA technology, thereby enabling quick extraction of huge volumes of data that can be reported in a flexible way.
You can access drilldown reporting by going to application menu path Controlling > Product Cost Controlling > Actual Costing/Material Ledger > Material Ledger > Information System > Drilldown Reporting > Run Drilldown Report or using Transaction KKML0. This will take you to the screen shown here:
Notice Report 01MLREPORT, which is the SAP standard drilldown report for the Material Ledger that was created from the Form 01ML_FORM. It’s possible to create your own Material Ledger drilldown report using Transactions KKML5 (to create the form) and KKML1 (to create the report from the form). However, as the standard SAP report is suitable, you can use this report without changing it.
Select the report, and click the Execute button that is highlighted in the figure above. This will take you to this screen:
As you can see, there are several fields that can be used to filter the output of the drilldown report. For this example, enter the relevant Posting Date YYYY “2018”, currency type (Crcy Type/Valuation), “10”, Base Unit of Measure “EA”, and Posting Period “12”.
Scroll to the bottom of the report, and choose Classic drilldown report as the output format that you want to display the report with, as shown here:
Click the Execute button to display the results shown in the figure below.
You can see that the values shown are reflective of the fields in the Material Price Analysis screen, such as Beginning Inventory, Receipts, Consumption, and Ending Inventory. However, with the drilldown report, these values relate to multiple materials. You can pull in extra characteristics by clicking the relevant characteristics in the Navigation area at the top-left part of the screen, which will pull them into the top-right part of the screen. You can then filter the values of these characteristics to display the report, as shown in the next figure.
You can also view the report by the material characteristic by clicking the Material field in the Navigation area and then clicking the Back button to display the results shown here:
You can see the report broken down by material in the above figure, with the quantity (Object Set) and values, such as preliminary valuation (PrelimVal), single-level price difference (1LvL PrDif), multilevel price difference (MLvl PrDif), and Actual Value, shown for the Beginning Inventory category. You can also see these values for the other categories by scrolling to the right part of the screen. You can show these views for any of the dimensions in the report, such as Material Type, Valuation Class, Profit Center, Division, etc., simply by clicking the relevant dimension at the top of the screen and clicking the lead reporting column to switch the view.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Material Ledger in SAP S/4HANA: Functionality and Configuration by Paul Ovigele.