What is a Production order / Process Order?  A Production order or a Process order is an object in SAP which identifies and evaluates the following: 

a)       The quantity that is to be produced for a finish product 

b)       The total planned time that would be consumed to manufacture the product at each operation, thus calculating the execution start time and the end time at each operation and in turn for the whole order. This is made possible by exploding the Routing/Recipes for the order quantity.

 c)       The total planned raw material quantity that would be required for manufacturing the product, derived through exploding the bill of material for the order quantity.

 d)       The total PRT consumption derived by exploding the PRT requirement for the order quantity

 e)       The total cost required for manufacturing the order, derived through adding up the raw material cost, the operational activity costs and the PRT costs; additionally you can also add overheads as required to the order costs.

  Demonstration  Assume that a production order or a process order in SAP is an “open box” (an hungry monster) which gulps up all the raw materials required for production, all the cost of these raw materials, which gulps up all the operational efforts or activities booked to produce a product, the cost associated with operational activities (& overheads), all the issued Production Resource tools (PRT) and the costs associated with it.