Explaining Development Collaboration in SAP Integrated Product Development

A contributor or administrator of collaboration would add a BOM to the collaboration so the other participants could collaborate on this shared product data. The BOM will be stored in SAP IPD so multiple suppliers can view and redline the BOM with product updates. At the end of this collaboration process, the collaboration owner will view the multiple redline versions and decide which supplier to work with for the future product version. Loading a BOM from your source system allows the participants to view, edit, redline, or download this information without any impact on your source system data. Follow the procedure below to retrieve product data from a source system and add it to collaboration.

1. In a collaboration, choose the Shared Product Data tab.

2. Choose Add.

   

3. Select the required product data and the system from where you want to retrieve the product data.

   The search filter bar section displays the selected product data's filter fields (attributes).

4. Perform the search for product data in the following ways:

   • Enter the search filter criteria in the fields and choose Go. The results that match the search criteria are displayed.
   • Enter no search filter criteria in the fields and choose Go. The collaboration retrieves all the available records for the selected product data and the source system.
   • By default, 25 records are retrieved. You can retrieve any number of records by using the Maximum No. of Hits field. A high number of results may lead to a gateway timeout error.

5. Select the records you want to add to the collaboration and choose Add.

   • If you have selected a BOM that has already been added to the collaboration, a warning message is displayed asking if you want to replace the existing bill of material. On confirming the message, the BOM is re-imported, and the content of the BOM file is overwritten. Any redlining created for the previous BOM is still associated with the reimported BOM and can be viewed.
   • In the collaboration, you see the header data of a BOM, for example: the change number that is assigned to the header item. The change numbers assigned to the individual BOM items are not visible. The selected records are added to the collaboration. You can view the details of the added records by choosing each record in the collaboration. Each product data is stored as a JSON file with the file name appended with the Object Type ID.

A participant in collaboration would need to download shared product data to edit or collaborate on that data. To download this data to perform your tasks, follow the steps below.

1. In a collaboration, choose the Shared Product Data tab.

2. Select the record that you want to download and choose Download.

A contributor or administrator of collaboration would need to delete shared product data if it was shared with the wrong collaboration, if they do not want the participants to view this information, or if a more recent version of the information exists. To delete this data to perform your tasks, follow the steps below.

1. In a collaboration, choose the Shared Product Data tab.

2. Select the record that you want to remove and choose Delete.

You can link files and folders to Reference Objects which are available in the Shared Documents. This allows the participants to understand better which files and folders are associated with the shared product data.

1. When adding or editing Link Files and Folders under Shared Product Data, choose Attachments.

2. Select the required files and folders to link them to Shared Product Data.

3. Choose OK.