Defining and Assigning Plants

A plant is an organizational unit within Logistics that subdivides the enterprise for production, procurement, maintenance, and materials planning. A plant produces materials or makes goods or services available.

• A plant and a division belong to just one business area.
• A plant can be assigned to several combinations of sales organizations and distribution channels.
• A plant can have several shipping points. A shipping point, on the other side, can be assigned to several plants.
• A plant has an address and a language and belongs to a country and a region.
• A plant has its own material master data. Data can be maintained at plant level for various views of the material master record, such as Materials Requirements Planning (MRP), Purchasing, Storage, Work Scheduling, Production Resources/Tools, Forecast, Quality Management, Sales, and Costing.
• Several purchasing organizations can be assigned to a plant.
• Management of material stocks on value basis takes place at plant level if the valuation area corresponds to the plant.
• Production planning and production are carried out on a plant-specific basis. However, certain applications can work on a cross-plant basis.
• Product costing can be carried out on a cross-plant basis.
• A plant can be defined as a maintenance planning plant. To define this, in Customizing, go to Enterprise Structure → Definition → Plant Maintenance → Maintain Maintenance Planning Plant.

A plant can simultaneously be a production plant and a maintenance planning plant.

The storage location key must be unique within a plant. You can use the same storage location keys in each plant. You can define the storage location keys according to the function of the storage location and set up a uniform storage location structure for all plants.

You can maintain one or more addresses for each storage location. These addresses can differ from the plant address. If you maintain a storage location address and use it in a purchase order, the system will output the associated address as the delivery address.

If you store several addresses for a storage location, the system always suggests the first address. You can change the address by selecting a different address number on the Delivery Address tab page (the system generates one address number per address).

• A local purchasing organization
• A cross-plant purchasing organization
• A cross-company-code purchasing organization
• Two purchasing organizations for different purposes, such as Procuring Materials and Procuring Services

When you click on the iconIMG within the activity Copy, delete, check plant, you can generate a new project view which you have to assign to an existing Customizing project.

This view contains all customizing activities which have plant-specific settings.

The check plant function is carried out in two steps:

1. In the first step, the system checks whether the entry exists in all tables in which the table key contains the specified organizational unit.

2. In the second step, the system checks whether the specified entry also exists in the dependent tables for which validation is carried out against the table key.

Among other things, the organizational unit plant is used as a key in the table containing the plant parameters for inventory management. This table is checked to determine whether an entry exists for the plant being checked. For each material type, you can specify per valuation area whether the material master records of this material type are to be updated on a quantity basis (stock materials) or also on a value basis (valuated materials). These details are similarly to be found in a table with the organizational unit plant as the table key. This table also contains the table key material type. The program not only checks whether this table contains entries for the plant being checked, but also whether all material types used (still) exist.

In SAP S/4HANA, usage of the Material Ledger is mandatory. The material ledger is a tool that collects transaction data for materials. It uses this data to calculate prices for the material valuation. It enables material inventories to be valued in multiple currencies and allows the use of different valuation approaches.

After creating a new plant you have to check if the material ledger is active for the new plant. To do this, in Customizing choose Controlling → Product Cost Controlling → Actual Costing / Material Ledger → Activate Material Ledger for Valuation Areas.

After Activating the Material Ledger you have to set the valuation area as productive. On the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Logistics → Materials Management → Valuation → Actual Costing / Material Ledger → Environment → Production Startup → Set Valuation Areas as Productive.