Managing the Material

Over time, the attributes of materials change. Therefore, you must be aware of the different change functions for the material to align your business processes with those of SAP S/4HANA.

Your company can use the following maintenance features to manage the changes in the material:

• Creating new screens for existing materials

• Changing the material type

• Making simple field changes

• Managing changes through statuses

• Performing mass maintenance of several materials

Extending the Material

When you create a material, complete information may not be available. Consequently, some views are not created. You can extend the material master record by adding more views. To do this, use the Extend Material View(s) transaction. To find this transaction, choose Logistics → Production → Master Data → Material Master → Other → Extend Material View(s) (MM50).

When you extend the material, consider the following questions:

• Which departments have to extend a material?
• Which material does a single department extend?

Maintenance Statuses

Department	Maintenance Status
Work scheduling	A
Accounting	B
Classification	C
Materials requirements planning (MRP)	D
Purchasing	E
Production resources/tools	F
Costing	K

Note

Other maintenance statuses are also available in SAP S/4HANA. See Maintenance status in transaction Extend Material View(s) (MM50).

Hint

You can also use the Create material function if you need to add additional views to the existing master record (for a single material).

When you create a material you normally use the classic material transaction. This means, that you only copy data for one plant and many views. Now let's have a look at an alternative scenario.

When executing the program, you can decide:

• Whether to first simulate the copy process in a test run without updating the database

• How many and which materials are to be created, enhanced, or changed

• Which organizational levels are to be copied with the respective database tables

• Which organizational unit of the reference material is to be used as the source for which organizational units of the target materials

• Whether existing data is to be protected or allowed to be changed

Constraints:

• Integrated material master data is not copied. This includes: Classification data, document data in the document management system (DMS), configuration data, MRP area data (MRP data is copied, however), quality management inspection types, sales conditions, bills of material, routings, and production versions

• The reference material must not be changed while copying is in process.

• The material type is copied from the reference material and cannot be changed.

Customizing:

You can use transaction MMCU to access Customizing for the material master copier (Copy Material program).

In these settings, you can specify (on a user-specific basis) from which source organizational unit to which target organizational unit the data is to be copied (for example, from plant 0001 to plant 0005). If "DEFAULT" is specified as the user name, the setting applies for all users.

Every time you access the material master copier, you can decide whether the aforementioned settings from Customizing are to be used (Apply User Setting indicator is selected) or whether the organizational units are to be proposed 1:1 from the reference material.

After you have created a material, you may need to change the material type. This may create a problem if transactions are already posted.

When you create/change a material you often have to define the usage inside logistics, whether it is allowed to use the material or not. Therefore you have to define a material status.

You can limit the use of a material in the following ways:

• Flag the material for deletion.
• Use the material status to lock the material for certain business processes in Materials Management and Production Planning (PP).

You can use the status information function to check whether a material is subject to restrictions and to identify the applicable restrictions. You can start this function while creating, displaying, or changing a material master record. You can create the material status in Customizing.

While creating the material status, you can set warnings or errors in the following business areas:

• Purchasing
• PP master data
• Demand management
• Production execution
• Quality management
• Plant maintenance
• Inventory management
• Costing

You can define the material status for all plants (using the Basic Data view) or separately for each plant (using the Work Scheduling view).

Watch the video and understand how a material type change could happen.