Using Master Data in Sales

In SAP Sales and Distribution, master data refers to the fundamental data elements that are used to support business transactions and processes. This includes data such as material master data, customer master data, and pricing master data.

The respective scope items are highlighted in the graphic below

Scenario: The bike company in our example has procured materials and produced the new e-bike. Enough stock is stored in the warehouse to start selling them. They now need to sell the bike to their customers.  

Imagine you already created the business partner FI Customer and assigned it to the record-to-report process. Now, you want to extend that business partner so that it can be used in the lead-to-cash process. What do you do?

In the business partner concept, a master data record consists of different roles. You assign the relevant sales area information as illustrated in the figure below.

1. The Fl customer role data is relevant for accounting. It is valid for the respective company code. In the role FI Customer, you enter the reconciliation account in the general ledger.

2. The customer role is extended by the sales area, which means that each sales area might have different shipping, billing, and sales information for the same customer. Sales areas consist of three fields from the enterprise structure: Sales Organization, Distribution Channel, and Division. When these three fields are used together, it makes a combination that SAP refers to as the sales area.

   • Sales Area A (Sales organization US, distribution channel wholesale, division bikes): In this sales area, partial deliveries are allowed, and shipping conditions are immediate. Wholesales business might have different terms than online or retail terms.

   • Sales Area B (Sales organization US, distribution channel online, division bikes): In this sales area, partial deliveries are not allowed, and shipping conditions are standard

If you want to sell materials for the bike company that we use as example, you need to ensure that the product and all the sales-related details of that product are created in the system. Product master records (also called material master records) can be used to automatically populate fields with stored data whenever they are used.

Scenario: You created the product master record already for accounting, planning, and production. Now, it needs to be extended for sales. To do this, the e-bike master record needs to be changed in order to have specific settings for the sales organizations that will be selling the bike. These are details such as pricing, packaging, and transport within the plants that will be delivering it.

Because product master record data is stored and recorded globally, you need to extend the data locally for data maintenance. You must maintain the data for the sales organizations that sell the bike and the plants that plan and store the bike as inventory.

The concept of product master record is illustrated in the graphic below.

• Material Master Record: The material master data is stored and recorded globally, then extended to local areas for data maintenance.
• We can sell our bikes for example from multiple plants:
  • Plant A might transfer and load their bikes with a forklift.
  • Plant B might transfer and load the same bike model with a crane.
• We also have several sales organizations:
  • Sales Organization A is for example US Sales. They price the bike at a specific price in US dollars and use packaging material they buy locally.
  • Sales Organization B is for example German Sales. They price the bike in Euro and use packaging material they buy locally.
• As the graphic illustrates, the type of localized data can be recorded for each, even though the product is stored as just one master data record.

The product master recorded can be structured in different views according to the needs of different departments. Each department is allocated views (data tabs - grouping of fields) that contain the information necessary for that department.

As changes to the product are needed, the sales department is responsible for extending the master data to new views. This material will be managed as inventory after it is produced, so, storage data is also necessary.

The graphic below shows the different information types for the product master record.

Now you have a good overview of the product master record. Because the product has already been created, there is no need to determine the material type again. Those details are stored globally and will apply to all local areas that would like to sell the product.

The E-Bike is material type FERT, for Finished Product. It is produced by using raw material (RAW) and semi-finished products (SEMI).

The condition master data includes prices, surcharges and discounts, freight, and taxes as illustrated in the graphic below.

You can define condition master data (condition records) to be dependent on various data. You can, for example, maintain a material price per customer or define a discount to be dependent on the customer and the material pricing group.

Building conditions allows for the creation of pricing procedures. These procedures perform sales order pricing based on the condition records found in the system.

Scenario: As a last step, you want to send an order confirmation to the customer.

The data for this confirmation is stored in the output data master. The output is information that is sent to the customer via various media such as mail, EDI or fax. An example of an output is the printout of an order confirmation.

The following chart shows the data flow.

• Output Master Data: When creating an order for a customer, you must consider transport agreements, delivery, and payment conditions, and so on, with business partners. To avoid re-entering this information each time for every activity related to these business partners, relevant data for the activity from the master record of the business partner is simply copied.
• Sales Order: When performing each transaction, applicable organizational elements must be assigned. Assignments to the enterprise structure in the document are generated in addition to the information stored for the customer and material.
• Order Confirmation: All of this data can subsequently be captured in the output, which is likely to be a PDF document or electronic document.

The Order Confirmation is now ready to be sent to the customer.