As already mentioned, in various sectors, especially in the process industry, it is necessary to work with homogeneous partial quantities of a material throughout the logistics chain. In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, batch management is available for this purpose.
Material and Batch
A batch is a uniquely identifiable partial quantity of a material. The batches of a material are managed separately in stock. They represent non-reproducible units with unique specifications.
The properties of a batch are stored in a batch master record. Batch master records always depend on material master records. A batch is always created for a material.
In general, the data of a material master is valid for all batches assigned to it. In contrast, a batch master record contains data that uniquely identifies the relevant batch and characterizes it as a non-reproducible unit. The batch specifications are assigned via characteristics of the classification system in the material master and inherited to the corresponding batch master records. As shown in the figure, batches for our material Paint are characterized, for example, by the characteristics viscosity, hiding power and wavelength. The permissible value ranges of the characteristics are defined in the material.
If you want a material to be produced and managed in batches, the batch management requirement indicator must be set in the material master record. A batch master record is created by the system in the background for certain business operations (such as goods receipt). Users can also create batch master records directly in master data maintenance.
With regard to the production process, a batch is a quantity of a specific material produced during a given production run. As an example, our company typically produces 1000 l of paint in cans of 1 l in one process order and assigns the 1000 cans to one batch since they were manufactured together. When the shop floor personnel executes a different process order on the next day, they create a new batch to ensure that the manufactured cans can be attributed to that process order.
Batch Management in the Supply Chain
Batch Where-Used List
Throughout the logistical chain, you can track individual batches of raw, semi-finished, and finished materials in a where-used list.. The batch where-used list documents a batch's path through the enterprise. The batch where-used list is used within the scope of product liability. This report enables you to find batches which, for example, must be recalled for quality reasons. You use the top-down analysis to determine from which batches a batch came from, and the bottom-up analysis to determine in which batches a batch went into. Both analysis can be executed in the Batch Information Cockpit.