Assigning Material Components to Activities Automatically

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Assign a WBS Bill of Materials (BOM) to a project using the BOM transfer
Assign material using the catalog interface

Bill of Material (BOM) Transfer

Flowchart showing WBS BOM and project routing process: Material BOM, project BOM, network transfer, MRP run, planned orders conversion, and production routing.

Project bills of material are BOMs that are valid for a particular WBS element. You can create a WBS BOM by copying a material BOM or other WBS BOMs. You create and edit WBS bills of material in the master data for the Production application.

You can assign WBS BOMs to projects using the BOM Transfer transaction. To do so, you must choose the corresponding selection parameters.

BOM Transfer

Flowchart showing BOM (product view) linking components and reference points to WBS elements and activities (project view) for forklift F-130##.

The logical link between a BOM component and a network activity, called the "reference point", is essential for ensuring the correct automatic assignment of a material component.

The assignments themselves are project-specific, but can be made simultaneously for a large number of networks in the project. You can assign single items, single BOM assemblies, or a multi-level BOM. You can assign components manually without reference points.

Process:

In Customizing for SAP PS, define reference points. Reference points are not physical points. They are virtual points that have the sole purpose of mapping the logic of the assignment between BOM items and activities.
Define reference points in the BOM components and the network activities.
Start the BOM PS interface (after changing the BOM). In this process BOM components are assigned to activities. If the Reservation/purchase req. indicator is activated, purchase requisitions and reservations are created for the assigned components when you save your data.

Selection Parameters of the BOM Transfer

Customizing the Reference Points

Table showing BOM transfer reference points with descriptions, including Position Hull, Install Cabin, and Assemble; BOM and Network data fields labeled as RFPNT.

As of Release 4.6, you can preassign the name and description of reference points in Customizing. This allows you to look for reference points using the matchcode search. You can no longer enter reference points that do not actually exist.

As of Release 4.6, there are special table fields for reference points in the network and the BOM. As in earlier releases, you can, however, still determine which table fields are to be used as reference points. You can define this setting in Customizing rather than in the BOM Transfer transaction used in earlier releases.

Assign Material Components to Network Activities Using the BOM Transfer

ExerciseStart Exercise

Using Catalogs for Sourcing

As of SAP R/3 Enterprise, the connection to the catalog interface in accordance with the OCI standard is available. You can use this interface to call up the component selection for an internal or external catalog from a network activity and transfer components to the network. The material is assigned as either a stock item or a non-stock item, depending on whether or not a suitable material master record can be determined in the SAP system for the material selected in the catalog.

To use this function, you first need to define the catalog and its call structure (URL, fixed values) in Customizing for the project system and assign these to the combination of plant and network type. You also need to define how the HTML fields or field values of the catalog are to be converted to SAP fields and SAP field values.

As of SAP ECC 5.0, you can also assign several catalogs for the combination of network type and plant. When you call up the catalog interface, a dialog box for selecting the catalog is displayed first.

Interface for material assignment via catalog selection showing steps: start catalog selection, select catalog, choose procurement type, and select components.

As of SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 3, the item category→C (planning element, no inventory management) is assigned for components that are assigned using a catalog interface. You cannot assign the item category→C manually or using a BOM transfer.

Self Service Requisition with Catalog

If you request consumable materials only occasionally, you can use the SAP Fiori app Create Purchase Requisition instead of the GUI transaction ME51N.

With this app, you can create a purchase requisition item in three ways, as follows:

Select the material or service from a catalog.
Enter the number of a material master record.
Describe the required product or service (if it is not found in a catalog).

If the cross content search is implemented in the system, you can easily search for material master records and catalog articles with one search.

SAP interface showing Employee Self Services with options for creating and managing purchase requisitions, featuring cross-content search for an employee catalog.

Before you order the items which you added to the cart, you can open the item details to review or change data. To "order" the items of the cart means to create a purchase requisition.

For stock material, it is possible that a reservation is created additionally to a purchase requisition. This function must be set up in Customizing.

My Purchase Requisition App

With the My Purchase Requisition app, you can check the status and details of your recently created purchase requisitions. The latest purchase requisition is displayed as the first entry. You can search and filter the list to see a specific purchase requisition or a set of purchase requisitions that were created by you. In the list, you can see the approval status of a purchase requisition. For a single item, you can view the status and the follow-on documents created. If necessary, you can delete a purchase requisition (depending on the processing status).

Before you enter requisition items, you can maintain the Default Settings for your user (Default Settings for Users app). In the default user settings, for example, you find the following data:

Organizational data such as plant, storage location, company code and purchasing organization
Account Assignment Category and Cost Center
Currency

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