Exploring Batch Management (BLF)

A batch is a partial quantity of a material that is managed separately from other partial quantities of the same material. 

In various industries - especially in the process industry - you have to be able to work with homogeneous partial quantities of a material or product across the entire logistics flow and value chain.

There are various reasons for this, such as:

• Legal requirements, such as the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines
• Hazardous goods regulations
• Tracing of defects, recalls, and regression obligation
• Need for inventory management differentiated by quantity and value, for example due to heterogeneous quality or recipe
• Production- or process-related requirements, such as the calculation of material quantities based on different batch specifications

Batch management is the identification of a quantity of material with a unique 10-digit alphanumeric code. The batch number assigned to a material quantity allows the material stock to be clearly sorted. General characteristic values, the chemical composition or product specifications at the time of production or procurement can optionally be stored in the batch master record.

For batch-managed materials, the batch number must be specified with each goods movement.

If a product is to be managed in batches, you must set the corresponding indicators in the product master record.

You first set a batch management indicator that is globally valid for the product. Basically, this indicator means that the product can be managed in batches.

Once you have set the general batch management indicator, you can set the plant-specific indicator. This enables you to decide, for each plant, whether the material should be managed in batches or not.

For example, a product may be subject to batch management in the production plant and not in the distribution plant.

Watch the following interactive demo to learn how to display a product subject to batch management.

In the interactive demo, you learn how to manually create a batch master record.

When creating a purchase order, entering a batch number is optional.

In the following demo we see two cases:

• A purchase order item is created without a batch
• A purchase order item is created and the system automatically assigns a batch

In this demo, we post the goods receipt to the purchase order item that was previously created without a batch number. When entering the goods receipt, it is mandatory to enter a batch. We opt for the automatic assignment of a batch by the system.

In this demo, we look at the stock situation of our product, which is subject to batch control.

In the following demo, we create a sales order for a product that is subject to batch management. At this point, we do not enter a batch.

In the following demo, we create a delivery for the sales order and check the result of the automatic batch determination. 

In the following demo, we enter the picking quantity for each batch in the delivery and post the goods issue.