The EWB is part of the Production Planning (PP) component in the SAP S/4HANA application. It is a complex tool that supports integrated processing of bills of material (BOMs) and routings. With the same interface, you can maintain both the object types and their links simultaneously, and in detail.
The EWB offers the following benefits:
- Supports complex planning processes
- Carries out parallel processing
- Selects the objects precisely from routings and BOMs
- Carries out integrated processing of operations and items
- Sets the locks precisely
- Shows how the change status develops
However, the concept of the EWB goes far beyond the conventional maintenance of BOMs and routings.
The EWB brings together conventional object maintenance with extensive change management functions.
Using complex selection criteria, you can combine any number of objects. The results contain no additional information. This helps you achieve a quick overview. The integration of an object browser, various viewers, and the digital mock-up viewer makes EWB a central tool within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).
Working with the Engineering Workbench
The EWB is a maintenance environment for product structures and PP objects. Its capabilities far exceed those of conventional maintenance for BOMs and routings because you do not need to process routings and BOMs separately.
The most important objects of the EWB are BOM items and operations. Views are applied to these objects. These views enable you to use the conventional BOM or routing structures.
The full scope of the following processing functions is supported in the views:
- Create
- Change
- Delete
The worklist contains the selected objects so that they can be displayed, changed, or created in the EWB. The system copies these objects from the database to the worklist. You can create new objects and change or delete existing ones in the database only when you save the worklist and while you process the objects.
Simultaneously Processing Objects in EWB
When you work with standard transactions for material BOMs and routings you have a standard lock scenario. Only one person per session is allowed to change the objects. Working with EWB the situation is different.