Exploring Master Data for Planning and Manufacturing

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
  • Get an impression of general master data in planning and manufacturing
  • Get an idea of master data for inhouse production

Supply Chain Master Data

Plants, Distribution Centers (DCs), vendors, and customers are basic logistics master data objects for supply chain planning. Supply chain planning deals with materials, which are defined in the form of material masters. For the plants used for production, you must also create work centers, BOMs (Bill of Material) and routings in addition to the materials to support planning tasks.

Supply chain planning deals with materials, which are defined in the form of material masters. For the plants used for production, you must also create work centers, BOMs (Bill of Material) and routings in addition to the materials to support planning tasks.

You can use special procurement types to define transportation lanes between the individual locations (that is, the plants, vendors and so on) in the supply chain. These transportation lanes define the flow of materials along the supply chain.

The supply relationship between a vendor and a plant is created in the form of a purchasing info record or an outline agreement.

Plants and Distribution Centers

Plants and distribution centers have quite identical properties in the system.

Plants and distribution centers have quite identical properties in the system.

  • Plant:

    A plant is an organizational unit that subdivides an enterprise according to production, procurement, stockholding, or material requirements planning. It can produce materials or provide goods and services. For a plant, you must specify an address, a language, a country assignment, and a plant calendar.

  • Distribution Center:

    A Distribution Center (DC) is a plant where the predominant activity is selling, or a plant that is involved in the distribution of materials.

Note

Plants also contain all the functions of sales and distribution and, conversely, production can also take place in distribution centers.

You can define one or more storage locations within a plant. A storage location specifies where a material is stored. Storage locations therefore allow you to differentiate between the material stocks in a plant.

Material Master Data

You plan material flow along the supply chain at the material level.

Global Data and Location-Specific Data

A material master usually contains the following data categories:

  • Global data:

    General data that is valid across all locations such as the measurements or the weight of a material.

  • Location-specific data:

    Data may differ depending on the location, therefore settings for planning are usually predefined locally.

The material master data is subdivided into views. A view is either valid globally or location-specific.

Views in Material Master

Division of Data into Views

A material master contains all material-related information for procurement, production, storage, or sales. Therefore, not all settings in the material master are relevant for supply chain planning.

Supply Chain Planning Settings

The settings for supply chain planning are mainly found in the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and Advanced Planning views, as for example you find there:

  • MRP type:

    Defines how to plan a material: Material requirements planning versus consumption-based planning, external planning, or no planning.

  • Procurement type:

    Defines how to procure a material: In-house, externally, or no procurement.

  • Lot-sizing procedure:

    Defines in which lot size procedure to bundle the receipts: Static, periodical, optimizing.

  • Planning strategy:

    Defines how to handle independent requirements and their interactions.

  • In-house production time:

    Defines how long in-house production is assumed to last.

  • Planned delivery time:

    Defines how long external procurement is assumed to last.

  • Production version:

    Defines how production is going to take place.

  • Advanced Planning:

    Defines that this material will be planned with PP/DS procedures.

Bills of Material (BOM)

The Bills of Material (BOM) contains the assemblies or components that are involved in the production of a material.

The Bills of Material (BOM) contains the assemblies or components that are involved in the production of a material. BOMs are single-level. The items in one BOM may contain another BOM.

BOMs are used e.g. in the following applications:

  • Material requirements planning
  • Production
  • Procurement
  • Product costing

Elements in BOM

A BOM consists of the following elements:

  • BOM header
  • BOM items

The base quantity in the BOM header specifies the amount of the finished product referred to by the item quantities.

Bills of material are single-level. An item of a BOM itself may also contain components.

Note

Multilevel production is described using the single-level BOMs of the finished product, of the assemblies and, where required, of the assemblies of the assemblies, and so on.

A BOM may also contain documents or text items in addition to stock items that are required for the finished product.

Bill of Material Structure

Bill of Material Structure. Header contains Status, Description, Validity and Lot-size range. Items contains Item category, Descriptions, Quantities and Control data. Examples of Items are Stock item, Non-stock item, Variable-size item and Document item.
  • BOM header

    The BOM header contains the settings that apply for the whole BOM. BOM usage determines the business applications for which a BOM can be used. The status of the BOM controls whether the BOM is active for particular applications (for example, Material Requirements Planning (MRP)). Multiple BOMs, which consist of multiple alternative BOMs, can also exist in addition to simple BOMs. The different alternative BOMs can then be valid for each of the different lot-size areas, for example.

  • BOM item

    The components required to produce the finished product are entered as items in the BOM. The item category specifies the kind of item you are dealing with:

    • Stock items are executed in the warehouse and are used in production.
    • Non-stock items are directly assigned to a manufacturing order (and not via the warehouse).
    • Variable-size items contain variable-size data (a steel sheet with a particular surface area, for example).
    • Document items contain a supplementary document that describes production (a kind of design and construction diagram).

    The individual items can also contain many other settings that only refer to that particular item.

Work Centers

A work center is where an operation or an activity is carried out in a plant. It therefore specifies where production ultimately takes place.

Which work centers are available for production, which time elements need to be included in planning, which capacities are used, which available capacity is provided, which category is relevant for scheduling, how long do individual work steps take, which costs arise during processing.

Work centers are used in the following applications:

  • Routings
  • Networks
  • Inspection plans
  • Maintenance routings

A work center is generally a specific geographical location in the plant. For example, a specific machine or department in a plant.

Work Center Capacities

The data of the work center is assigned according to thematic views. In particular, the available capacity of the particular work center and the data needed to calculate the costing of work completed is stored in the work center. The default values define data that has to be transferred into the operation of the routing or are used as a reference.

Work center capacities, specify in each case the working times, break times, available cap intervals and shifts.

The capacities that are available to a work center are explicitly specified in the work center. In this case, you may certainly use more than one capacity per work center. For example, you can assign both machine capacity and labor capacity to a work center.

Work center contain the available working time. Moreover, formulas specify how long the capacities will be loaded by a certain operation.

Note

In addition to standard available capacity, intervals of available capacity and shift schedules can also be used, for example, to specify exactly when a particular machine is available.

Routings

A routing contains the work steps required to carry out production.

A routing contains the work steps required to carry out production.

Mainly the following information is included:

  • Relevant operations
  • Sequence in which the operations occur
  • Work centers at which the operations are to be executed

You can define a routing using the routing group and the group counter . Moreover, the routing contains reference to the material whose production it describes and can contain parallel or alternative sequences in addition to the standard sequence.

Routing for Scheduling

In addition to the standard values, the routing also contains the time elements that are relevant for scheduling operations.

Note

Each operation in the routing can contain its own base quantity, to which the time elements relevant for scheduling can refer.
Scheduling based on Routing and Work Center. Standard values of the operation used in the scheduling formulas resulting from the work center are - fixed time elements and variable time elements.

A work center is assigned to the operation.

Note

The work center uses its standard value key to specify which standard time elements can be taken into consideration during the planning process. For example: setup time, machine time, and personnel time. The scheduling formulas stored in the work center define the duration from the allowed time elements in the routings.

The setup, processing and tear down of an operation are all displayed using a corresponding formula. The steps for which a formula is defined are executed, for example, tear down may not be necessary.

If multiple capacities are stored in a work center, the scheduling basis is used to determine which of these capacities are relevant for the scheduling process.

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