Many companies manufacture products that can be specified by multiple characteristics. Take a shirt as an example, that can come in different sizes and colors. In SAP Business ByDesign we offer the concept of product specifications, to describe the finished product variants. In case of the shirt, we would then create a product specification for each combination of size and color, e.g. (large, blue), (large, red), (medium, blue), and (medium, red). The components again might be described by characteristics like size for the undyed shirt or the color for the paint needed. However, before release 2205, you had to create a product master record for each variant of the components, because usage of product specifications for bill of material (BOM) components was not supported. With release 2205 we now introduce the option to maintain a product specification also for a bill of material input component.
With that you can significantly simplify your product and production master data setup. As an example, I have created a BOM with four variants, each variant is assigned to the same output product, but a different product specification.
Looking at the ‘Input Products’ tab in the bill of material maintenance UI, we find that a product specification is assigned to each component. Also note, that the same input product is used twice, but with different product specifications. The assigned product specifications now focus only on those characteristics needed to describe the input product, respectively the color or the size.
You might remember that in Release 2202 we have added a Business Configuration question
If this option is ‘In Scope’, then a product specification that is assigned to the output product of a production proposal will
not automatically be assigned to an input product, in case the ‘Identified Stock’ type of that input component is ‘Optional/Mandatory specified identified stock’ - see product master data:
However, in case the option is
not in scope (as per screen shot above), and the product specification should be propagated, still the product specification that is explicitly maintained in the Bill-of- Materials, will be considered, and not the propagated one.
To illustrate this, I have created a production proposal for product SR_PRS_AG_01 (which is a different product compared to my shirt example above) with product specification PRS_AG_01 assigned to the output product.
The corresponding BOM for SR_PRS_AG_01 looks like this:
During planning the product specification is propagated to the two input components SR_PRS_CP_03 and SR_PRS_CP_04, but since I have explicitly maintained a product specification for the two input components SR_PRS_CP_01/02 in the Bill-of-Materials, they are used instead during production proposal creation.
For a system demo please also check out my
video.