Item Unique Identification (IUID) or Unique Item Identification is part of the compliance requirement for serial controlled materials. This is the global unique ID that can be generated for an equipment. IUID can be used to protect the data integrity throughout the equipment’s life cycle.
Once IUID is generated, this is never changed even if the equipment is modified.
In simple words, let’s say there are two manufacturers producing some equipment. There may be a possibility, both manufacturers can generate the same equipment number and generate a label for that. During the life cycle at any given time, if we need to differentiate the equipment, with the marking of IUID one can distinguish the equipment.
This blog explains the changes that we see in EWM when we have IUID relevant serialized materials.
Standard SAP supports UID1 & UID2 construct types.
UID1 is the combination of Issuing agency code, enterprise identifier, serial number.
UID2 is the combination of issuing agency code, enterprise identifier, material number & serial number.
To demonstrate the functionality, I created a dummy issuing agency code, dummy enterprise code.
In standard, we can generate UID up to 72 characters.
Another important configuration is to enable the IUID handing at serial number profile level.
While working with IUIDs it is for goods receipts and issues, capturing SN is obligatory.
This SN profile should be assigned to the material master along with IUID type.
Also, while working with IUIDs, serial number & equipment master should have same number range. That can be achieved using SerLevel equal to 1 as per above screenshot.
This profile is limited to ERP, no specific configuration needed for serial number profile in EWM.
We can use Inventory level, warehouse level or document item level serial number profiles in EWM. The only difference is if we use document item level, we don’t have the visibility of SN/IUIDs in EWM but can be captured during transactional processing.
Also, it is possible to receive externally allocated UIIs if vendor is sending UII information along with ASN.
With activation of above set up, when the inbound delivery is created in ERP, we can generate SNs/IUIDs.
In our process, in case if we don’t generate SNs in ERP, we can also generate SNs/IUIDs directly in EWM.
Upon completion of GR & put away depending on the serialization procedure we use in EWM for material, we can view the SNs/IUIDs.
In this example, I maintained materials with inventory level profile, due to that IUID updated at serial number level in physical stock.
To demonstrate the example, I considered the receiving process from supplier, we can also produce SNs/IUIDs if the material is a make part.
Also, if we look at equipment for the serial number, we can see additional fields related to IUID.
During transactional processing in EWM, we can either scan IUID or SN for execution.
Other dependencies or restrictions related to SNs will remain same even if we introduce IUIDs. All logistic processes such as manufacturing, quality, shipping remain same.
This is out of the box configuration and no development involved.
PS: This is my personal observation based on requirements that I worked on, and this blog is based on S4 HANA 2022 version sandbox. Functionality is available in older versions also.
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References
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