MRP driven demand for shipping box not on BOM

[ang86]

I am hoping someone can help me on how to set up shipping/packaging boxes to be driven by MRP and create purchase reqs. when the component is not on the BOM

Current situation: Our company makes a product and we ship the product in a shipping box. Without this box we cannot ship, not shipping or delayed shipping cannot happen. We continously run out of boxes as this was tracked manually by a person counting them and notifying purchasing when we are low. We recently launched SAP and with all the features we no longer wish to have a person manually track the inventory. The boxes are not on the BOM, therefore SAP S4HANA is not creating purchase reqs to driving demand via MRP. The obvious solution would be to add these boxes to their corresponding BOMs and have them backflushed as a bulk item; but the issue with this is that BOM's would require engineering changes that have to be approved by the customer. Due to this, we could be waiting a year or more for approval and have to change thousands of BOMs.

I am wondering if there is a way to link the shipping box to our products so MRP can issue purchase reqs and track stock requirements to buy the boxes without having to add them to the BOM?

[moshenaveh]

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