Minimizing Data Maintenance in SAP Distribution Channels and Divisions

SAP ERP is a powerful tool. You can do so much with it, it’s tempting to dive into the complexity and use features just for their own sake. But that’s not a good way to set up your SAP. Rather, you need to let business needs drive your SAP complexity. 

Today, we’ll be talking about SAP distribution channels and divisions and how you can set them up for minimal data maintenance. We’ll also talk about what this means for an SAP e-commerce integration--something to consider even if you aren’t currently doing e-commerce. (See our previous blog post announcing Corevist interface for eCommerce)

TIP: Limiting Material Master field and view access

To configure the limiting of fields / views in the Material Master go to:

 

Logistic General -> Material Master -> Configuring Material Master

 

Create a user specific Screen sequence.

You can restrict the maintenance of certain views by auth. object M_MATE_STA

You can create a transaction variant for MM02 using transaction in SHD0. Therein you can keep any field you want for a particular user to be non changeable mode (I.e. display only). Then assign that transaction variant to the applicable user.

 

Similary create another transaction variant for any other user and assign the user to that transaction variant using the same SHD0 transaction (Standard variant tab).

Consumption-based planning and MRP

MRP and Consumption-based planning are two fundamental SAP planning types that can be used to determine a product’s requirements. To avoid any confusion we not referring to the MRP run that is executed through MD01 and MD02. We are referring to planning types that are set in the Material Master’s MRP1 tab. The MRP type is used in the MRP run to determine HOW procurement and/or production quantities are calculated.