On my latest project, I’m not the one setting the design, so I’m going with the flow of what was decided. One of the point that I’m having a hard time with is the selection conditions being assigned to the bill of material items. Now my long time friends and colleagues know that I’m hard core of keeping all of the logic out of the bill of material. I learned a hard lesson of putting too much logic into the BOM selection conditions. Now, here’s my question to you modeler’s out there. I managed to crash MRP in 3.0F using a combination of material variants and complex selection conditions.
Now, since that time, I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid anything other than simple assignment logic in my bills of materials. Now, this does cause me to create a lot of additional characteristics in my configuration. Granted, all the characteristics are calculated and never seen by the user. This sets all the logic on the front end. By the time the back end does anything with it, it’s as simple as pie. This is the process I’ve lived by for over 15 years of Variant Configuration.
The thing is, that was 3.0F… 15 years ago that this occurred. I know that SAP has dramatically changed the processes for VC. The “word” is that as long as you don’t plan to use Characteristic Value Planning or APO. But being the old VC guy that I am, I have a hard time to believing that. So my question to all of my readers out there… where do you stand? have you put complex BOM logic into your models? and if so, did you notice any impact on MRP? I’d love to hear your experiences.
As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing form you.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike