It’s interesting to me how much fear and concern exist around material variants. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time with them, and that’s why I have no fear (much like how a snake charmer isn’t afraid of the snake… they just have a healthy respect for it 😀 ). I wanted to chat a bit about what you do and don’t need to worry about when it comes to material variants. I’ve seen the full spectrum in my career, so like that snake charmer, respect MV’s, don’t fear them
First off, don’t make MV’s for everything. My very first VC job was back in version 3.0F. In those days, there was no good solution to handle returns, restocking, etc… So rather than wait for SAP to fix the issues, we developed the a function within the configurator to create a fully usable MV within a minute or two. This was the process we used for everything that was configurable. And it worked fine. The concept was that if modeled everything correctly, there was no reason it could not be instantly costed and assigned all the relevant master data in the background. This approached solved all the issues on the sales side of things. Now, the complications came on the engineering side of things. Within a year or two, we were in the 100,000’s of MV’s. This meant that each time something changed, all the MV’s needed to be changed as well. This might be a simple revision to the part, or might be a full fledged configuration change (which required a refresh of the configuration within every material master). This process quickly become overwhelming. Especially when massive changes where required that dealt with ECM and complex date shifting. YUCK. This taught me to respect MV’s… but also to appreciate them.
See, even today, returning a VC part isn’t easy, and if you want to return it to stock, you have to use an MV anyway. The short story is that you can’t do business without them. The important thing to realize is to NOT overuse them.
Now, on the flip side, I recently uncounted a client that needed configurable materials on a service order. SAP didn’t design for this, so you simply get the error you can’t use a configurable material as a component on a service order. Now, this to me is a perfect use for a simple program to create an MV, handle all the BOM, routing, costing and material master, then drop the material on your order a minute later and go on your merry way. This was not a high volume service shop that would be generating thousands of MV’s a month, and the configurations were very simple, this was a perfect use for an MV. You may have read some posts about this a few months back. In general, there is no good way to handle this. You can do the purchased part (generate a req back to yourself, make a sales order to add the configurable part and so on), you could create a production order for a dummy part, then add the configurable material onto it’s BOM (creating lots of production variance… probably 100%), or you could use an MV.
My advise, respect the MV and don’t go overboard. However, don’t be afraid if you need to make a few hundred per year.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike