In my latest project, I’m getting back into the IPC, and finding all things that don’t quite work the way I expect. ha ha. Today’s lesson for me has to to do with IPC Class items. More specifically, using a class type item on your BOM in conjunction with a multiple value characteristic.
So, let me set the stage of what’s happening within my models. We have two multiple value characteristics that get set with a bunch of keys. Then we have multiple class type 200’s that use the same two characteristics to uniquely determine a material. Pretty straightforward, and works great in ERP. The problem comes when we moved to IPC. As soon as we started configuring some test orders, we found that most of our class type 200’s were not resolving, more to the point, they weren’t getting the value.
SAP has OSS Note: 1564395 – Class node specialization with multi-valued characteristics.
The basics of the note state: values of a multi-valued characteristic will be considered for class node specialization in IPC as follows:
Let {v1, .., vN} be the values assigned to the multi-valued characteristic at runtime and let D be the local domain of classification values maintained for a certain material M in the class node, then this material is considered as a possible (consistent) specialization iff all values v1,…, vN are contained in the set D.
Well, this doesn’t work for our purposes. The multiple value characteristic contain values for many different materials, M, so specialization won’t occur.
In our case, we’re going to go down the path of a P-Function to handle passing the values explicitly to the class type 200’s. Otherwise, we were looking at revamping our constraints in a significant way to attempt to pass the values directly to each class type 200. And this is an option I haven’t even tested, so there’s no guarantee it would even work. If anyone else has encountered something close to this, I’d love to hear your solution.
As always, 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