Vendor assignment based on material configuration?

[v_s6]

Hi All,

We are on ECC 6.0. We are facing issues with configurable materials on the materials management side. Almost all our products are configurable. So we have one single material code for them and numerous possibilities based on their configurations.

The problem is that the material number remaining the same we have different vendors/suppliers for different configurations. The reason is that not all configurations of a material can be produced by one single supplier. Now on the MM side we can have supplier assignments only at material code and plant level like in source lists. This is not helping our cause as we have to change the assignment of the supplier in the purchase requisition all the time manually after checking the configuration behind the material. Also the other issue is that we can have only one planned delivery time in the material master but the lead times from the suppliers varies considerably based on the configuration to be manufactured.

Our VC team refuses to create any new material code for different configurations. The thing that I want to understand is how is this problem tackled by lot of other organizations who use VC. Are there any standard business practices or functionalities available in SAP standard to overcome this problem?

All inputs are welcome and will be valuable.....

Regards,

V S

[Former Member]

Hi,

" This is not helping our cause as we have to change the assignment of the supplier in the purchase requisition all the time manually after checking the configuration behind the material "

Are the PR's generated manually ? On what basis do they enter the Source of Supply ?

Why do they have to be changed manually many times if they can be entered correctly for the first time ?

Could you let us know why you would not like to have a custom development ? ( ex BAPI)

[Former Member]

Hi, you need to choose the extra tab and select the variant condition while create info-record for your VC material for different suppliers in ME11.

Refer the below help link it may help you..

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/5b/7bc8e39e2611d1b6000000e8a738dc/content.htm

[JL23]

isn't this not just selecting the right conditions for a given variant at a certain vendor?

I don't think that those conditions actually control the source determination.

I did not yet come across such a requirement. We are ourselves a manufacturer of configurable materials, but rarely buy them, and if then usually from the same vendor. I guess this mainly a manual process using the desired vendor to tell purchasing from where it shall be procured.

Maybe you could include the vendor into the configuration. Still the buyer would need to look it up and SAP could not itself determine the vendor.

[v_s6]

Hi Jurgen,

Thanks for your reply. Of all the people who have answered, it seems only you understood the query

For the vendor assignment we have a custom development done which changes the vendor assignments on all the PRs coming out of MRP after the MRP run is done. But this development is hampering the system performance heavily.

In any case, even if we take the source determination out of the equation I still wonder how the planned delivery time is taken care of by other organizations. Though you might be procuring all the variants of the configurable material from the same vendor all the time, it is still quite possible that some of those variants might have distinctly different delivery times by virtue of those being more complex and hence needing more time to manufacture.

How is this tackled without creating a new material master for each of these material variants?

With whatever little I know, I believe it is not possible to work around it without creating new material masters.....but still would like to understand if I am missing a trick here....

Regards,

V S