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Former Member
Jul 27, 2016 at 10:52 AM

Manage Remaining Shelf Life at local (plant?) level

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Dear all,

I am currently working on an issue with shelf life management in MM, with an without batch management.

The context is: we are a distribution firm (which mean we do not produce goods, but rather buy them and afterward sell them), therefore are not at all talking about a production process here.

In our organization, we have got a central purchasing entity (a plant in our system, let say 0001) which purchases goods, receive them, and afterwards ships them to other plants (let say 0002). These plants them ship goods to customers.

I am not sure that this would be relevant for my issue, but note that plant 0001 is batch managed, whereas plant 0002 is not (we have activated batch management at plant level). Material shelf life is managed on batches in plant 0001, and in HU (handling units) in plant 0002.

We use remaining shelf life to manage inventory, and shelf life expiration date (SLED) is entered in the system when posting the good receipt from an external purchase order or from a pruchase order between plant 0001 and plant 0002 (we have chosen to use sales orders / purchase orders between the purchasing entity 0001 and the receiving entity 0002, rather than stock transfer order).

During the reception process (at plant 0001 and plant 0002), expiration date of goods that are received is controled against material Remaining shelf life (so that we do not enter goods that do not match our shelf life requirements).

Yet, as plant 0001 is "higher" in the distribution chain, its shelf life requirements are higher than those of plant 0002. For example:

- we want plant 0002 to have 10 days of remaining shelf life at reception

- as some time is required to receive, and then ship from plant 0001 its shelf life requirement would be higher, something like 13 days

The issue is that material remaining shelf life is maintained at client level (in MARA-MHDRZ) and therefore is not specific plant by plant. If we maintain the value of 10 days, then the purchasing entity will sometimes enter goods for which shelf life expiration date is to short to guarantee 10 days to plant 0002, but if we maintain 13 days, plant 0002 will refuse to receive goods that have more than 10 days left.

Would there be any way to maintain remaining shelf life at plant level ? Maybe in the purchase info records, but maintaining it at plant/material/vendor level would be more time consuming than at plant/material level (multiple vendors can provide the same material).

Note that we only use ECC, and have not implemented tools like APO.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,

Pierre