Material Determination

Material determination provides you with a tool for automatically exchanging materials in the sales and delivery documents as well. When you process a sales document, the system automatically searches for a suitable condition record provided through condition technique. You can define substitution reason to every condition record in material determination that defines how the material should be determined. You can define substitution reason in customising such as 0001 – advertising campaign; 0002 – customised material; 003 – EAN number.

Note 1: You do not need material master record for the material number that you are replacing. During order entry, the material ordered by the customer is replaced by the substitute defined in the master record.

Note 2: the item overview of the Sales A contains information about the material that was originally entered as well as the reason for substitution.

The functionality of manual and automatic product selection is available during material determination.

a. Reason for substitution 0005: manual product selection (list of default values)

b. Reason for substitution 0004 & 0006: automatic product selection (depends on product availability in order and delivery)

In manual product selection (0005), the system does not automatically replace the product. Instead, it displays a list of all the substitution materials and other information in the master record doing the availability check such as quantity available that can be confirmed on the customers requested delivery date and if the full quantity cannot be met, the system proposes a new date on which the material can be completely delivered. You can then select the required material from the list.

During automatic product selection (0004 & 0006) the system replaces the entered material automatically if it is not available. When you enter an order, the system tries to fill the quantity of the order with the first material in the material determination master record. If there is no enough quantity available then it fills the remaining quantity with the next material.

You can choose whether or not to run the material determination during the delivery process for the same material, as the result of the substitution may change due to the new availability situation of the material.

Note: You can use “Product Attributes” in the material and customer master records to exclude a particular material from product selection. This means that the rejected materials will not be included when system determines a substitution material. This only applies to products entered manually. In the case of material determination, the system automatically disregards products with attributes which the ship-to party has rejected.