Skip to Content
1
Former Member
Dec 08, 2009 at 03:12 AM

MM design issue - Plant vs Purchasing Group

173 Views

Hi SAP Gurus,

I have an SAP MM design issue. We are a warehousing company and so we manage customer stocks as well as we do procurements for ourselves for our own offices at different location.

With SAP MM, we are not sure whether to define our offices and customer sites EACH as plants (which would be around 250 in total) or we should just define few plants and create purchasing Group as each office/site. (We do not stock material for our offices, all is procured on consumption basis and we intend to create only few materials. WMS is not implemented yet, which will be implemented in future for our customer sites)

Iu2019m of the opinion that each office/site be defined as a plant for following reasons:

- Enable site-wise analysis of purchasing, as each office/site will do its own procurement of consumables.

- Not all the reports in MM allow selection criteria Purchasing group (e.g. ME2V, MC$G, MC$4 and all MC** LIS reports), but will most certainly allow plant as criteria.

- Proper utilisation of Purch group, in addition to plants, will allow one more dimension in reporting.

- Design of each site as plant will go well with WMS when we go for that in future to manage our customer stocks.

I understand in terms of creating materials, it will need to be extended to all the plants, but guess that should not be a big burden as we can use Z programs/LSMWs to extend materials to all the plants.

System administrators suggest that we use Purchasing Group, instead of creating so many plants (just create a few plants) and are against such proliferation of plants for reasons:

- Number of plants may go up in future and the sometimes plants are moved to another location, that will have substantial maintenance (not sure what maintenance here)

- For most of the offices/customer site, purchasing groups should be defined as plants require lot of maintenance.

Can you pls shed some light on whatu2019s the best way for us to go? Are we best avoiding plants and creating Purchasing groups for most locations or would that be against SAP MM design principle and hurt us in reporting and future implementation of other modules (e.g. WMS, BI)

Points will be given to all serious contributors (not for providing links to other site, as Iu2019ve already done extensive googling on the issue)

Thanks to all experts in advance.