Variant Configuration in Pharmaceutical Indutsry ...does it help in Material numbering?

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1. Dear All,

In a pharmaceutical client’s legacy system, the material codes (raw, intermediates & finished materials) have various attributes assigned to the codes. For example the source of Raw material used in the manufacture, the customer country, the analytical specifications for the finished code, etc could influence the material codification. Thus the same product has several material codes to map to different set of attributes.

In SAP, while we can use batch management to capture attributes as characteristics, however, I guess the characteristics can be displayed only when we have a stock. How can we display the characteristics when there is no stock? For instance to create a Sales Order, I need to select the material with the matching attributes in order to cater to a customer’s requirement. How to find which material to use? Is Variant Configuration the only answer to this situation? Or is there any other way out? Do Pharmaceutical industries use VC concepts as such?

With Regards

Sanjay