SAP ERP

Product Development & Collaboration -- Product Data Management

The following business goals and objectives can be achieved through the implementation of these processes:

Reducing Operating Costs & Increasing Efficiency

•   Reduce administration, improve business processes

Material Management

You can Manage the master data for all materials an organization procures, produces, stores, or sells.

BOM Management

Enables you to manage all the assemblies and components of the product and their technical data. By defining separate BOMs for the different areas within your organization, such as engineering or production, each area has its own view on the product with the specific data it requires.

Routing Management

In a routing, you plan the operations (work steps) to be carried out during production, the activities to be used in the operations as a basis for determining dates, capacity requirements and costs, the use of materials during production, the use of work centers, and the quality checks to be carried out during production.

Variant Configuration

With the variant configurator, you can describe and easily manage all the possible variants of a product. In the ordering process, the customer is able to configure a product that exactly matches his or her requirements.

Document Structure Management

Document structures can be used to maintain complex sets of documents, with or without engineering change control and revisioning.

Classification

Allows you to use characteristics (for example, color or size) to describe all types of objects (for example, materials, documents, or equipment) and to group similar objects in classes. Using the characteristics as search criteria ensures that you can find objects with similar or identical characteristics as quickly as possible.

Configuration Variants

Product Formulation and Recipe Development

Supports the development of product definitions, the product formulation process, and the creation of recipes for manufacturing products. The developer can drive product development forward using structured product and raw material specifications in the form of non-machine-specific and cross-plant formulas and recipes, independently of existing material masters. There are also functions available for determining product properties that can calculate the properties of products from the properties of raw materials, for example, compositions, nutritional values, and product prices. Detailed search functions allow you to find previous definitions and approaches so that you can build on these results by making sure that failed attempts are not repeated, therefore reducing costs and development time and speeding up the development process. Functions such as workflow, project management, status management, and change management, also help to control and monitor product development processes.

Basic Data and Tools

The joint implementation of specification management, reporting, and the functions of the information system for both recipe management and EH&S means that information can be closely linked together. In this way, you guarantee that product development information provides an up-to-date and consistent base for subsequently determining product safety and dangerous goods classifications. It also informs the responsible departments early on about product changes that must be dealt with and can then be included in the change process.

Multilevel Recipe Management/Scale Up

As a rule, the development of new products takes place on an enterprise-wide basis and is then, for example, adjusted according to country-specific conditions and legal requirements and is then, in the next stage, realized at machine level. The multi-level functions of recipe management support this process through the availability of enterprise-wide general recipes, area-specific site recipes, and machine-related master recipes. Functions support the transition processes and enable the user to easily recognize and manage the relationships between them. This allows production to be linked to the conversion of laboratory standards to production standards early on, therefore speeding up the conversion and the time-to-market.

Trial Management

Brings together the different functions of PLM in a workbench. The developer can use the workbench to initiate and manage the steps involved in product definition and development as well as the creation of samples and their quality inspections.

Configuration Variants

This component allows users to create and manage specifications for EH&S objects such as substances, agents, dangerous goods classifications, waste codes, and packaging and assign characteristics to these objects using identifiers. For each specification you enter structured data and text information, for example, in the form of phrases. Business specifications and phrases can be used for products developed, manufactured and procured for the plant.

The SAP system enables the creation of a central specification database. The database can be used for cross-company queries, for research purposes or to provide immediate information for incident management. Data recorded in local specification databases can be matched up with the data stored in a central specification database. Data from the central specification database is then distributed to other systems within companies, which process data for planning, checks, and evaluations.

Configuration Variants

Change Notification/Claim Management

Describes an issue in an easy-to-use way to trigger and monitor corrective actions, e.g., an engineering change request.

Engineering Change Management

Can be used to change various aspects of production master data (for example, BOMs, task lists, materials, documents, and some early engineering objects) with history (with date validity) or depending on specific conditions (with parameter effectivity). Changes take effect under precisely defined conditions (precise date or specific effectivity parameter value). The changed object is saved twice -- in its state before and after the changes. A change master record or ECR/ECO controls and documents the changes. Materials and documents can be assigned a revision level as well.

Order Change Management

Identifies existing procurement elements (production orders, planned orders, or purchase orders) that are affected by either an engineering change or a change to a sales order for a configurable product.

Configuration Management

Enables you to identify the objects that describe a product in a particular life-cycle phase and collect them in a configuration folder. With different configuration folders in various life-cycle phases, you manage the configuration of products and projects across different life-cycle phases.

Configuration Variants