Material Master

Material Master

Purpose

The material master contains information on all the materials that a company procures, produces, stores, and sells. It is the company's central source for retrieving material-specific data.

Integration

The material master is used by all components in the SAP Logistics System. The integration of all material data in a single database object eliminates redundant data storage. In the SAP Logistics System, the data contained in the material master is required, for example, for the following functions:

In Purchasing for ordering

In Inventory Management for goods movement postings and physical inventory

In Invoice Verification for posting invoices

In Sales and Distribution for sales order processing

In Production Planning and Control for material requirements planning, scheduling, and work scheduling

For information on transferring material master data to the R/3 System, see the R/3 library documentation LO Material Master Data: Data Transfer Workbench.

Features

In Customizing for the Material Master, you can model the material master around your company’s requirements. You do this in the Implementation Guide (IMG) activity Configure customized material master.

By customizing the material master, you can configure the dialog for maintaining material master records, according to the following criteria:

User

Material type

Industry sector

You do this using standard subscreens and customer-specific subscreens. If you use customer-specific subscreens, they must belong to a customer-specific function group that you create as a copy of the standard function group for subscreens.

The standard material master offers you a choice of the following screen sequences for industry:

This screen sequence is designed so that as much data as possible is displayed on a single material master screen. This increases the length of the screen, but reduces the number.

This screen sequence allows a maximum of 21 lines to be displayed on each screen. It is intended for small screens.

In this screen sequence, the screens are presented as tab pages, similar to a stack of index cards. Each tab page has a tab title, for example, the name of a user department such as Purchasing, Warehouse Management, and so on. Displaying screens in this way has the following advantages:

Improved overview
Greater transparency
Easier navigation
Suitability for small screens

It is the screen sequence preset in the standard SAP R/3 System.

Screen sequences 3 and 23 are for retail.