Before describing the management of materials in WM, we need to discuss briefly how the material records are organized in the SAP Materials Management system.

The material master record contains all information about the materials a company procures, manufactures, stores and ships. The data stored in the material master is not only used by Warehouse Management (WM), but also by other application components, such as Inventory Management (IM), Production Planning (PP), Quality Management (QM) and Shipping (SD-SHP).

The integration of all information about a material into a single record eliminates redundancy and makes it possible to store material data for all relevant system components in a single database.

You maintain and display material master records using views. Just as data in the material master record is maintained for specific departments, such as quality assurance, sales or product planning, some of the data is used specifically by the Warehouse Management (WM) application.

For example, when you maintain material data from the viewpoint of warehouse management, the system displays only the data that is relevant for the storage of the material in the warehouse. General data that is relevant for more than one view (for example, the material's description, its weight, and its volume) appears in several views.

There are two organizational levels that can be defined for WM. In the WM view of the material master record, all the indicators and fields that are used for the entire warehouse number are entered at the warehouse number level. There is also a storage type level with all the indicators that apply to a single storage type but do not for the entire warehouse. If you enter a storage type for a material on the initial screen for the WM view, the system displays an additional section in which you can enter, for example, a fixed storage bin or a control quantity. These fields only apply to the storage type and not to the entire warehouse.