Order BOMs for Variant Configuration (SAP Library

Order BOMs for Variant Configuration

Purpose

Products that are made to order in plant engineering and construction and mechanical engineering are generally very complex and are specific to one customer. For this reason, you cannot define a BOM entirely in advance. Once you have created your sales order, you need to make manual changes to the BOM by creating an order BOM especially for the sales order, without changing the original BOM.

An order BOM is identified by the sales order, sales order item, and material number.

In variant configuration, you can work with 2 types of order BOM. The difference is in the way they are saved:

Knowledge-Based Order BOM

The order BOM is saved as a copy of the super BOM with manual changes and dependencies.

Result-Oriented Order BOM

The configuration result is saved as an order BOM, with manual changes but without dependencies.

Process Flow

1. You create a sales order for a material (see Creating Sales Orders). The material is configured in the sales order. You cannot configure the configurable assemblies of the BOM in the sales order. The explosion of your structure is not displayed if the Engineering view is selected in the configuration profile.

You can also create an order BOM for a quotation. However, you cannot copy the order BOM for a quotation to a sales order.

2. Once you have entered the sales order, you can use the maintenance function Bill of Material ® Order BOM ® Maintain (Multi-Level) to process the BOM The order BOM maintenance function explodes the entire structure of the order BOM. You can configure the configurable assemblies.

The engineering process determines which assemblies need to be changed and which new assemblies are required.

You can make the following changes to a BOM:

Change BOM items (for example, quantity)

Add items

When you add an item, change the item number. The default is always the number of the item you selected. However, each item number should only occur once in a BOM.

Delete items

Copy items

Cut items
Specify class items manually

Creating the order BOM is known as fixing. Order BOMs are created individually for each assembly. If you fix the BOM of the header material, you do not necessarily fix the BOMs of subordinate configurable assemblies (exception: Top-down setting).

Once you have finished processing the BOM structure, you can start to release assemblies for MRP.

Result

You create an order BOM by fixing the BOM of a material. The BOM is fixed if one of the following applies:

Manual changes are made to assemblies

The configuration profile for the assembly has the Automatic fixing indicator or you choose Fix on the result screen of the maintenance function

Restrictions in BOM Maintenance

BOMs of non-configurable assemblies are not exploded.

In a knowledge-based order BOM, you can only process configurable assemblies that have the Order BOM setting in their configuration profile. In a result-oriented order BOM, you can maintain all assemblies.

Characteristic values can only be assigned to configurable assemblies that have the Order BOM setting.

If you use engineering change management, you cannot use the change overview to display change information, because the order BOM is a new BOM – not a new version of the original BOM.

See also:

Process: Order BOM

Settings in the Configuration Profile