Changing a Material Type 

Use

In certain circumstances, it may be necessary to change the material type. For example, a material that was always procured externally in the past and whose material type allows only external procurement is also to be produced in-house in the future. Therefore, you must assign the material to a material type that also allows in-house production.

Integration

Since the material type influences the way transactions are processed in the R/3 System, the system checks any change to the material type to see whether it is allowed.

Prerequisites

If the material is already in stock, or if reservations or purchasing documents exist for it, the following conditions must also be met:

If the material, whose material type you want to change, was handled in batches and if, due to the maintenance statuses of the new material type, the material can no longer be handled in batches, although batches still exist, you cannot change the material type.

Activities

If you change from a material type that allows only in-house production to a material type that allows only external procurement, or vice versa, the system converts the procurement type accordingly.

If you change to a material type that allows different user department data than the old material type, the system does the following:

You can maintain these fields by choosing Material ® Change.