Procurement Settings 

You can further specify how a material is to be procured by using the Special procurement field. In particular, it is possible to use this field to specify that the material is to be procured directly. For more information on this field, see Procurement Type and Special Procurement Type.

Although it does not directly affect procurement, the Strategy group field determines amongst other things the account assignment for a material and therefore is important for processing material components in the Project System.

Another field that is important for material components in projects is the Individual/collective requirements indicator (on the MRP 4 tab page). If individual requirements are not allowed here, that is the indicator is set to Collective requirements only, it is not possible to assign the material to project stock or sales order stock. Similarly if you specify Individual requirements only, it is not possible to assign the material to plant stock.

In order for a material to be planed by MRP, the MRP type field (MRP 1 tab page) has to be set to a value that results in MRP planning. It is essential that this field does not have the value ND (No planning)

A further important factor is the material type itself. When a material is assigned a material type, you automatically decide which screens are displayed when you create a material. You can also specify in the material type whether a material is to be procured internally or externally. For more information, see Material Types.

See also: Settings in the Material Master (for assembly processing)

The settings in the BOM are particularly important if you use BOM transfer to assign components to a network.

In the item overview of the BOM you must enter an item category for each component.

You can also enter a special procurement key in the BOM item detail screen. These settings then take effect when the BOM items are assigned to activities automatically using BOM transfer. On this detail screen you can also enter an explosion type that overrides some of the settings in the material master or special procurement key. In the current context this is particularly useful for changing the Individual/collective requirements indicator.

You determine whether project stock is to be used for a project and whether the project stock is valuated in the project definition when you create the project. The default setting is obtained from the project profile. For more details; see Project Stock.

You can define a procurement indicator in Customizing the Project System under Material ® Procuremen t for frequently used combinations of settings. You can then save this procurement indicator in the network profile as a default or enter it in the component overview during assignment.