Creating Product Substitution Procedures 

Use

You save information about product substitutions in a product substitution procedure. You must assign a procedure type to each product substitution procedure.

The procedure type cannot be changed subsequently.

Costs

You can assign costs for the procedure. You can prioritize product substitutions by assigning costs. Note the following:

In substitution procedures of type 0 (chain) you cannot enter any costs because the sequence of the substitutions is fixed. Instead, you can set a Selection end indicator.

Selection end indicator

You set this indicator to reflect a technology change within a selection of products. The indicator selects the processing start of the product list.

You can set the selection end indicator for substitution procedures with type 0 (chain) only. In addition, this indicator can be valuated for access strategies 01 and 04 only.

Example

In the first instance, you start with requested product P4. According to access strategy 1 (start from top of list), P1, P2 and P3 are defined as predecessors and P5 as the successor. The results list appears as follows: P1 ® P2 ® P3 ® P4 ® P5.

In the second instance, you set a selection end indicator for P2. You start with requested product P4. P2 and P3 are defined as predecessors; P5 is defined as the successor. The results list appears as follows: P2 ® P3 ® P4 ® P5.

Procedure

  1. From the SAP APO screen select Master Data ® Rule Maintenance ® Integrated Rule Maintenance.
  2. In the Overview frame, choose (Maintain product substitutions).
  3. Choose Procedure à Create.
  4. Define an alphanumeric sort key (maximum 10 places) and a description for the product substitution procedure and choose a procedure type.
  5. Choose Enter.

    6. The fields in the Details frame are now ready for input.

  6. Enter the requested product and the substitute products.
  7. If necessary, enter the validity period of the substitution.

    8. At runtime the check compares this validity with the product availability date of the requested schedule line.

    For further information, see Validity Period in Rules

  8. Enter the costs for the current product substitution, if necessary.
  9. Choose a product substitution reason, if necessary.
  10. Choose Save.

Note that the requirements quantities and the confirmed quantities from the ATP check always refer to the base unit of measure of the products involved. There is no conversion of the units of measure for a product substitution.

If the base units of measure of products differ from each other within a substitution, considerable under- and over-confirmation situations are generated when there is a substitution.

We recommend that you do not substitute products with different base units of measure. You configure the base unit of measure in the product master.