Displaying Engineering Data 

Use

In the early phase of product development, employees without knowledge of the SAP system need a wide range of product information from the engineering environment. The product designer offers these people access to information on, for example, a product structure with many variants. You can also present the most diverse documents graphically, regardless of the application that was used to create them (for example, a CAD system).

Prerequisites

On the initial page, you have selected the iPPE object whose engineering data you want to evaluate, or you have executed a hyperlink that goes to the page of an iPPE object.

See Selecting an Access for a Structure

Procedure

Once you have selected the iPPE object on the initial page, or chosen the hyperlink, you see the object-specific page.
Links to the objects from the engineering environment provide further detailed data. The following sections describe how you can get essential engineering information.

Selecting Views

The navigation area views is determined dynamically for each iPPE object. Several views are listed, to present a clear overview of the data of an iPPE object.

·         You display the data of a view by clicking on a view in the list.

The view that is currently displayed has an arrow against it.

·         If the system determines objects for a view, the number of objects is displayed.

You display the structure node of a product structure. The following views are listed for this iPPE object:

Data sheet
Structure
Documents (3)
Workflow (0)
....

This means:
Three documents are linked to this structure node. If you want to check the list of documents, click on the documents view. No work items exist.

Navigating in the Product Structure

You see information on the structure of a product in both the navigation area structure and the structure view.

The following overview shows the information contained in these two display areas.

Procedure	Use
Navigation area Structure	The iPPE object whose engineering data is displayed on the page is shown in bold. ·         Higher-level iPPE objects are listed next to the upward arrow. If an iPPE object is subordinate to several iPPE objects, the path upwards is ambiguous. In this case, the Structure area shows any higher-level object as an example of the upwards hierarchy. ·         Directly subordinate iPPE objects are listed below the selected iPPE object, indented. A triangle shows that a subordinate object has subordinate objects of its own. The higher-level and subordinate objects are presented as links. If you execute these links, you see the object-specific pages of the objects. All data is updated for the newly selected iPPE object.
View Structure	The information in the structure view is more comprehensive than the information in the structure navigation area. -          There is a table for objects that are directly above or below the selected object. -          The table lists the objects with information on the product class, the node type, and the change status, if there is one. The higher-level and subordinate objects are presented as links. If you execute these links, you see the object-specific pages of the objects. All data is updated for the newly selected iPPE object.

Displaying a Product Class

The header data for the newly selected iPPE object is displayed on all views. Below the header data, the product class of the selected object is specified. The product class or product class hierarchy (classes of class type 300) lets you display the characteristics for all variants of a product. These characteristics classify the entire product.

The product class is presented as a link. If you execute this link, you see the detail data of the product class, such as the list of characteristics and administrative data.

You can also classify an individual structure node and an individual component variant (classes of class types 056 for iPPE nodes and 053 for iPPE variants). You assign values to the characteristics of these classes, thereby entering additional object-specific attributes for the individual iPPE objects.

See Assigning Values to Characteristics

Displaying a Change Number

Processing of an iPPE object with reference to a change number is done in the iPPE workbench.

If a change status with reference to a change number exists, the change number is presented as a link. If you execute this link, you see the detail data of the change number, such as the reason for change and the status.