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Component documentation Engineering Workbench (PP-BD)  Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Purpose

The Engineering Workbench is an environment for maintaining product structures and operations. Its capabilities far exceed those of the conventional maintenance of bills of material and routings.

The most important objects in the Engineering Workbench are BOM items and operations. Views of these objects are available that present the conventional structures of bills of material and routings. In addition to this, other views are now available that were previously not possible. All of the maintenance functions, such as Create, Change and Delete are supported on all of these views.

Features

Integrated Processing

You no longer have to maintain routings and bills of material separately. You can simply select those object types in the Engineering Workbench with which you want to work, for instance Material, Production resource/tool, Operation etc. You summarize this selection in a working area. For instance the design and production departments both have special requirements and therefore each has its own special working area.

Complex Selection Criteria

You can select any object in you working area by its attributes. You can combine all the selections logically.

Simultaneous Processing

Any items from any bills of material can be processed by different people at the same time. The same applies for various operations in a routing. If you want to edit a BOM item (operation) that is being edited by somebody else, the Engineering Workbench tells you who is doing so, so that you can contact him to coordinate the changes. The other user can release the BOM item (operation) for you without having to interrupt his work.

User Support

You change or delete the objects you have selected within the Engineering Workbench. You can also create or copy new objects. You execute all of these functions from a uniform user interface. You can save intermediate results, without interrupting your work in the Engineering Workbench. This means that you can execute complex tasks efficiently.