Bills of material (BOMs) are used as follows:

• To assign components to structured articles

• To assign empties to full products

In the standard article master, you can maintain BOMs by accessing the Basic Data view and choosing Components. When creating a structured article or full product, this has the advantage that you can assign the components to the article and maintain the Listing view, all in the same transaction. When you save your data, listing conditions are created for the structured article or full product, and also for the components.

On accessing BOM maintenance from the article master (see Use), you specify the components and their quantity. The base unit of measure for each of the components is entered automatically. It is normally the only unit of measure allowed.

On accessing BOM maintenance from the article master (see Use), you enter the unit of measure (of the full product) for which you want to create an empties BOM. After choosing Enter, you can enter or change the empties components. If necessary, you can specify a different unit of measure for components by choosing Display <-> Change component unit. This requires you to have created the dimension and the required units of measure for this dimension in Customizing for Global Parameters in the activity Check Units of Measurement.

If you access BOM maintenance, but want to create or change an empties BOM for a different unit of measure of the same full product, you can do so by choosing Other unit of measure (header). However, this is not possible once you have changed an existing BOM for a specific unit of measure, or assigned empties to the full product for the unit of measure.

On accessing BOM maintenance from the article master (see Use), you enter a generic article. After you choose Enter, the system enters the variants of this generic article automatically. You now need enter only the required quantities. If you have created quota scales for the variant-creating characteristics of the generic article, the quota scales can be used to propose the required quantities automatically. You do this in the tree structure by expanding the relevant generic article and characteristic, and selecting the quota scale as required.