Creating a Project/Network in Assembly Processing 

To create a network from a sales order, follow the procedure described in section Creating an Assembly Order. When you save the sales document, the system creates an operative network in the background and assigns it a number.

You can create a network for each item in your sales order. If these networks have interdependencies, you can link the dependent activities together with relationships to form an overall network. Alternatively, if the quantity of the sales order item is greater than one, you can group assembly or other activities together into one network. For information on how the system calculates the work, duration, costs or material component quantities in this case, refer to Activities in PS - Project System.

If you have linked a standard network to a standard work breakdown structure and then save the sales document, the system creates an operative project, that is, an operative WBS and an operative network, in the background and assigns them numbers.

How is the Project Identifier Determined?

To easily match-up a customer project with the corresponding sales document, it is helpful when the project number contains the identifying number of the sales document.

How the system determines the project identifier from the ten-character sales document number, depends on whether you specified project number editing in Customizing of the Project System. Regardless of whether the project identifier is edited or not, the WBS element identifier must be unique. The system uses a search and replace technique which takes the first WBS element at level one and uses its identifying string as the basis for creating the identifier of all other WBS elements in the new project.

To ensure a one-to-one correspondence between the project and its related sales document, the identifying string of the standard WBS element should always be longer than ten characters.

SAP recommends that you use project number editing for projects created using assembly processing.

With project editing

The area between the first and the second special character of the identifier of the standard WBS is replaced by the corresponding number of positions from the sales document number starting from the right side of the sales document number. Therefore, to ensure a correspondence between the project and sales document, the area between the first and second special character of the identifier should always be at least ten characters long.

Std. Proj. def. / WBS element

Sales document number

New identifier in operative project

M/12345-001

0066778899

M/78899-001

M/123456789-001

0066778899

M/066778899-001

 

Without project editing

Project identifier is less than ten characters long

When the sales document number is longer than the project identifier, the system replaces the entire standard WBS identifier with part of the sales document number, starting from the right of the sales document number. The length of the standard WBS identifier remains the same.

Std.proj. def.

Sales document number

New identifier in operative project

M123456789

0066778899

0066778899

M12345

0066778899

778899

 

 

Std. WBS element

Sales document number

New identifier in operative project

M12345
(at level one)

0066778899

778899

M12345-1
(at level two)

0066778899

778899-1

 

Project identifier is more than ten characters long

When the sales document number is shorter than the project identifier, the system replaces the first ten positions of project definition with the sales document number. Any remaining characters from the original project definition number are tacked on to the end of the new project identifier.

Std. project def.

Sales document number

New operative project definition

M123456789ABC-1

0066778899

0066778899ABC-1

 

When the sales document number is shorter than the project identifier, the system replaces the entire identifier of the first WBS element with the entire sales document number and truncates any extra characters. Subsequent WBS elements retain the additional identifying characters, as shown in the example below:

Std. WBS element

Sales document number

New operative WBS element

M123456789ABC-1
(at level one)

0066778899

0066778899

M123456789ABC-1-1
(at level two)

0066778899

0066778899-1

M123456789ABC-2
(at level two)

0066778899

error

M123456789ABC-1-2
(at level two)

0066778899

0066778899-2

 

In this example, the system cannot create a new operative identifier for the standard WBS element M123456789ABC-2 because it is looking to replace the string M123456789ABC-1 from the first WBS element at level one. First you get the message that the WBS element already exists, then you must manually assign the WBS element a new identifier.

See also:

For more information on projects and networks, refer to the SAP documentation PS - Project System.