You can use this function to allocate one or more reference substances to a substance. In doing this the R/3 System generates a link from the characteristic values of the reference substance to those of the referencing substance. This greatly reduces the amount of data that needs to be entered.

The required reference substance must belong to a substance category for which the Ref. perm (referencing permitted) indicator has been set in the IMG activity Define substance categories.

The following rules apply for substance reference in the R/3 System.

• If you allocate a reference substance to a substance, a link is created to the substance from all the characteristic values assigned to the reference substance. You cannot exclude individual substance characteristic categories.

• Identifiers
• Material allocations

• You can manually overwrite characteristic values that are assigned to a referenced substance. You can choose

• whether the characteristic values assigned to a referenced substance are to be deleted, and whether you re-enter data
• whether the characteristic values assigned to a referenced substance are to remain as a template, and whether you overwrite data

• If you allocate several reference substances to a substance, the characteristic categories for these reference substances may not overlap.

• The R/3 System rejects the allocation of a reference substance if at least one of the following conditions is fulfilled: The planned reference substance

• is identical to the referencing substance (a substance may not reference itself)
• has a substance category that does not allow the substance to be used as a reference substance (defined in Customizing for Product Safety)
• is being processed by another user
• already has a reference substance (multi-level referencing is not allowed)
• overlaps with at least one other reference substance for this substance in at least one characteristic category

If you call a substance characteristic category that was transferred to the substance via substance referencing, the characteristic value is shown in display mode.