The trend toward globalization of businesses places high demands on the organization of product data. There are often several development and production locations with their own systems.

Product data distribution / Integrated Distributed PDM ensures a continuous flow of data through all phases of the product development process. For example, the system landscape of a company may comprise a central PDM system and several ERP systems. Using Application Link Enabling (ALE), master data from the PDM system is distributed to the various ERP systems. This ensures consistent master data maintenance across systems. All master data belonging to the PDM environment (materials, BOMs, documents, change master records, and classes) can be distributed.

A user triggers sending of master data objects manually. All data belonging to the master data objects to be sent is also sent.

You can have changes to master data in the PDM system automatically distributed to the ERP systems by using the Shared Master Data Tool (SMD tool).

The SMD tool logs changes to master data objects by using change pointers. It is connected to the change documents interface. To use the SMD tool to distribute master data, change documents must be generated whenever a master data object is created, changed, or deleted.

You can use the graphical Product Structure Browser to evaluate master data across multiple systems. This means that you can use the browser to check the master data that you have distributed.

You can use document distribution to distribute original application files of documents to defined recipients. You can start the distribution manually or couple it to the processing status of the document, for example release.

You can maintain a recipient list for each document. Many different recipient types are supported, such as office user, external companies and contact persons, SAPoffice distribution lists, and organizational units. Many distribution types make it possible to send documents by using different media and to different scenarios. For example, you can send documents by SAPmail, e-mail, fax, to a printer, or plotter.