This component aims to give a redundancy-free description of products or product families that have many variants, and to provide a consistent data basis for all enterprise areas that work with the product structure or parts of it. It provides an integrated data model that is the basis for efficient IT management of the product structures. You can use it to adequately portray both the product creation process (with the main focus on Product Data Management) and also production (the main focus being requirements planning). You can use the iPPE product structure to configure concrete products quickly and efficiently.

Within the iPPE product structure, the product variant structure is for maintaining configurable materials and the assembly group is for maintaining non-configurable materials without direct reference to the configurable final product.

You use the iPPE product structure to configure products with many variants and a large number of BOM items.

To use the iPPE structure, you require the following components of the SAP R/3 System:

• Engineering Change Management (ECM)
• Classification System
• Variant Configuration

To plan material requirements with the Rapid Planning Matrix (RPM), you must have installed and maintained data in the iPPE component.

• You can create views on the product. You can use nodes in the product structure more than once. The views can be multi-level, that is, set up as a hierarchy.
• You can use ECM to edit variants for the product structure. When you use ECM, the system can make operational use of different change statuses. When you do not use ECM, there is exactly one effective status for each variant in the system.
• The variants of the structure nodes refer to concrete materials. However, in the planning phase you can maintain variants without assigning materials. You can make the assignment when the concrete product is planned and you have created the materials.
• You can maintain variable-size item data at the variants for the structure node when you work with variable-size items.
• The product structure allows you to maintain color nodes for color-neutral variants at the structure nodes.
• You can use the classification system and object dependencies to control the selection of the variants at the structure node.
• You can use the consistency check to test the selection conditions for the variants at a structure node. This prevents ambiguities or gaps in the variant selection.
• You can maintain product-class-specific selection conditions and colors for variants.
• You can use the Document Management System to append accompanying documents and DMU documents to the variants.
• You can check whether your product structure is recursive, that is, whether materials are made up of themselves when they are reduced to their component parts.
• You can use a special work context (focus) in the iPPE workbench for making development studies or special customer designs. In this work context, you can change existing product structures or parts of them without affecting the original structure.