Archiving Material Master Records
(LO-MD-MM) 
Unless indicated otherwise, the information contained in this info object is relevant to the material master for industry and to the article master for retail. Retail customers are requested to substitute article for material.
Definition
Archiving object MM_MATNR for archiving material master records.
Use
All the information your company needs to manage a material is stored in a data record in the material master, sorted by various different criteria. When a material is no longer required in a company or plant, you can archive and delete the material master record. You have the following options:
· Flagging the material master record for deletion
This is known as logical deletion. Before a material master record is physically deleted by the archive and delete program, the program checks whether the record can be deleted. The procedure is different for industry material master records and retail article master records:
– Industry material master records
For more information on flagging material master
records for deletion, and the organizational levels at which they can be
deleted, see 
Flagging Material
Master Records for Deletion in the SAP library documentation LO Material Master.
There are no residence times for industry material master records.
– Retail article master records
For more information on flagging article master
records for deletion, and the organizational levels at which they can be
deleted, see Articles: Article
Discontinuation in the SAP library documentation LO
SAP Retail.
For article master records, you can specify the number of days between the logical deletion and physical deletion of an article master record for each article type. You do this in Customizing for the Article Master in Define Attributes of Article Types. In archiving, it is useful to create a variant for retail article master records and to start it periodically.
· Archiving and deleting the material master record direct
Here too, the archive and delete program first checks whether the record can be deleted.
You can display archived data, but not reload it.
To access archiving for material master records, choose Logistics ® Materials management ® Material master ® Other ® Archiving ® Material.
You
now have the following options (for information on procedures, see Archiving
Procedure):
· Archive/delete
· Display archive
By selecting individual objects and choosing Continue, you can display a list of the archived or deleted material master records. By further selecting individual objects, you can display the following archived data in detail:
– Tables
– Long texts
– Change documents
Structure
Tables
The
archiving object MM_MATNR is made up of all material master tables. With this
archiving object, data records are archived and deleted in these tables. For
information on how to display the names of these tables, see Tables and Archiving
Objects.
Programs
MM_MATNR contains the following programs:
Program |
Function |
MMREO050N |
Write |
MMREO110N |
Delete |
Write program
The
write program supports the ADK interruption function, meaning that you can
interrupt the write phase and restart it at a later point in time. For more
information on this function see Interrupting and
Continuing Archiving Sessions.
In the selection screen of the write program you can select the documents to be archived according to material number under Materials. Under Options you can further restrict the selection of documents. You can find information about the different indicators in the field help. In Processing Options you can determine whether the write job is to start in the test mode or in the production mode. If in archiving-object-specific customizing you set the indicator for the automatic start of the delete program, you can also indicate here that the delete program of the archiving object should be started with the test mode variant you entered in archiving-object-specific customizing.
During the write and delete runs the program produces a standard log with information about the processed data. In the selection screen of the programs you can indicate that you want a detail log. In addition to the information contained in the standard log, the detail log also contains a list of the objects that were processed and the corresponding messages.
In the field Archiving Session Note you can enter a short text about the archiving session, which will help you find and identify the session in archive management later.
Delete program
The delete program has the standard variants SAP&PROD (production mode) and SAP&TEST (test mode). During the write and delete phases the system produces regular progress messages in the job log and in the status line.
Integration
Before a material master record can be archived and deleted, other objects (such as purchasing documents) that refer to this material must themselves be archived. You can see which objects these are and the dependencies between them in the network graphic.
If a material master record cannot be archived and deleted at a given organizational level, the reason is given in the log (for example, a purchase order exists for the material). The log also contains technical data such as the number of material master records read and the number deleted.
Other
than the general settings to be made in Customizing (see Customizing), no
application-specific settings are required for archiving, except the possible
definition of a residence time for retail article master records (see Use above).
Since material master records can be archived and deleted individually or in groups for one or more organizational levels, it is not possible to make any general statements on runtimes and memory requirements. The deletion run should take place as soon as possible after the archiving run to avoid problems resulting from the materials concerned being changed or used in other functions (such as goods movements) between runs.
See also: