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Component documentation Configuration Management (LO-CM) Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Purpose

During their life, products and projects go through various life-cycle phases such as engineering and design, sales, production, and maintenance. In each life-cycle phase, a product has different configurations. A configuration is made up of multiple different objects that describe the product in the relevant life-cycle phase. For example, these can be documents, materials, BOMs or other objects. The grouping of objects changes over the course of time and is different from life-cycle phase to life-cycle phase.

With configuration management you identify the objects that describe a product in a particular life-cycle phase, and group them in a meta object – a configuration folder. With the help of different configuration folders in various life-cycle phases you manage the configuration of products and projects over different life-cycle phases.

Configuration Folders in Three Different Life-Cycle Phases

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text

Configuration management can be used in various business processes:

The features offered in Release 4.6C support the Collaborative Engineering & Project Management processes.

Extensive documentation on this can be found in the SAP Library under Logistics ® PS – Project System ® Structure linkCollaborative Engineering & Project Management (CEP).

When your product reaches a milestone, you freeze the processing status for a specific point in time in a baseline. This processing status can later be reproduced at any time.

You can find information on baselining in this documentation under Creating a Baseline.

For additional information on the distribution of product data and documentation, see Structure linkProduct Data Distribution.

Integration

These components are integrated with configuration management:

Features

In a company the various products go through different life-cycle phases. You can personally define the individual life-cycle phases for your products and projects in Customizing for configuration management, and combine them flexibly together to meet your company’s requirements.

With accompanying documents, you can comprehensively document the editing processes of a configuration folder. Accompanying documents connected to document management (CA-DMS) via an object link and are managed with their functions.

From a worklist, you always have fast access to the configuration folders that you work with.

See: Worklist

See: Status Management in Configuration Management

You use the product structure browser to look for objects that are relevant to a configuration and copy them, using Drag & Drop, into your configuration folders.

If you create a baseline, the system automatically looks for objects that are relevant for the product and adds them to the baseline.

See: Automatic Completion of the Structure

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