Fast Entry of Characteristics in Purchase Orders

Use

In the past you always had to go the characteristic value assignment screen for each item in order to assign values to the characteristics of materials when entering a purchase order with several configurable materials.

Fast entry of characteristics lets you enter characteristic value assignments for up to ten characteristics directly in the item overview. This greatly reduces entry effort, particularly for materials with few characteristics and for preconfigured materials.

Integration

Production, Materials Management and Sales and Distribution make shared use of the same object dependencies. This is why you cannot maintain separate object dependencies for production orders, purchase orders or sales documents.

If you want your object dependencies to be application-specific, you can evaluate an object characteristic in your object dependencies that you have defined in the MILL_APPL_ID field of the VBAK table. The content of this field is MM for purchase orders.

Prerequisites

If you want to use fast entry of characteristics for purchase orders, you must have made the following settings in Customizing of Purchasing :

You have activated fast entry of characteristics for the purchase order in Customizing at Purchase Order Fast Entry of Characteristics in Purchase Order Set Up Fast Entry for Characteristic Values by selecting the FDE Active indicator.
You have created a characteristic display that includes the desired characteristics for the purchase order.

You define a characteristic display at Purchase Order Fast Entry of Characteristics in Purchase Order Define Characteristic Display for Overview Screen (mySAP Mill Products).
You have assigned an application group that includes the Purchase order transaction to this characteristic display.

You define an application group at Purchase Order Fast Entry of Characteristics in Purchase Order Define Application Group for Characteristic Display .

Features

In the item overview of the purchase order you can display up to ten characteristics using a characteristic display; you can then configure the characteristics when you enter purchase order items.

The configuration status is also displayed in the item overview. The system displays the following symbols in the Configuration Status column to indicate whether configuration is complete or whether there are still inconsistencies:

Configuration status symbols

Symbol	Description
	The configuration is incomplete (mandatory characteristics are missing) or inconsistent (object dependencies conflict). You can change the configuration.
	The configuration is complete and consistent. You can change the configuration.
	The material in this purchase order item has already been configured in the material master or in a purchase requisition and the item only points to the configuration there. As a result, changes in the material master or in the purchase requisition are immediately visible in the purchase order. If you branch to the characteristic value assignment screen of this item, the system copies the configuration. Consequently, the configuration of the purchase order is independent of the original configuration. If you change the configuration of the material master or purchase requisition, you can no longer see the changes in the purchase order.
	The configuration cannot be changed.
	The configuration does not exist or the material cannot be configured.

When you click on these symbols in the item overview, you are taken to the characteristic value assignment screen of the corresponding purchase order item.