If you enter a unit of measure of a full product in a purchase order or in a sales order and an empties bill of material exists for the unit of measure, the system automatically adds items for the empties components. In the same way, empties components are added to a delivery if the delivery was generated as a follow-on document to a store order.

For every empties component, the system adds an item to the document, calculating the quantity from the quantity of the full product and the corresponding percentage of the component in the bill of material.

You can have the system add empties items in the following documents:

• Purchase order
• Sales order
• Delivery (only when deliveries are generated as follow-on documents to store orders)

Before the system can automatically add empties components to documents, you must activate empties processing by making the required settings in Customizing for Materials Management.

You order 15 crates of the full product "beer". An empties bill of material (BOM) exists for the unit of measure crate. The BOM has the components "bottle" (24) and "crate" (1). The system would add two extra items to the purchase order: