S/4HANA Materials Management and Operations - Material Master Data changes observed

Material Master:

Structurally material master is same and the old transaction (mm01, mm02, mm03) still exists in S/4HANA world. However, there are some fields removed, new material type added and length of material has been changed but beyond that, there is not much changed from a functional perspective.

The first change is to the material master field length. Earlier in ECC it was 18 characters long. Now in S/4HANA, it has changed to 40 characters long. If you go to F1 help and click on technical data and double click on data element.

IN ECC the length of the material is 18 character.

In S/4HANA the length of the material is 40 character

However, it is switched off by default. The length of the material is 40 character meaning technically material length is 40 characters but, by default, it is not yet set to 40 characters.

You have to check the extended material field to do this. The menu path to check the flag for extended material field is

SPRO –> IMG –> CROSS-APPLICATION FUNCTIONS –> GENERAL APPLICATION FUNCTIONS –> FIELD LENGTH EXTENSION –> ACTIVATE EXTENDED FIELDS

GO TO NEW ENTRIES AND CHECK THIS FLAG

Unless you check this on SAP, it will not use the entire 40 characters in the external interfaces communications. You could easily create a material with 40 characters but,

when you look at the related interface document that will be used to communicate, like a sales order or purchase order IDOC, you will see looking at the text description in the IDOC, that SAP is still using the old 18-character material length. That is because current BAPIs and all the other SAP systems that are currently in place are basically still using 18 characters for that field. For a S/4HANA functional consultant, the definition of material should be 40 character but when it comes to a interface IDOC, the external systems do not know what the length definition of the material field should be. So if your blueprint requirements says all your systems should set it to 40, you have to check the Flag for the Extended material number so that SAP S/4HANA is starting to use the extended field for communication to external system when it comes to material master.

 You can restrict the length of the material master field by using the SAP APO transaction OMSL where you specify the format of material master field.

 The second change in material master, is to the field ‘Foreign Trade Data’ field. It is now no longer relevant in S/4HANA. It is part of SAP Global Trade Management (GTS).

The third change in material master is the addition of new material type SERV. As the name suggests it intended to be used to determine the service type. The choices available for this are

• Basic data
• Sales view
• Purchasing view
• Accounting

I am Gary Phelan, an IT and SAP Global Program manager at Aptiv Global Operations Ltd in Ireland. Thank you for taking the time to read my weekly post. I hope you are leaving knowing a little more than before, about SAP S/4HANA.