If maintenance activities are to be carried out for an equipment and at the
same time if an identical replacement is to be
maintained for it in inventory then is it better to create it from the material
master rather than from
PM -> Technical Objects -> Create -> Equipment.
What is the significance of maintaining Functional Location BOM.
I would do both create a material number for consistency and the
replenishment of equipment in the future and also assign it a unique equipment
master record number.
In the equipment master record (I believe PM DATA screen), there is a
construction type field which is by default an IBAU material. Link the material
number to the equipment master. If you want to get real slick, create the
equipment master record with reference to the material number. This way the
description (short text) of the equipment is automatically populated by the
Construction Type (IBAU material) as well as populating the Construction Type
field.
The Functional Location BOM further enhances the hierarchy of the equipment
master BOM via Component lists. Lets say you have several equipment (large
assemblies) BOM's made up of smaller components (material). You could then
create several large assemblies in the material master which would be the
equivalent to the equipment (large assemblies) which have BOM's of smaller
components (material) . Next, create a Functional Location BOM made up of
several of these larger assemblies (material) . This will provide you with a
nice hierarchy when running List Edit Display (multi level).
This is a rather complex situation because if the equipment is an asset then
the repair costs should reflect the asset value too in some cases. Also the
replacing equipment has its own cost record and I think you want to know which
equipment number has the most costs collected.
There are a few other ways to control this situations:
1. Creating a sub work order linked to the main work order with the repaired
material. So this sub work order should
collect the repair cost. This has the advantage that the main work order
cannot be closed unless the repair has been
closed. (or a disadvantage in some cases)
2. You can also use the serialization utility, meaning creating a material
number and link it to the equipment and activate
this utility in the material master record. For every movement in MM , it
will ask for the related serial number and
accordingly to the proper equipment. So if you send this to the vendor I
think this is an advantage to see how much
time this particular equipment has been send out for repair.
But as I said before, the whole process can be very complex if you want to
follow it up properly.
In SAP, On what basis we decide to create either material master record or
Equipment master record. And what is the basic difference between Material Master record and Equipment
master record.
In SAP a material is a representation of an object that can be procured,
produced, assembled, sold, and replaced (among a couple other things). A
material can exist as a physical object as stock and it can also exist as a
virtual representation of a structure or process. Usually materials are handled
as groups of objects (like 100 fenders or a dozen cookies of batch A or 4 panels
in restricted stock).
An equipment is a representation of a single physical object that is handled at
a much more granular level than materials. An equipment is typically installed
somewhere and can have extra information (like warranty or measurement data) and
can have maintenance done on it. Usually it's the individualization and
maintenance aspect that determines if an object is an equipment or a material (a
single entity for which you want to track data like maintenance work, history,
or costs).
An equipment can also be linked to a material by indicating that the equipment
is made of the material (as a generalization - construction type) and/or
indicating that the equipment is actually an instance of a material (material
plus serial number in the serial data tab).
