Dear All,
Wish you all a very happy new year-2012... 🙂
I faced a strange issue during SAP implementation project for one of the leading fire protection devices industry in USA. Such situation could occur in any industry which has materials management processes along with Quality Management.
In our case, in Material Management, business has activated a Revision Level for products to track the changes with materials and related documents, and hence there were multiple revision levels created in for a particular material in SAP. Also in QM, business had a specific process of an external vendor certificate requirement, in which vendor has to provide quality certificate along with goods. In such scenario, a Quality Information (Q-Info) Record must be created for a material/goods and as a normal practice, we created a Q-Info Record for a particular Material, Plant & Vendor combination.
Considering above, in purchasing process, while creating a Purchasing documents e.g. Purchase Order (PO) for a particular product, which has multiple revision levels maintained and a certificate requirement, system tried to fetch a current/Active revision level. But Active version would be RESET by system, as no Q-Info Record is maintained for active revision level. This is because system tries to verify if vendor being used in purchasing document is released by QM team for procurement.
Due to Revision Level RESET in purchasing document, system wouldn’t populate a current/Active Revision Level and hence could not link the correct document/data related to product/s into PO. This was creating problems...
First option which came into mind to overcome this situation was to create Q-Info Record for each Material, Plant, Vendor & Reviosion Level combination so that system would find correct record for a particular revision level. But this would have been created more questions/concerns from business... considering amount extra master records (Q-Info Records) to created in SAP along with business efforts involved into it.
And then I came across a more suitable and one-time solution to overcome this situation... to implement a BAdI- QB_Q_INFO_RECORD in SAP system.
Using this BAdI implementation, we can force SAP to skip/clear a revision level for a material in a particular business transaction in which it accesses the Q-Info Record, either in read/write mode. Because in a normal case business would not have Q-Info Record created for each material revision.
In this BAdI, system refers to different combinations of the Q-Info Records with reference fields-Material, Plant, Revision Level & Vendor, even though a single Q-info record is maintained in SAP. With this solution, we avoided creation of multiple Q-Info Records for each Revision Level alongwith business efforts to create it everytime.
Off-course, this solution was commended by business people as it was a better solution than to create multiple Q-Info Records in SAP for each revision level. After this I did not tried to search/look for any other solution to this. 🙂
