3 Important Batch managed materials in Automotive

 The good news for SAP consultant is that there is extremely limited concept of batch in Automotive products, but the sad news is that we must define materials as batch managed. We will cover following concepts in this blog.

What are Batch Managed Materials

What is the concept of Batch in Automotives?

Which material types should be batch managed?

 

What are Batch Managed Materials

 

Normally batch management is use in process industries such as cement industry, Batch is a group of finished or semi-finished goods having same characteristics such as color, raw material, date of manufacturing, machine/work center etc. The purpose of managing Finish Goods in batch is to identify unique group of products which are produced.

Concept of Batch in Automotives?

 

In automotive industry, every vehicle is unique. Every vehicle can recognize from its Chassis or Engine Number. But the problem is that SAP only recognize Finished Goods (FG) or Semi Finish Goods (SFG) by its batch number not by Chassis number or engine number. The solution of the problem as we solved is

1.     Define all FG and SFG materials as batch managed.

2.     Define lot size to 1 because every vehicle unit is unique.

3.     Define a batch characteristic of Chassis# and Engine number in Class characteristic.

4.      At the time of creating production order. we write vehicle’s planned chassis number as batch characteristic and Engine number as batch characteristic of Engine material.

Which material types should be batch managed?

 

All Finished Goods can define as FERT Materials and batch managed.

Those SFG which are dependent of FG materials such as Welded Body, Painted Body, assembled body and Engine Item can define as HALB material types and batch managed.

There is another material type which must be managed as batch managed material, which is CKD KIT. It is a major share of materials. CKD abbreviated Complete Knock Down KIT. Every model has its KIT which consist of all parts/components required to Assemble a complete vehicle. CKD KIT normally import in lot and each lot has a fixed lot size, normally 48 or 96 unit in one lot. CKD KIT need to be store and manage in batch and each batch represent a unique lot.

 

There might be some other materials which can be batch managed but above material types are necessary to defined as batch managed for successful implementation of SAP in automotive.