Introduction to Material Master Data in SAP MM

Master data in SAP MM is used as a base for any transaction related to procurement. It requires certain master data to be maintained if you are selling, producing, transferring stock, purchasing, doing physical inventory etc.. We have material master data, customer master data, vendor master data, pricing/conditions master data, warehouse management master data (storage bin master data) etc.

The ones we will focus in MM module are material master and purchase info record is needed.

Material Master Data: What you should know about material master with respect to MM flows?

Material in SAP is a rational representation of certain properties, goods or service that is an item of production, sales, purchasing, inventory management etc. It can be a bike, a bike part, gasoline, shipping service or consulting service, for example which can stored as material master data in SAP MM.

All the information for all materials on their likely use and characteristics in SAP are called material master data. This is reflected to be the most important master data in SAP (there are also customer master data, vendor master data, conditions/pricing master data etc.), and all the processing of the materials are subjective by material master. That is why it’s critical to have an exact and well-kept material master data.

In order to be assured in your movements you need to know material master views and its implications on methods in other modules, business transactions and a few more supportive information like tables that store material master data, transactions for mass material management (for altering certain features for a large number of materials at once).

Material types in SAP MM

In SAP ERP, every material has a representative called “material type” which is used through the SAP MM structure for various resolutions.

Why is it essential to differentiate between material types and what does that characteristic represent in SAP MM?

• It can represent a type of origin and usage – like a finished product (produced goods ready for sale), semi-finished product (used as a part of a finished product), trading goods (for resale), raw materials (used for production of semi-finished and finished items) etc. These are some of the predefined SAP material types among others like food, beverages, service and many others.
• We can define our custom material types if any of standard ones doesn’t fulfill our need.

Material type in SAP MM

What can be configured on material type level in SAP MM flows (possible differences between types)?

• Material master views: It defines the views associated with a Material Type. For example, if we have a material type “FERT” assigned to our material Product 1000 – we don’t want to have Purchasing based views for that material because we don’t need to purchase our own product – it is configured on material type level.
• Default price control: we can set this control to standard or moving average price (covered later in detail), but this can be changed in material master to override the default settings.
• Default Item category group: used to determine item category in sales documents. It can be changed in material master to override the default settings.
• internal/external purchase orders, special material types indicators, and few more.
• So material type in SAP MM is assigned to item that have the exact primary configuration setting for material master views, price control, item category group and few other. Material Type can be assigned during the creation of the material in t-code MM01 (covered in detail later)

Material type in SAP MM Transaction MM01

find a complete list of materials with their respective material type in SAP MM?

There are several transactions for this. The raw information itself is kept in MARA table
(you can view table contents with t-code SE16 or SE16N – latest version of the transaction), however in certain systems these t-codes aren’t permissible for a standard user. In such cases, we can easily obtain the list with t-code MM60 (Material list). MM60 is used mainly often as it shows a lot of basic material characteristics.

Selection screen – you can enter only the material number:

MM60 Selection Screen for Material Listing in SAP MM

We can see that material 1320 in plant 1000 is of type FERT (finished product).

Material group

Another characteristic SAP material is assigned during it’s creation is “material group”, which can represent a group or subgroup of materials based on certain criteria.

Which criteria can be used to create material groups?

Assigned material group in material master

Any criteria that suit your needs for reporting purposes is right for your system. You may group materials by the type of raw material used to produce it (different kinds of plastics used in the production process), or you can divide all services into consulting services (with different materials for SAP consulting, IT consulting, financial consulting etc), transportation services (internal transport, international transport), you can also group by production technique (materials created by welding, materials created by extrusion, materials created by injection etc). Grouping depends mainly on the approach your management chooses as appropriate, and it’s mainly done during the implementation, rarely changes in a productive environment.

In addition, there is a material hierarchy (used mostly in sales & distribution) that can also be used for grouping, but it’s defined almost always according to sales needs as it is used for defining sales conditions (standard discounts for customers, additional discounts, special offers).

On the other hand, material group is mainly used in PP and MM module.

If you need to display material groups for multiple materials, you can use already mentioned t-codeMM60. You just need to select more materials in selection criteria.

Material group in report MM60

Material group is easily subject to mass maintenance via transaction MM17. More on that in the material master editing section