SAP ABAP IMG Activity SIMG_HPM_0011 (Define Additional Stockkeeping Units of Measurement)
Hierarchy
☛ BBPCRM (Software Component) BBPCRM
   ⤷ CRM (Application Component) Customer Relationship Management
     ⤷ CRM_APPLICATION (Package) All CRM Components Without Special Structure Packages
       ⤷ OIB (Package) HPM Hydrocarbon Product Management
IMG Activity
ID SIMG_HPM_0011 Define Additional Stockkeeping Units of Measurement  
Transaction Code S_SO5_65000681   (empty) 
Created on 19991116    
Customizing Attributes SIMG_HPM_0011   Define Additional Stockkeeping Units of Measurement 
Customizing Activity SIMG_HPM_0011   Define Additional Stockkeeping Units of Measurement 
Document
Document Class SIMG   Hypertext: Object Class - Class to which a document belongs.
Document Name SIMG_HPM_0011    

In this step, you:

In inventory management, stock levels are maintained in each material's base unit of measure. The unit of measure group enables inventory management in multiple stockkeeping units of measure.

Example

Requirements

Standard settings

Recommendation

When you set up the IS-OIL system, you have to decide:

  • Which unit of measure to use as the base unit of measure for a material
  • Which additional units of measure to enter in the unit of measure group that you assign to the material

Stock levels in all of these units of measure are held in the system, and quantity conversions take place to determine all quantities for all units of measure during a goods movement, delivery processing or physical inventory count postings.

Once stock has been posted for a material, it is not possible to change the unit of measure group any more. This means that you can not:

  • Assign another unit of measure to the group
  • Remove a unit of measure from the group
  • Cancel the assignment of a unit of measure group to the material
  • Change a material from a non-HIM to an HIM material

If such changes were possible, inconsistent stock levels for the material would result, and stock levels could not be rebuilt from material documents for the additional unit of measure. Also, reversals of documents prior to a change of the unit of measure group would lead to inconsistent stock level quantities. The system would then contain inconsistent document histories that could not be removed, even if stock levels were zero and there were no open deliveries, purchase orders or other reference documents present in the system.

To avoid or remove such inconsistencies, SAP does not provide tools that would support any change of the unit of measure group, even if stock levels are at zero.

It is therefore extremely important to make the right choice when designing the unit of measure groups and choosing its entries:

  1. Base unit of measure

The base unit of measure is used for the valuation of material.

For base units of measure, choose units of mass (for example, KG, LB,TO, STO), or volume at a fixed reference temperature (for example, L15, liter at 15 °C, BB6, barrel at 60 °F).

Do not use units of measure such as liter at ambient (L) or gallons at ambient (UGL) as base unit of measure, as the quantities associated with these units vary with temperature, thus leading to variations in the valuation without the book quantity having changed.

In principle, it is not necessary to include the base unit of measure in the unit of measure group. However, we recommend that you do so in order to facilitate periodical consistency checks within the system.

  1. Unit of measure group

Try to set up unit of measure groups that can be used for as many materials as possible.

  1. Unit of measure group entries
    1. Try to limit the number of entries to those that are truly independent of each other, and cannot be calculated easily from a unit of measure that already exists.
      2. Although there is no technical limit, it is easy to produce redundant information by selecting too many units of measure, thus using system resources (performance, disk space, etc.) unnecessarily. In addition, the HPM function dynamically enhances the unit of measure group during goods movement transactions by including new units of measure, for example, from conditions in sales orders. For these additional units, the quantities are also calculated and stored in the material documents.
    2. Avoid redundant entries in the unit of measure group.
      3. Example.
      The following units are to be included in your company's standard unit of measure group:
      M15 (cubic meter at 15 °C)
      L15 (liter at 15 °C)
      M3 (cubic meter at ambient)
      L (liter at ambient)
      KG (kilogram)
      TO (metric ton)
      M15 and L15 contain the same information. By simply dividing the L15 quantity by 1000, you obtain the corresponding M15 quantity. The same is true for L and M3 and KG and TO. Thus, you can reduce the number of entries by a factor of 2.
    3. Use units of measure that contain quantities that have a comparable level of magnitude.
      4. Example:
      If you choose L15 as unit of measure for the standard volume ( for example, if this is the excise-duty-relevant unit of measure), you should choose KG rather than TO as an additional unit of measure , since the density of petroleum products is close to one kg/L, so that one kg is approximately one L of product.
    4. Avoid too many units with the same dimension and temperature dependency
      5. Example:
      The units of measure L, M3, DAL (Dekaliter) are all convertible into one another by factors of 10/100/1000. Thus, one of these three units will be sufficient when added to the unit of measure group.

Example of a streamlined unit of measure group for a European company that has strong business relationships with US partners:

  • L15 (excise duty relevant unit of measure, base unit of measure)
  • Unit of measure group:

    KG (mass unit of measure, Europe)

    LB (mass unit of measure, US)

    L (volume at ambient, used for reconciliation purposes)

    UG6 (US gallons at 60°F)

These entries fulfill the four criteria described above:

Except for the units KG and LB, the units cannot be converted directly into each other using a known conversion factor.

Although the conversion between LB and KG is basically simple, the factor is not an integer but a figure with several decimal places. It therefore makes sense to include LB in the unit of measure group as well.

As a BB6 quantity can be obtained by simply multiplying the UG6 quantity by 42, BB6 is not included in the unit of measure group.

Conclusion:

The recommendations described above can be used as a general guideline for the design of the unit of measure group and choice of units of measure. However, the business requirements of your company may force you to ignore one or more of the above recommendations. If your analysis of the requirements reveals that this is the only way to proceed, you can of course do so.

Activities

Further notes

The unit of measure group is assigned to a material in the material master record. This assignment activates the material for quantity conversion calculations and for inventory management in multiple units of measure.

Business Attributes
ASAP Roadmap ID 204   Establish Functions and Processes 
Mandatory / Optional 1   Mandatory activity 
Critical / Non-Critical 1   Critical 
Country-Dependency A   Valid for all countries 
Assigned Application Components
Documentation Object Class Documentation Object Name Current line number Application Component Application Component Name
SIMG SIMG_HPM_0011 0 I270009306 Hydrocarbon Product Management 
Maintenance Objects
Maintenance object type C   Customizing Object 
Assigned objects
Customizing Object Object Type Transaction Code Sub-object Do not Summarize Skip Subset Dialog Box Description for multiple selections
VC_OIB_UOMGROUP C - View cluster SM34  
History
Last changed by/on SAP  20070320 
SAP Release Created in