Equipment Master

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).    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 equipment or a material (a single entity for which you want to track data like maintenance work, history, or costs).   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).  

- A material master is used to describe an item, usually stock able, that is purchased, manufactured, sold, inspected, serviced, etc.  A material master is usually created when there are multiple quantities of an item; say a product that is being manufactured. 

- A material master may have a serial number profile entered in order to allow distinguishing between the different copies of the same item.   For stocking, inspecting, sales, manufacturing, etc; the exact serial number(s) being transacted will need to be specified. 

- Depending  on the serial number profile specifics, each SN may get a unique equipment master, which records information specific to the material-SN combination (not just about the material in general).  For instance, if a product sold to a customer is returned for service, that material-SN (=equipment master) will have a record of the service order used. 

- For items which are never inventoried but for which information particularly PM transactions are recorded, an equipment master without a material master may be created, for instance a piece of processing equipment. So an equipment master may link to a material-SN combination, or may be a stand-alone.

Creating a Master Equipment  

Use

The master equipment serves as a reference when automatically creating a new piece of equipment from the sales order with service item. It can be a piece of equipment without configuration or configurable equipment. The following explains how to create a configurable piece of equipment. For information on how to create a piece of equipment without configuration, see Creating a Piece of Equipment in PM - Structuring Technical Systems.

Prerequisites

You have created a configurable material. You just need to process the basic data. The main requirement is that the material is configurable.

Logistics ® Customer service ® Service processing ® Environment ® Technical objects ® Material ® Create (general)

You have created a configuration profile for this configurable material and assigned the classes for the equipment.

Logistics ® Materials management ® Material master ® Material ® Environment ® Configuration profile