Best Practice for making material obselete

[Former Member]

Hai Experts,

Could any one please advice me what s the best practice to make a material obselete. Is there any best practice or incase if it is not there what would be the diff ways it cant be made obselete.

Please advice me on this.

Thanking you in advance

Regards,

Gopalakrishnan.S

[murugan_mgl · Accepted solution]

Deletion -MM06,but this can be removed.

You can block the material with cross plant material status in material master,with error message-MM02

You can lock the material in material master-MM02

You can archive the material

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hai,

Thanks guys for your advice. I have one more clarification on this material deletion now. can we delete the material from the system by any means?

Can you please advice on this?

Regards,

Gopalakrishnan.S

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

to delete the material physically you have to run archiving, but before you can archive a material, you have have to archive all dependend objects first.

e.g. if you had purchase orders and requisitions, then you have to run first archiving for PR and POs.

if your material has a bill of material, then this need to be archived first.

if your material had stock, then the earliest time to delete(archive) a material is when current year and previous year stock is zero.

in worst case you have to keep the material for another 2 years.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hai,

Thanks Guys for your information on this. This was really useful.

Regards,

Gopalakrishnan.S

[Former Member]

I have one more clarification on them. So kindly mark it as unanswered

[Former Member]

Hai Guys,

Thank you all for the info. Who runs the archive and what s the procedure or process of it. Can you guys brief on them?

Thanking you in advance.

Regards,

Gopalakrishnan.S

[JL23]

Archiving is a process, rather than a transaction. you have to take care that you fulfill local laws and retain your data for x years for internal and external auditors.

archiving requires customizing, you have to tell SAP where your archive is and what name it has and how big it can be, and when (definition of retention period) a document can be archived.

you have to talk with your business how long they want the data keep in the production system (this depends on how long they need to run reports on this data)

you have to define who can access the archived data and how this data is accessed.

Who runs archiving?

Tough question. Data owner is the business, so they should run.

But archiving just buckets fragments your tables.

so many companies have a person who is fulltime responsible for archiving and does it for all business units and organisations.

Archiving is nothing what can be done "on the fly", you will encounter all kind of errors, processes that are not designed well will certainly create a lot problems in archiving and need to be reworked.

I had an archving project with 50 days project time, and could develope guidelines to archive about 30 different objects. there are 100 more objects possible, and we have still not archived master data like material, vendors and customers because of so many dependencies and object that need to be archived prior to those objects.

[former_member218067]

Hi,

If your material is not in use you can put a deletion flag for the material master in transaction MM06

Which will block the usage at plant/ storage location /valuation type level and also Sales Org and distrubusion channel level

If you are using material statuses you can block the usage across all plants by using X plant material status block in material master

basic data-1 view or you can plant specific material statuses from Purchasing view to block for specific plant same goes with sales

area with sales org view

Thanks

Diwakar