Stock transfer of unidentified material

[Former Member]

Hi,

Got a question about the following:

My customer has several WM-warehouses; one central warehouse and a few smaller regional WM-warehouses.

Sometimes, it happens that old material (old railway tracks, etc.) is returned to one of the regional WM-warehouses. Sometimes, these returned materials cannot be identified as existing SAP materials. Currently, these returned materials are returned to the central warehouse where they can be identified and booked into SAP.

However, now my client wants to be able to make a record in SAP for the unidentified materials which are located at the regional warehouses. Afterwards, they want to transfer the materials to the central warehouse for identification via a stock transfer. Obviously, they don't have a material number, so they want to do this via text fields or something similar.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of process? Maybe by using a dummy material or something?

Thanks & regards,

Oliver

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Oliver,

as you said, a dummy material would be a good idea because with "textfields" only, you cannot handle WM/IM operations. If you like to use WM infrastructure only for storing/retreiving, just create a negative quant somewhere with the dummy material and use the positive quant to move the physical stock around.

As you have several warehouses (LGNUMs) & stock transfer in between, you need a IM stock also. You may also use a dummy material there to start the processes of receiving locally and transfer it to central whse.

If your ERP is new enough, you can switch on documentation batch in customizing (transaction OMCDB) & per material type & process step.

Then you can use one dummy material number now with several documentation batch numbers (and info text (like description of returned goods) stored in batch details). Each batch# can be created during IM goods receipt and removed during goods issue. With dis docu batch# you can track the return ...

Best regards,

Matthias

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthias,

Thanks for the info; I wasn't aware of the documentation batch functionality so that's good to know. However for this client, I think we're going to use dummy materials.

Regards,

Oliver