Restricting who can change a characteristic value on a configurable material on a sales order.

[former_member758466]

We have certain configurable materials which need an engineering review of the product application application before we allow a sales order to be fulfilled and processed into a production order.  In the past, we had this working, or at least thought we had it working, by having a characteristic which I will call ENG_APPR with values of "Approved" and "Not Approved".   When not approved, the material would stay yellow in the configuration and then you would have to lock it to go red due to a characteristic restriction we created while it awaited a review by somebody that could change that characteristic to Approved and make it green in the configuration on a sales order.  We did this by going into the class for this material and assign the "E" Org. Area against this ENG_APPR characteristic which would mean that only those users with the E profile assigned to their account would be able to change this characteristic value in the material configuration on the sales order line item, right?  For some reason, this seems to not be working properly anymore and while our team is investigating the issue, I would like to know what other options there are out there that I could look at for achieving this behavior within the standard SAP configuration?

[keyur_mistry1]

Joseph Whiteley,

Your requirement is to hide the characteristics called - ENG_APPR ?

Your business were using authorization object concept to change the characteristics value for the few users.

Am I right?

If yes then go through my below comments.

The best way to achieve this kind of requirement base on authorization object concept only.

If you are looking for the other alternative. You can resolve the same from many other ways too. I will guide you on few of.

1st Approach;

By default we can set this characteristics as "Not Approved" and non editable to few user.

(Create table with Cstics name - CT_USER_NAME, for list of users for whom the characteristics will be available in editable mode)

Here you have challenge to call user name in run time to call that the characteristics (CT_USER_NAME) value. You can create here one function module to call user name in run time. (Your ABAPer can do it quick for you)

- Create one procedure to call that function module and assign it in configuration profile (CU42).

Note: When requirement of characteristics editable and non editable mode is tentative, at that time better to make characteristics non editable with the help of procedure.

2nd Approach;

Create multiple configuration profile. 

- Standard Profile

- Manager Profile.

Manger profile rights allow to only selective user ID. And in Manage profile keep characteristics - ENG_APPR in editable mode where as in standard profile keep non-editable.

3rd Approach;

As you know precondition can hide the characteristics and characteristics value. Find out your trigger point and hide the characteristics value - "Approved ". If user name concept you are building for your product configuration you can do it base on User ID too.

Some of the reference link to practice on above suggestions.

Variant Functions - Variant Configuration (LO-VC) - SAP Library

Using Dependencies to Change how Characteristics are Displayed - Variant Configuration (LO-VC) - SAP...