Blogs about the Enhanced Material Search:
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One of the key issues in wholesale distribution and other trading industries is efficiency in sales order entry. To speed up the searching for materials the new "Enhanced Material Search with Creation" is introduced as an alternative to the F4 material search, implemented in the Standard Sales Order within SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 2.
In a series of blogs I would like to outline the fantastic new features of the Enhanced Material Search with Creation that makes sales order entry much more efficient and intuitive for sales reps and backoffice.
This first blog covers the general features of the Enhanced Material Search and the enrichment of search results with additional information from SAP ERP, like prices and stock availability for selected plants.
Full-text search using the TREX search index
The new enhanced material search is called from the Standard Sales Order and comes with an own screen. It provides a full-text google-like search for materials. Of course you can use wildcards. A fault tolerance can be switched on/off on the search screen. This is a much more intuitive way to search compared with the F4 search.
Additional specific search criteria can be used to narrow down the search results or to search in a field-specific way.
You can configure your desired search criteria from a list and influence their sequence on the screen. Also you can customize which search criteria are always visible and which can be additionally shown when individually required. This saves screen space for the search results.
The enhanced material search is based on the SAP Search Engine (TREX) which is typically installed on a small external server. The TREX search incredibly fast because the index is held completely in memory (RAM). A nice benefit: When using a TREX index instead of the F4 search you reduce the load on the SAP ERP system and gain performance for other processes.
Keyword Search
Imagine you are a new sales rep and a customer calls you and ask for an affordable water pump that is in stock. How do you start your search? Is a pump called "pump"? Usually not - typically there is a model number and maybe a vendor named in the material description, but the term "pump" does not appear.
With the new enhanced material search a keyword search is introduced that solves this common issue. The keywords are not assigned to individual materials but to material groups. So you can e.g. create a new keyword "PUMPS" and connect it to the material group(s) that hold all the pumps. After a few minutes allowing the TREX to update its index the new keyword can be used as a normal search term within the full text search. Of course you can mix "normal" search terms with keywords, e.g. "siwamatics pumps" would bring up all materials which have the term "siwamatics" in the material description fields, and which are part of the material group(s) the keyword PUMPS is assigned to.
The keywords itself can be easily created in the new (small) transaction WSD_KEYWORD. You can assign one keyword to multiple material groups. You can also use keywords for common abbreviations, e.g. to use "PBG" for all plumbing products.
Enrichment of Search Results with Prices, Stock Availability, and other ERP
OK, with the new keyword search feature you have easily found the pumps, but you still need to know which pumps are in stock and what their (customer specific) sales price is. Remember we are still in a sales order, so we know the customer, pricing conditions, and we know our plant/store and our distribution chain - so we know enough to determine stock availability and prices - let's do it!
Unlike the standard F4 material search the search results in the Enhanced Material Search are enriched with stock availability (ATP or unrestricted stock) and prices (list price, expected customer price, purchase price):
Transfer multiple search results to sales order
With this wealth of information on hand, a sales representative can quickly and easily find suitable products that are in stock and in budget. The sales rep can directly enter the order quantity for search results (even for a different plant!), mark the search result lines and transfer all marked lines to the sales order in one step.
From a sales order point of view, the sales order receives material number, order quantity and plant for each search result that is transferred. All the determinations for ATP or gATP, prices, plant/material combination checks, price calculation etc. take place in the sales order as before, without being influenced by the new Enhanced Material Search.
Where to get info material?
You can find an infokit about the Enhanced Material Search and other Sales Order Enhancements in the Sales Order Enhancement Series: Overview.
Next blogs:
Best regards,
Dr. Ingo Woesner
Product Manager
Application Strategic Innovation - Multichannel
SAP AG
P.S. The Enhanced Material Search with Creation is part of SAP ERP Core 6.0 EhP2, contained in SAP_APPL 602 in Business Function SD_01. No industry switch is required. The Enhanced Material Search is designed as a module that can be implemented in other applications as well. This must be done on project basis. Customizing is specific to the calling application. A major update and improvement was provided with Enhancement Package 5 (see my 5th blog).
P. P.S. Blogs about this and other Sales Order Enhancements are collected here: Sales Order Enhancement Series: Overview
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