Enhanced Material Search – Part 5: Major improvements in Enhancement Package 5
Blogs about the Enhanced Material Search:
- Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 1: Overview, Enrichment of Search Results with Prices and Stock Availability
- Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 2: Catalog Search for Supplier Products
- Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 3: How to further enhance the Enhanced Material Search capabilities to my business?
- Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 4: How to create new Search Criteria w/o modification
- Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 5: Major improvements in Enhancement Package 5
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In ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 2 SAP has provided the Enhanced Material Search in the Sales Order, Quotation and Inquiry (see Enhanced Material Search with Creation – Part 1: Overview, Enrichment of Search Results with Prices and Stock Availability). The Enhanced Material Search provides a great alternative to the classic material search in ERP Sales Order, offering full text search capabilities for materials and supplier catalog products (without material number), plus on-the-fly Creation of new materials.
Since then many customers have implemented it, and we received great overall feedback but also many requests how to further improve and extend this great search. We have tried to accomplish some of the requests with SAP notes and BAdIs, to allow customer specific extensions.
In Enhancement Package 5 a major update was provided. The Enhanced Material Search now supports Purchasing transactions. Usability improvements, generic features and a personalization option have been implemented as well.
SAP Enterprise Search Framework is now supported as an alternative to the Search Engine Service.
As a goodie with great value customer specific funtions keys can now be created via a BAdI to include further functions, actions, jumps to transactions, display images etc from the search results.
Customers using SAP for Retail can use the Enhanced Material Search in Seasonal Procurement transactions, have Generic article support, and can use PRICAT as a catalog management tool to create the catalog index out of PRICAT data. Several material creation and change options are offered for SAP Retail customers: Simplified Material Creation (EhP2), but now also MM41/42, PRICAT, and Core Master Data Maintenance for Articles.
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.
Best regards,
Dr. Ingo Woesner
Product Manager
Application Strategic Innovation – Multichannel
SAP AG
P.S. Please read my blog about more Sales Order Enhancements
Sales Order Enhancement Series: Overview
Terrific series on Enhanced Material Search. Very helpful to us. Thank you.
We are having a problem downloading the Infokit you provided and would like to review the material. Can you confirm that this file is ok or give us guidance to download from an alternate location.
Thanks.
thanks for the flowers - I will update the 5th article sonn with more detailed information about the new EhP5 capabilities of the Enhanced Material Search. You should also check my other BPX articles about some more sales order enhancements on Sales Order Enhancement Series: Overview
Many of them are activated and configured in a few minutes and bring a lot of value, especially the Material View.
But coming to your question: Thanks for the info. I tried from home and from the SAP network, and have faced the same issues. There have been such problems in the past - the downloads from the repository where I have saved the file is obviously not very reliable. I will try to find a better place.
In the meantime you can download the infokit with this link (valid for the next 145 days):
https://sapmats-de.sap-ag.de/download/download.cgi?id=UUERYME0KM5E8Q6RS8TQQWUANO0MIREWWSG53WFUSZR9NCVF4Q
Any questions please let me know.
Enjoy,
Ingo
We're looking at the EMS functionality in EHP5 and I have a question on the stock availability.
In the older version of EMS you could configure the stock availability for Own Site to show Unrestricted stock in the overview line for the site and then ATP stock in the detail line for the same site. In EHP5 it looks like you only have the option of showing either Unrestricted or ATP for Own Site (i.e. there isn't an overview line and a detail line for the site).
Is this correct or am I missing some configuration?
Many thanks,
Alex
yes, you are right, but as far as I remember this change wasn't introduced with EhP5 but with a correction note. However, I am not sure anymore what the reason behind was.
Best regards,
Ingo
Hi Ingo,
Great Article...makes it very clear. Thank you.
I have one query in regards to BADI_WSD_SEARCH_QUERY which you have mentioned somewhere in the series.Can we modify the query/or result based on Storage Location?
Thanks,
Chirantan
Hi Chirantan,
I'm sorry - storage location is not a parameter taking into consideration for search results. The ATP and storage information are not part of the search query.
Best regards,
Ingo
Hi Ingo
Without changing the parameters of search criteria, can we enhance the displayed results such that stock is displayed at the storage location level.
Thank you
Hemant
Hi Hemant,
I am very confident that this is possible. The search criteria retrieve (static) results, but the real time prices and ATP quantity (across all storage locations) are enriched after the search is performed. In this enrichment process you could read the individual storage location quantities and find a way to display them.
But what's definitely not possible (or only with heavy modifications) is to transfer the storage location information per line item back to the sales order.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Ingo
Hi Ingo,
Our sap system running on EHP5 version and we try to test the Enhanced Material Search. This new functionality is really interesting four our business, but before implement it we want to test it on our environment. Currently we don't have Trex on our system. Is it possible to test the functionality without Trex (we don’t have a server for that at this time). If it's possible how we can do it.
Thanks for your Help
Best regards
Silvant
Hi Silvant,
I'm sure you will love the Enhanced Material Search.
A TREX is mandatory, no way without.
For test purposes you can install it on the same machine as the ERP. For productive systems this is of course not recommended.
Don't forget the other sales order enhancements, which are implemented all together in less than a day (without Advanced Returns Management), see
http://scn.sap.com/community/erp/sd/blog/2009/02/22/sales-order-enhancement-series-overview
Best regards,
Ingo
Hi Ingo,
Thankyou for this series, I wish you well in your new projects.
If you are still monitoring this blog, a question.
I have included the Material Storage Location Table MARD and Storage Location Field LGORT_D into the TREX Index, and have also mapped the field into the results.
The results correctly selects the material and plant, but always returns a row for each storage location maintained for that material and plant combination, not just the one entered in the search parameter.
You can see this behaviour in IF_BADI_WSD_MATERIAL_SEARCH~MAP_SEARCH_RESULT.
I have followed the guide and SAP Notes, and cannot understand how to just show the row for the Storage Location selected.
Thanks,
Tim
Hi Ingo,
Great Article. I have a prospect who desperately needs this functionality.
Question, the purchase price only seems to show up based on "own" plant. Can this be configured to show the purchase or moving average price at several locations? They might choose the location copied to the SO based on purchase price (affected by commodity prices)
Thanks,
Bill
Hi Bill,
The purchase price is read from the Purchasing Info Record and
not calculated.
In case you need a different price calculation you should add a
new column to the search results and fill it with the desired calculated value.
This is described in general here:
Search Result list - SAP Notes
1228244 – BAdI to modify result attributes (change/remove/add result attributes
from the result grid, e.g. remove purchasing price from the list)
1280951 - Material Search: Display of customer fields in result list
1278108 - Material Search: Display of customer fields in result list
Best regards,
Ingo
Ingo, Thanks for your help in advance. Is it possible in Enhanced Material Search to create material storage location view? If not, is there anyway for us to enhance the function using some BAdi to achieve this? I saw you mentioned the following on your Part 3, can you please confirm there is no standard config to make this happen? Just so we do not reinvent the wheel.
Material Creation
1161441 - Extension of field set for material creation
1117038 - Enhancement of BAdI BADI_WSD_MATERIAL_STRUCTURE (to influence the material creation process, e.g. to create the dispo view etc.)
Hi Harry,
I am no developer, but the BAdI in note 1117038 was created for such purposes. Please check.
Best regards,
Ingo
Hello Ingo,
I have another little question about the EMS (Enhanced Material Search). We want to implement a new functionality, for which we need the order no (VBAK-VBELN) resp. the handle no (VBAK-HANDLE) within the EMS to uniquely identify the current user-session.
With our analysis we haven't found this data.
Is this Information available within EMS? If yes, where?
Thanks & Best regards
Richard