EAN Recycling in AFS

In AFS Materials, we can assign EAN’s not only at the main material level, but also at the grid value level. This uses a lot many chunk of EAN numbers allowed for the materials. AFS provides a wonderful functionality to re-use the not-used EAN numbers by recycling the EAN numbers.

EANs for recycling comes from two sources

• EANs from archived materials.
• EANs lost due to buffering

When the material master is deleted and archived, the archiving program deletes all the entries of the material master data tables including EAN tables. During this process “To-Be-Recycled EAN” table is also updated with the EAN numbers from these materials. This are recovered EANs which can be used by the Recycling Program. 

The Recycling Program checks the business data of the selected materials. If all the documents are complete, the EANs are moved to recycled table when their retention period is reached.

The Online standard transaction (MM01/MM02), Material Master Mass Maintenance, accesses the number range specified for the EAN category. If the interval maximum has been reached, the “EAN/UPC recycled” table is then read to get the EAN/UPC codes. When assigned, the EAN/UPC code is deleted from the “EAN/UPC recycled” table.

EAN/UPC codes that were never used (Buffering…etc) will also be added to the “recycled” table, which facilitates in using these missed EAN numbers.

Archiving is mandatory for recycling unless the customer decides otherwise.