Monday Knowledge Snippet (MKS) – 92 Cylindrical Material

Today’s MKS is about an enhancement of the material master to support cylindrical objects. Before SAP Transportation Management 9.6 and S4 1809 all material was assumed to be cuboid defined by length, width and height.

Loaded Truck with kegs on a pallet

When starting to consider such a shape, it is required to define it in the material master. This is now possible under the Package Building Settings available both in the anyDB and S4 material definitions. The relevant field is product shape. By default of course all materials stay cuboid, but 3 other options exist.

Product Shape definition in material master

How is this used?

Visualization: To support the planner to better understand mixed pallets and the load plan or a resource, it is important to show him cylindrical objects correctly.

Detailed Package Building / Load Planning: So far both process steps consider such objects by their cuboid bounding box, but already know the type of the object to enable customer enhancements.

Examples:

Truck with loaded kegs

Truck with small coils on pallets

Truck with big coil

Truck with rods separated by wooden blocks

To correctly consider for example kegs in detailed package building, the product relationship profile (MKS85 and MKS88) offers options to define how they behave.