S/4HANA 2020: Automatic assignment of Storage Location MRP Area to Material Master

As you probably already know, SAP S/4HANA introduced a simplification for the storage location planning scenario and it is now a requirement to use MRP Areas if you need to plan a storage location separately or to exclude it from MRP. (if you are not aware of this simplification, check this blog)

With this simplification in place, SAP is trying to bring new features to improve the S/4HANA usability, such as the improvements in MD04 delivered in MD04 (see details here)

SAP S/4HANA 2020 brought a new feature that will simplify the master data maintenance for materials with MRP Areas. In ECC, it was possible to define a default value for the storage location MRP indicator in the customizing transaction OMIR, therefore, whenever a storage location was extended for MRP, it would be automatically excluded from MRP or planned separately.

Now, in S/4HANA 2020, it is possible to automatically assign a storage location MRP Area to a material when extending this storage location to a material, and have default values for the MRP fields in the MRP area. This feature allows a storage location to be automatically excluded from MRP or planned separately whenever it is extended for a material. So let’s check how this feature can be enabled in the system.

The first step is to create an MRP Area Profile in customizing and the following picture shows the IMG activity path to this customizing activity.

MRP Area Profile Customizing

In the MRP Area Profile we will define default values for the MRP fields under the MRP Area. These values will be used when extending the storage location assigned to the storage location to the material master, if the feature is active for the MRP Area. By setting the flag Copy Field, the value defined at the material master at plant level will be copied to the MRP Area.

MRP Area Profile

After the profile creation, we need to check the flag Assign Materials Automatically and assign the profile to the MRP Area in the MRP Area customizing (transaction OMIZ).

MRP Area Customizing

With this setting in place, whenever we extend storage location 0004 (which is the storage location assigned to the MRP Area) to a new material, it will automatically create the assignment to the MRP Area, with the field values proposed on the profile. The following figure shows the MRP Area that was automatically assigned to a material. Note that the MRP Area will be created in background, once we save the material, so we will not see when extending the storage location in MM01.

MRP Area

This feature is one more step to streamline the adoption of MRP Areas in S/4HANA and I hope you can leverage this new feature to simplify the master data maintenance in your system.