Re: [sap-log-mm] Tracking Patent Numbers in SAP Material Masters

Posted by Sap Land Tuesday, 28 February 2012 12:18

Reply from PMassey48 on Feb 28 at 3:19 PM

Mark

This really depends on your objectives and to whom you wish to communicate the patent registration detail. It also depends on the complexity of the patent/product relationships.

I have treated drawing numbers as a characteristic. It is possible to define which classes carry this characteristic. The advantage of this method is that you can search by characteristic and quickly find the products related to it. The disadvantage (and it is significant) is maintenance - the characteristics can be created externally and imported by batch, but once you have done that they become dormant. Users find it very difficult to maintain such characteristics and therefore tend not to maintain them. When there are modifications, the updates rarely get made. One of the main issues is that the users responsible for the patent base data are not key MM users and rarely understand the commercial variants that may have arisen. This route becomes more complex when there are multiple patents or design rights related to a single product.

The difficulty of using text as a solution is the search paths to find the products covered by a patent.

This would appear to be a documentation issue; the objective is to link a product to a patent number in order to give a link to a patent document.

I am sorry that I cannot give a definitive answer, but it really depends on what are the objectives behind tracking patent numbers in MM.

P Massey

---------------Original Message---------------
From: mark edwards
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 1:22 PM
Subject: Tracking Patent Numbers in SAP Material Masters

Anyone tracking patent numbers in SAP ? I'm thinking there are various ways: bill of documents, classification, batch, text fields even but these vary from the tactical (text) to overkill (classification/batch). Has anyone seen this before or have any thoughts about the most practical ways ? Much appreciated,

Mark

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