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VENKATESH GOLLA
November 22, 2019 6 minute read

SAP S/4HANA Article Master

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SAP S/4HANA Article Master

Hi ,

This article blog is about the Article master or Material Master life cycle. In this blog post, I have tried to explain about the
approach on how to de ne article structures in SAP S/4HANA, the cycle of material master and how to load it to SAP
S/4HANA

When I started my Material master carrier, I had struggled with the below questions.

What is Material/Article?

How many types of Materials (and relationships among them) would be there and how to di erentiate?

What is the structure in SAP S/4HANA?, etc.

Let’s start the technical part

The material master contains information on all the materials that a company procures or produces, stores, and sells. It is
the company’s central source for retrieving material-speci c data. This information is stored in the individual material
master record

In a layman language, The Article Master or Material Master is all about what a company produces and sells. To keep all the
information from product to product and its selling information along with di erent varieties available including nal
o ering price to customers/end-user.
The material master is used by all components in the SAP Logistics System. The integration of all material data in a single
database object eliminates redundant data storage. In the SAP Logistics System, the data contained in the material master
is required.

Article Category

The article type (MARA-ATTYP) determines fundamentally, how the article will be stored on the database and how it will
react. Essentially the following values are possible:

1. Single material (industry) (MARA-ATTYP initial): ‚Standard’-Materials of non-Retail systems, created for instance by
MM01.
2. Single article (MARA-ATTYP = 00): Individually created articles like standard-materials.
3. Generic article (MARA-ATTYP = 01): Generic articles do not exist physically and are not sold but do only exist as a data
reference for variants.
4. Variants (MARA-ATTYP = 02): Article of the kind of the generic article, but with special characteristic values. To the
generic article ‘shirt’ for example, one can have the variant: shirt, white, size XL’.
5. Sales Set (MARA-ATTYP = 10): A set is a combination of several articles that are bought individually and sold together,
for example, a bottle of wine together with two wine glasses. The components are been deposit in the basic data view at
the button ‘components’. Technically, a set is handled like a BOM and stored in BOM database tables. You should not
maintain a set by BOM transactions, however.
6. Prepack (MARA-ATTYP = 11): A lot is a collection of di erent articles that are bought together and sold individually, thus
more or less the opposite of a set. Shoes would be a good example: They are bought also a collection of shoes with
di erent sizes (for example one of size 39 three of size 40 … two of size 45 etc.). Prepack allocation plans are maintained
in transaction WSTN11. From a technical point of view, prepacks are also plant independent BOMs.
7. Display (MARA-ATTYP = 12): A Display is a collection of articles that are, like prepack, bought together and sold
individually, including special packaging. An example would be at Christmas time the paper gure of Santa Claus,
holding di erent types of chocolate: the manufacturer delivers the whole gure, the store sells the individual chocolates.
Again, this is technically a BOM.
8. Material group article (MARA-ATTYP = 20)
9. Hierarchy article (MARA-ATTYP = 21)
10. Group material (MARA-ATTYP = 22)
11. Material group reference article (MARA-ATTYP = 30)

Let’s talk about a few main(regularly used) material types like single, generic, variant, PIR, displays and BOMS.

Single-Article

Individually created a standard article in SAP retail systems. A single article has no variant de ning characteristics, such as;
avor, size and/or color. Single articles are not connected to any other article in standard functionalities

Generic-Article –

Generic-Articles are not real articles and cannot be sold. They serve only as a data reference for variants/varieties.
Although generic articles exist in the systems, they have no inventory management. Generic-Article can be regarded as
“parents” of the individual variant articles.
Generic Article is a special type of con gurable article that can be used for structuring and maintaining variants of an
article. Variants are articles that di er only in certain characteristics such as color, size, or avor. They grouped together as
generic articles.

In Layman language –> Generic articles do not exist physically and are not sold but exist as a data reference for variants.
Generic articles exist in systems but have no inventory management.

Variant article

Child article of the generic article, but with special characteristic values assignment, like avors. Variant articles are always
created via generics and will inherit characteristics from the generic.

Display article

A Display is a collection of articles that are like the prepack, bought together and sold individually. As components, you are
not restricted to use either single articles or variants of di erent generic articles. Within display articles, it is possible to use
articles from di erent Merchandise Categories.

Purchase info record

Serves as a source of information for Purchasing. The purchasing info record contains information on a speci c material
and a vendor supplying the material. For example, the vendor’s current pricing is stored in the info record.

Sales set

A set is a combination of several articles that are bought individually and sold together, for example, a bottle of wine
together with two wine glasses. Individual components can have a di erent price, di erent tax code but will be sold
together with one price.

Prepack

A prepack is a collection of di erent articles that are bought together and sold individually. Within prepacks you are
restricted to use only variant articles. All variant articles must be assigned to the same merchandise category.

BOM (bill of materials)

A formally structured list of the components that make up a product or assembly. The list contains the object number of
each component, together with the quantity and unit of measure.

Let’s start creating a material

Step 1:
 Go to transaction code MM41 to create a material

There you can see multiple types of material types as below

Step 2:

Select your material type, in our example, I have selected some sample material type and other details like material group,
material category, sales org, etc.

Now a screen appears for all view(w) in Tab screen.

1. Select the Basic Data1 tab.

2. Enter the material category–> Here we are creating single material, hence select ’00’
3. Enter the material group.

 
Step 3:

Once after lling the details, get into views to ll the values as below:
Step 4:

Go to sales, purchasing and other tabs as per your requirement and ll details
Sales:

and enter sales organization details as follows:

Step 5:

Once lled the required views, save it.

Let us see our created material

Transaction code:

MM43

Step 6:

Tcode MM43 shows the materials been created.

Step 7:

Select the views which were created as follows(like basic, sales, purchasing, and POS)

In this case, I have created basic, sales, purchase as well.

I am selecting only basic and purchase.

Step 8:

The Basic view would be shown as below once created.

Step 9:

DC View:
 If you want to change the material details the go to transaction code MM42 and make necessary changes and save it.

Step 10:

Change the material details with MM42 TCODE as explained above

 

In my next blog for the continuation to this material blog, i will try to put up the di erentiation between single, generic and
variants nad display with more examples.

In the next blog posts, we can discuss more on processing.

That’s all about this blog post.

Thanks for reading, please provide your feedback.

Happy Learning, see you in my next blog

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