29-08-2014, 10:34 AM
Materials Management module in SAP consists of several components and sub components. The most prominent and widely used are Master Data, Purchasing and Inventory.All of these components have their sub components that are essential in specific business processes, and all of the processes, and all of the processes are executed by using transactions.Transactions in SAP mean processing of certain information in order to complete business process requirement. For example, if you have purchased 10 pieces of litter buckets, you can perform particular transaction code (t-code) that will reflect those changes in SAP. Most of the business processes involve multiple SAP transactions to be accomplished and are spread over one, two or more modules.
Material in SAP is a logical representation of certain goods or service that is an object of production, sales, purchasing, inventory management etc. It can be a car, a car part, gasoline, transportation service or consulting service, for example.
All the information for all materials on their potential use and characteristics in SAP are called material master. This is considered to be the most important master data in SAP (there are also customer master data, vendor master data, conditions/pricing master data etc), and all the processing of the materials are influenced by material master. That is why it’s crucial to have a precise and well maintained material master. In order to be confident in your actions you need to understand material master views and its implications on processes in other modules, business transactions and a few more helpful information like tables that store material master data, transactions for mass material maintenance (for charging certain characteristics for a large number of materials at once).