Article number is an internationally standardized number uniquely identifying a material. It always refers to a specific unit of measure or type of packaging such as a pack of ten pieces or a box.
Article number normally has 13 digits & the following structure:
* EAN prefix
This may be a country indicator, identifying the country
from which the material comes, or, in the case of instore EANs, it may
be company-specific.
*Article number
*Check digit
Material number is number uniquely identifying a material master record, and thus a material. For every material that your company uses, you must create a material master record in the material master. This record is uniquely identified by a material number.
Some consultants say that material number is part of the
article number.
What is Business Area?
Business Area is responsible for a plant is determined
as a function of the division. As a rule, a valuation area corresponds
to a plant.
What is MRP?
MRP is carried out using current and future sales figures.
The main function of material requirements planning is to guarantee material
availability, that is, it is used to procure or produce the requirement
quantities on time both for internal purposes and for sales and distribution.
This process involves the monitoring of stocks and, in
particular, the automatic creation of procurement proposals for purchasing
and production. In doing so, MRP tries to strike the best balance possible
between optimizing the service level and minimizing costs and capital lockup.
What is MPS?
A special form of MRP is master production scheduling (MPS). MPS is executed using the same principles as MRP. The aim of MPS is to reduce storage costs and to increase planning stability. This is useful in the following cases :
To ensure that there is good material availability, various floats and a safety stock are entered, which inevitably lead to high stock levels. Thus, high storage costs are incurred, especially for valuable materials.
The master plan of these materials greatly influences the entire production process: The planning of the dependent parts depends on the planning result of the finished products and main assemblies, even if the finished products represent a small share of all the materials to be planned. Frequent changes at finished product level can render the complete MRP run unstable.
