Material Determination use stock of discontinued material

Question

I am trying to determine if there is a way in R/3 to have a material replace an older material but as sales orders are entered take into consideration any inventory that might still remain of the discontinued material. Here is an example.
1.) We have 15 EA of Material A in inventory in Plant 123
2.) We are going to discontinue Material A and replace with Material B in this plant
3.) VB11 Condition Records are setup for the A to B substitution for order entries
4.) Order for 20 EA for Material A comes in
I would like to see a requirement tp use the 15 from A that are still inventory and then place an order for the remaining 5 on the new Matl B (from Mfg or whomever provides).
Is this possible using the condition records for material determination and the follow-up material options on MRP4 view?

Answer 1

Hi Bill,
This is possible using standard SAP functionalities.
Now considrer a situation where you are creating VB11 record for material A(to be discontiniued) which is to be substituted by material B. And the need is to deplete the available stock of material A first and then start substituting it with material B.
In order to achieve this, while creating a record in VB11 firstly create a record for replacing mat A by mat A , then double click the record line that you have created, which will pop up a small window giving you options to enter mutiple alternatives apart from mat A. where you can you can enter material B as the second alternative/replacement after mat A.
The sequence of material is important to decide which material is considered as the replacement by the system.
In our case system will first replace mat A by mat A and search for stock availability, if sufficient stock or no stock available it will replace the original mat A with the alternative material entered in the VB11 record i.e. Mat B.
Another important thing to note while creating VB11 record is a check box available as "MRP Indiciator" now this indicator plays an important role while transferring requirement to MRP.
In our case we have Mat A which is being disontinued so we dont want the requirement for mat A to be transferred to MRP incase of shortage, instead we want the requirement for material B to be transferred for MRP.
In this case you need to check the MRP indicator box for Material B. if not checked the requirement for Mat A would be transferred to MRP.
Hope this clarifies your questions.
Thanks,
Kishor