Products or services, also called "items" or "materials" to borrow the term from SAP, represent the proposal line item deliverables that are in your product catalog as well as the make or buy components that make up each deliverable's bill of material. Products or services are normally synchronized from SAP's material master tables using a view and a batch interface.
While your company may elect to only maintain products or services in your SAP system, meaning that a view of the SAP material data is sufficient, we normally recommend that you copy or sync. the SAP material master data into this application to allow local editing of proposal costing parameters. This is recommended because often times the planning and execution parameters in your material master, such as the MRP settings, are not the same as quantity or pricing lot-size rules desired for cost estimating purposes. This application comes with a synchronization process allowing you to manage certain attributes such as base unit of measure, part code and description in SAP and to copy and manage other attributes, such as estimating parameters, here.
Whether products are view-only or synchronized from SAP allowing you to edit, you can view the list of products and services under the menu "Master Data" and sub-menu "Products & Services".
In the product or service list you can:
- Click on the + toolbar button to add a new product which is not in SAP. You typically add products directly in this application, and not to SAP, for things like travel expenses (e.g. airfare, hotel, per diem) and other direct costs (e.g. currency options or hedges, cost of money, escrow fees)
- Click on the x toolbar button to delete a product, recognizing that if you delete a product which was synchronized automatically from SAP it will simply come back again. Do not delete a product which is used in proposal line items
- Sort or filter your list based on a number of fields such as unit of measure, commodity code or group, part code or description, owner, item or material type and valuation class. Item type values are shown below and typically match the SAP material types with the addition of "travel item" or "proposal-specific item".
Double click on any row to open the product details.
