Service Codes & Products, also referred to as "items" or "materials" borrowing the terminology from SAP, encompass the deliverables outlined in your product catalog, along with the components sourced or produced internally that constitute the bill of materials for each deliverable. Typically, these Service Codes & Products are synchronized from SAP's material master utilizing a batch interface.

While your company might choose to solely maintain products or services within your SAP system, thereby relying on a view of the SAP material data, we typically advise copying SAP material master data, to enable local editing of proposal costing parameters. iPE includes a synchronization process that enables you to handle certain attributes—such as base unit of measure, part number, and description—in SAP, while copying and managing other attributes—such as estimating parameters—here.

Whether products and service codes are view-only or synchronized from SAP for editing, you can access the list of products and services by navigating to the "Master Data" menu and selecting the "Service Codes & Products" sub-menu (subject to your user's authorization).

In the Service Code & Product list you can:

• Add a new service code or product that is not present in SAP, by clicking on the "New" button (as shown below). Typically, you directly add products within this application, particularly for items like travel expenses (such as airfare, hotel, per diem) and other direct costs (like currency options or hedges, cost of money, escrow fees), instead of adding them to SAP. Products/services can be also added from the product selector in an estimate or from with the proposal bill of material.
• Remove a product or service code, by clicking on the Delete icon. However, keep in mind that if you delete a prod/service code that was automatically synchronized from SAP, it will be reinstated. Also you should avoid deleting a product or service code that is being used in proposal line items or material estimates. You can undelete product or service codes which you previously deleted (or undelete anyone’s if you are a system admin user).

• Sort or filter your list based on a number of fields such as base unit of measure, commodity code, contains a bill of material (BOM), description, manufacturer’s part, part number, product owner, type of item, and valuation class. The item types available represent major groupings of products or services and generally correspond to the material types in your SAP ERP system, with the inclusion of "travel items" if you estimate travel in iPE using services codes for airfares etc.

Double click on any row to open the product details.

Item types control what products are sold, purchased, made in-house, supported and so on. A representative list of item types is shown below, however Twenty5 will configure item types to match your requirements as part of the implementation of iPE.