The products or services, which encompass the items in your proposals as well as the components listed in the bill of materials, are usually synchronized from SAP’s material master or directly created within this application, particularly when they are solely utilized for proposal costing. By double-clicking on an item from the product or service list, you can access its details, which are presented across the following tabs.

• Product key information, as explained below
• Product estimating parameters
• Cost & price data
• Bill of Materials (for in-house make parts with product structure in iPE)
• Supplier sources and quota percentages
• Comments & files attached to this product
• History of changes

The KEY INFO tab has the following attributes:

1. The part or service number, typically synchronized from the SAP material number (MATNR) or external manufacturing part number (MPN) if the functionality is active in your SAP system, is represented here. Although there is no length restriction in iPE, SAP typically confines this field to 18 or 40 characters (in discrete industries). Any leading zeroes linked with numeric part codes in SAP are concealed. Unlike in SAP you can later on edit the material number if you created it incorrectly by mistake.
2. The product or service description. You can search for a product by its code or description.
3. This indicates the type or category of the product or service, representing a broad grouping of products and services. Usually, it aligns with your SAP material types, possibly with the addition of 1-2 types specific to products or services created directly in this application, such as "Travel" or "Other direct cost".
4. The commodity code or material grouping code serves to categorize and group products and services. Companies utilize this code for various purposes, such as assigning inflation or quantity adjustment curves, escalation factors, and overhead rules by commodity. It's advisable to adopt an industry-standard classification, such as NAICS or MIL-SPEC commodity codes. Collaborate with your implementation consultant to establish the list of commodity codes and, if desired, synchronize them from SAP's "material group" or "external material group".
5. The base unit of measure is the unit utilized for bill of material components, as well as the default unit for other functions such as sales and purchasing the product. If the product is managed in multiple units—such as a product planned or designed in "each" but purchased in "boxes"—click on the "Manage Other Units" link to access the unit of measure conversion popup, as described below.
6. Company – specifies the segment or business area from your company which primarily owns this product or service.
7. Profit Center – Profit center's are typically used in managerial accounting and financial reporting to evaluate the performance of different business units or segments. Revenues can be reported by profit center of the items being sold.
8. Limited to specific sites – Most products or services are defined globally i.e. can be used by all of your divisions, business areas or sites. Check this box if you want your product or service to only be visible and usable in locations where you have defined a cost/price in the COST/PRICE tab. There is also a separate option within the Planning & Estimating tab to define data separately for each site, location or SAP plant code.
9. Owner - who is responsible for this product, also called the product manager.
10. Sites – indicates that planning & estimating properties such as estimating method or pricing quantity rule and/or standard or average cost – can vary from one site to next

Engineering & Manufacturer Info

As you scroll down the KEY INFO tab you can edit more basic product or service information including:

1. Preferred Supplier - preferred suppliers can help ensure consistency in product or service quality, and might be set from a fixed vendor in SAP ERP. Preferred suppliers give preference to purchasing history for the same supplier when costing materials.
2. MPN – purchased parts can be bought from the manufacturer or from a reseller who often uses their own numbering system, or you may use a different part numbering system in your company to the manufacturer’s part number (MPN) provided by the supplier.
3. MPN Description – the MPN description provides additional information about the part or product associated with that particular MPN
4. Follow up part – a follow-up part might is a replacement item that is associated with, and replaces, the primary part. Cost history is read from the follow-up part in place of the current part.
5. Similar to part – similar to parts are typically related in terms of their specifications, features, or intended use. They may serve as alternatives or substitutes for one another, with an optional cost-ratio or complexity factors. Cost history is read from both the product and its similar-to part, with cost history for the similar to being multiplied by the complexity factor in the proposal bill of material if applicable.
6. Parametric options & features (sometimes called 'configurable assembly' or 'model/unit effective') – indicates a complex or configurable product or assembly which has various different costs, prices or bill of materials components depending on the selection of specific options, features or parametric values. For example a car might vary according to the engine size, seat cover and wheel diameter or an aircraft bill of material for estimate might vary according to the model and serial number of the aircraft.
7. Size – specifies the size of the product
8. Raw Material – specifies the raw materials feeding into the product for REACH reporting.
9. SAP ID – refers to a unique identifier assigned to materials within the SAP system. Normally the part number itself is the same so this is optional.
10.  MRP Group – normally synchronized from SAP, MRP Groups are used to control the SAP MRP run and planning behaviors for materials or products within an organization. MRP Groups can be considered as another way to group or classify products.
11. ABC Indicator – the ABC Indicator is typically derived from an ABC analysis, which categorizes items into three groups (A, B, and C) based on their relative importance or value. This too can be copied in from SAP ERP, but you can also edit the ABC classification in iPE.

Multiple Units of Measure

If you have purchase order history in various units of measure, or in a different unit of measurement to the bill of material definition, then you need to maintain unit of measurement ratios. These are normally synchronized from your SAP material master unit of measure conversion tab however it is also possible to review and edit the unit ratios manually by clicking the "Manage Other Units" link highlighted above. In the units of measure popup you can:

1. Add new units with their conversion ratios to the product's base unit of measure by clicking the + and selecting the alternative unit from the list. You can only add units with no dimension (such as box, carton, parcel etc.) or units which have a different dimension to the base unit (such as converting from a "length" like meter to "weight" like "warehouse storage mass"). You can only view not edit the conversion ratios for units of the same dimension (such as converting from meters or yards, or from kg to lb) because that is already managed by the system for you.
2. Enter the ratio between your unit and the base unit ("Box" to "Each" in this example). In the screen above 1 box contains 15 items or "each" of this product
3. If the new unit of measure is smaller than the base unit then check this box. In the screen above if 15 boxes were required to pack up a single "each" of this product then the "smaller" column would be checked. If 15 each fit in a single box then "smaller" would be unchecked.