SAP Material Status

This tutorial is part of our SAP MM course and we will discuss the concept of SAP material status here. You will learn what is a material status in SAP and where to find settings for materials statuses. We will also illustrate how to create a new SAP material status.

Any business maintains their products to be sold or manufactured using material master records in SAP. These material master records are managed at the client level and also at the plant level. If a material has to be managed at the client level, then it should be controlled with the fields available in “Basic data 1” and “Basic data 2” views in material master.

SAP material status is a field in a material master record which defines the status of the material when we consider various functional areas where this material is used. For example, a material can be in “Blocked” or “Released” statuses.

SAP Material status Field in Material Master Record

SAP material status field is available in “Basic data 1” view, “Purchasing” view, “MRP 1” view, “Quality Management” view, and “Costing 1” view.

SAP enables us to configure various settings for material statuses. Here is IMG menu path to perform the configuration:

SPRO -> Logistics -> General -> Material Master -> Settings for Key Fields -> Define Material Statuses

The transaction code for this menu path is OMS4.

If we start this configuration activity, it would bring the below screen showing a view to define material Statuses.

Now, let’s check details of the material status “01 – Blocked for Procmnt/Whse”.

Both plant-specific and cross-plant settings could be maintained on this screen.

The plant-specific settings include “Purchasing”, “BOM”, “Routing/master recipe”, “Material requirements”, “Production”, “Production resources/tools”, “Plant maintenance”, “Inventory management”, “Warehouse management”, and “Cost estimate with quantity structure”.

For all these fields there are three different message settings are available, viz.,

• Blank – No message
• A – Warning message
• B – Error message

We can specify any of these three messages based on our requirements.

For example, if you look at the screenshot above, you will see that SAP material status “01” has several fields with “B” as an input, which means it is an error message. When a material is maintained with SAP material status 01, the material is blocked for purchasing, inventory management, forecasting and MRP. SAP transactions related to these areas would throw an error message indicating that a material is blocked for Procmnt/Whse.

Next, let’s have a look at the SAP material status “99 – Obsolete”.

Obsolete is a state where the material would no longer be used. Hence all fields should be maintained with an error message. If the material has to be blocked client-wise, then status 99 should be maintained in “Basic data 1” view of a material master record.

The same configuration activity can also be used for maintaining and creating other SAP material statuses. There are many SAP material statuses available in the standard SAP. We could use the available material status if it meets our requirements. Otherwise, a new SAP material status could be created by copying the already existing SAP material status. The newly created status should start with Z, to differentiate between standard SAP and the customized ones.

For instance, let’s imagine that we would like to create a new SAP material status similar to the standard status “01”, but with few modifications. In this case, “01” status should be copied and a new one with name “Z1” should be created.

To do this, select “01” line which should serve as a source, then click on “Copy as…” icon.

This way, we created a new material status “Z1” by copying the standard status “01”. The modification that we require is in BOM area and the fields over there are now marked with B – error message.

Hence, when a material with status “Z1” is used for any purpose that involves BOM, the system would throw an error message showing “Blocked for Pur/Whse/BOM”.

There are many standard material statuses supplied with the system. For example, when you create a material, it could be set to the status “10 – Created but not usable”. Then, when the material is required for business processes, it could be changed to “15 – Uncosted material”. When the material costing has been carried out, the status could be changed to “16 – Initial Status Go Live”. Once the project is in Go-Live stage, the material status could be changed to “30 – Released and saleable”.

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