Bill of Material for Empties

Definition
The bill of material for empties (or empties BOM, category 7 in SAP Beverage) defines the
assignment between full product and empties. The empties BOM is a special form of the bill of
material.

Properties of empties BOM category 7:

• It is independent of the sales BOM.

• It is also called a group BOM, as it is plant-independent.

• It contains alternate units of measure in the BOM header of the full product (different
BOMs for pallets and crates, for example).
• It is integrated in purchasing, inventory management, physical inventory, and logistics
invoice verification (automatic BOM explosion).
• In empties BOM category 7, the empties remain an independent material (and therefore
have their own info records, condition techniques, evaluations, inventory management,
account assignment, and so on).
• The evaluation of vendor deposits is performed using separate info structures.
• Empties can be treated as a valuated (current assets) or nonvaluated (fixed assets)
material.

• It provides an overview of the stocks of tied and untied empties at plant and storage
location level.

The empties management uses two different types of bills of material:

Type 5 (SD BOM)

This type of bill of material is part of standard SAP R/3. The BOM type is used in
SAP SD exclusively.

Type 7 (Empties Bill of material)

We recommend: Work with the bill of material type 7 of SAP Beverage in empties
management in order to fully use the component. Using this type of bill of
material guarantees that the data is generally transferred from SAP MM to SAP
SD.

Structure
The BOM components represent a supplement to the BOM header

• The BOM header represents the actual goods

• The BOM components are the assigned empties material
The bills of material for empties have a separate unit of measure in the header, in contrast to the
standard BOMs 1 (production) and 5 (sales). This means, for example, that you can manage
different bills of material for a full product in "pallets" and the same full product in "crates". You
have to define a bill of material for each unit of measure (bottle, crate, pallet, and so on) that is
used in SAP MM and SAP SD. This means the selection during order entry in SAP SD is
unnecessary.

You can only define the empties BOM as a single-level BOM. This means no further nesting is
possible within the list.

Recommendation: To avoid incorrect BOM explosion by the system, always use

identical base units of measure in a production order and the corresponding
empties BOM.

Integration
The system automatically uses BOM category 7 (empties) during order entry in SAP SD.

When you create bills of material with different usage categories, it does not
matter which ones you create first.
Please note the priorities in the sequence of BOMs in Customizing.

Example
A bill of material can group together 10 liters of beer, 1 crate (frame), and the 20 bottles it
contains.