SAP Batch Determination made easy

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Recently a colleague encountered the following problem:

His customer tracks perishable products that are bought / inventory managed / sold using the SAP functionality Batch Management (LO-BM). The products have a shelf life and therefore a “Use by/Expiration” date. His problem was that he was able to correctly update the characteristic “Expiration date” of the batch, but was not able to select batches during the delivery stage, based on the “Expiration date” – i.e batches that were still fit for use.

So here is a tutorial on how to select batches during the delivery (but it could be applied to any batch search requirement) for which the shelf life has not expired. It has to be noted that SAP covers all kinds of scenario.

- It might be company practice to ship out the door products with a minimum shelf life of X days
- It might be that a specific customer requires a product with a different, longer minimum remaining shelf life
- It might also be that products that are shipped to a specific country require a yet again different minimum shelf life

It might be that you require all three or a logical combination of all three. SAP will easily cover all those requirements and more.

This tutorial only covers the batch determination process in SD, but once you get the jist of it you should be able to apply this to any other module where that function is covered. I also assume that you have set up your system in such way that you are able to have products batch managed.

Step 1 – Standard SAP characteristics you will import

The first thing you need to do is to check that your SAP client has all the required SAP standard characteristics. To do this go to transaction CT04 and query your system to find all characteristics that are called LOBM*.

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