SAP Virtual material (PHANTOM)

Virtual material means that from the technical level or in the design drawings, there may be modified materials, but in the actual production process, the material may not be formed, or the formation of the material is only a moment, the production will not stop at the moment of the formation of the material, but continue to move forward, the material in an instant or finally formed another material. Sometimes virtual materials are also used to represent a group of materials, such as the establishment of a material called "unit general assembly". A variety of products will include the "unit general assembly". The material refers to the five small parts that will be contained in a certain type of mechanical product. These five small parts are not actually assembled together, and multiple product BOM will use the "unit general assembly". The material refers to a certain five parts. The five parts are not actually assembled together.

In a simple summary, there are two functions of virtual materials:

One is to optimize BOM and simplify the operation: when most of the assembly parts of several products are the same, but some of the key parts have changed, we can also take PHANTOM as a collection of the same common parts, so it will reduce a lot of work when creating BOM. The most typical example is lamps. When the same lamp is shipped to different countries, it may just be different from the plug, and the others are exactly the same. At this time, we can make the parts under the finished product into plugs, fire bulls and PHANTOM pieces. All other assembly materials are included under the PHANTOM parts.

The second is to clearly express the processing technology and product structure of the product: the general assembly process is an assembly line operation, and we know that the BOM is usually one layer at this time. But if the assembly process of the product is very complex, the single-layer BOM looks difficult to see who should be assembled with whom. But if it is divided into multiple layers, it will become a semi-finished product, and a series of actions such as work order, storage and delivery of materials should be done, which is why it has the function of PHANTOM. It can not only see the assembly structure of the product, but also save the trouble of semi-finished products.

You can set this option in the material master data and BOM respectively:

Master data Settin

Virtual items are set up in BOM

Https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Q8H92ASW8YiLnP-2DNzCsw