Simply create an additional MDT “virtual” in your IBP modeling. Even better, with the recent and very good “Manage Master Data” application, you don’t need to link up this complementary MDT with your many planning areas. You only need to create and activate it, and this is it. You can browse your master data in Fiori, not in a Master Data Excel workbook. The second option is only possible if you introduce these MDT in your planning areas. No issue, from the Fiori apps there is also an export feature to Excel.

What are these Virtual MDT? In fact, this a feature quite similar to a SQL Inner Join feature, which allows you to link several individual MDT, being simple, compound or reference, and define what relates them. For instance, in PSH you wish to have product information as well, not only the product ID. To do so you create a new MDT of the type “virtual”, select the PSH and Product MDT and define Product ID from PSH links with the Product ID in Product MDT. Then you also add in this virtual MDT any other fields from your source MDT that make sense to use like material type, category, etc. You are not limited to only two source MDT.

See the below example, where I have created a Virtual MTD that links PSH, PSI, PSR, Product Header, Product Item, Location, Resource and Resource-Location.

MDT are connected with Join Conditions as you can see here:

Finally, because I only want some of the source fields (attributes), I defined in this virtual MDT only those fields that make sense. See below.

This is an extended example, which took me one hour to set. I also created two reference MDT of the initial Product MDT, here Product Header and Product Item to differentiate the product from the PSH as the output, from products as components from the PSI.

Finally, this setting does not consume any memory. Reference MDT do not consume memory, neither do Virtual MDT.

With this concept it is easy for us to analyze master data, crossing data between MDT and detecting either inconsistencies or useless ones.

Enjoy IBP!