1.) Term Batch
Materials are produced and theoretically have the same properties. Nevertheless through minimal differences in the productionprocess a certain property may change e.g. steel may have different robustness, pharmaceuticals contain a raw material coming from a different vendor,…
Or it happen on purpose (same material, just the color is different),
Or for food everything that is produced at a specific date (implies how long yopu can eat it)
In order to distinguish for one material the different “qualities” which are on stock, the term BATCH (german charge) was introduced. It is a level below of the material. The differentiating attributes/values are captured in the classification with 023.
2.) ERP
If I remember right In ERP the stock, valuation, sale and movements can be done per batch
3.) ERP-CRM
In order to allow CRM the capturing of batches the following was done:
The material/Product get a new settype comm_pr_batch, which is not visible at the ui. It contains just the name of the class from classtype 023.
The order is reading the product. When it has the settype batch, during the entering of the item the values for the attributes of the class are requested ( I am not sure, if a value help exist). The order captures the data per item.
ERP does a batch matching and delivers the correct batch.