Information about purchased and manufactured items must be prepared before you maintain the items' standard costs in a manufacturing environment. For example, the cost groups that are assigned to purchased components provide the basis for segmenting the calculated costs of manufactured items, and the BOM calculation group that is assigned to items defines the applicable warning messages that are generated by BOM calculations.

A manufacturing environment that uses routing information requires additional preparation steps in order to maintain standard costs. For example, additional information must be defined for cost categories that are assigned to work centers and routing operations.