Settlement rule & Material Ledger in a different Base Unit of Measurement

Hello SAP Gurus,

I bring you a kind of complex situation that we are currently facing in a new SAP implementation and, hopefully, you guys you be able to provide me some guidance.

Our business is manufactures units panels, where each particular SKU has exactly the same dimensions among the different units. The units are stored in pallets with certain piece count. We’ve been struggling between Operations and Controlling in order to understand what should be the most appropriate Base Unit of Measure for our Finished Products. Operations (including myself) supports Pieces (more healthy from a production and logistics standpoint) and Controlling supports Cubic Meters (more accurate from a product costing perspective).

During the production process, we have besides the header material, also some co-products with different measurements. Example:

The settlement rule of this production order will split the costs into both materials based on the quantity in Pieces:

Besides, it will happen the same with the price variances during the Material Ledger execution.

Thinking on the other side, if we work with M3 as BUM, no issues are found on the Product Costing side, however, we may face some logistics issues with inaccurate conversions, once the stocks are moved (purchased, consumed, manufactured, sold) in Pieces.

According to SAP definition, my understanding is that working with Pieces is the best solution, based on this: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_470/helpdata/en/ff/515f4349d811d182b80000e829fbfe/frameset.htm

Based on this briefing, I have the following questions:

1. From your perspective, what is the correct Base Unit of Measure according to the characteristics of this business?
2. Is there any way to split costs during the order settlement and Material Ledger, considering an alternate unit of measure?

I really appreciate your help on that.

Diego Tuleski