fernando,
Great question.
In demand planning each value stored in a key figure is decribed by a CVC characteristic value combination. This is a set of "characteristics" that completely describe the values in the key figures. They would be things like product, customer, plant,sales office, ect. The characteristics act very much like filters do in excel. They allow you to summarize the data in many different ways. This is a concept call multidimenionality.
A feature of Charteristics in demand planning is that once they are created with the transaction /n/sapapo/mc62 they remain the same unless modified with realignment.
Attributes are descriptive valuues associated with a characteristic that help to more completely describe that charateristic. As an example: If the characteristic was social security number one of the values of that characteristic would be your social security number. The characteristic social security number could have many different attribues that would more completely describe you as an indivicual (IE age, eye color, address). One of the nice features about attributes is that they can be changed with out the use of realignment. So for eample if you moved and address was an attibute you could change your address without changing any characteristics in realingment.
Techically in DP characterisits are stored as a part of a CVC in the Planning object stuture of your planning area. and Attributes are stored as a part of the master data table of the infobject of the characteristic.
In actual use in a demand planning planning area interactive planning attributes and characteristics appear to the user the same.
Some people say that you have a performance hit using attributes. I have never been able to measure that difference in practice.
Attributes certainly allow you to simplyfy your planning object stucuture and are an essential tool in DP.
George
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.