Two-Step Listing Design

[Former Member]

I am thinking of using a two-step listing procedure as follows:

1)  Create one general assortment and assign all the stores to it. Use assortment grade at merch cat level (site master) to control listing by what my client deems store category.  This is step one in my listing procedure.

2)  Use classification data to further refine the initial listing.  There are six characteristics required.  These are held against article and site master records.  What I am trying to get is SAP to only list where the first step (assortment grade check) is satisfied, but also that the characteristic data between article and site matches.

Note that classification data will only used by exception to further refine the listing records.

Can anyone tell me if this is possible?  What will be in WLK1?  The issue I can see is that classification listing will add records with the site as the assortment ID.  General assortment listing will use the assortment ID as the key.  They are both positive listing records if that makes sense?

I'm not wedded to this approach, so if anyone can think of an alternative way of using assortment grades, with a second step to prevent certain articles going to certain sites then I'm all ears - note that exclusion modules will be too cumbersome to maintain due to the volume of data the users would have to maintain.

[Tobias_König · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

one remark from my side:

"Create one general assortment and assign all the stores to it" - no matter what the logic behind: with this setup an article is in the assortment for ALL assigned stores or not - meaning not listed for ALL stores. In WLK1, you only have the relationship between article and assortment.

If you add local assorments (which every site has by default) just be aware of the following: if an article is in the general assortment, it is valid for all stores - it does not matter, if there is an additional entry for the local assortment of any store. If you want to prevent some articles from being listed for certain stores, you also could go for "Exlusion". This is all working from a technical perspective, but it is (depending on the number of articles / sites) sometimes hard to handle for the end-user in terms of maintaining all the stuff and figuring out then, why an article is listed or not.

Regards

Tobias

[Former Member]

Thanks Tobias.  I agree that exclusion modules may be the way to go.  I don't want to lose the use of general assortments with grades as it provides a number of benefits to the business.  Maybe the answer is to have a two-step procedure using merch cat/assortment grade, followed by a user exit which checks the classification data and creates exclusion modules accordingly.  As you say, there is a data maintenance implication of manually maintaining exclusion modules that I would rather avoid. SAP could theoretically maintain the exclusion modules via a secondary user exit step inside listing.

James