Use of Marchendise Catagory-Characteristics

[Former Member]

Dear Gurus,

Can any one tell the usage of adding up characteristics to Merchandise category.

I just know characteristics are used for variant creating articles.

I understand that characteristics can be added to MC to generate reports based on these characteristics .If so is there any standard report ..?

Pls. help.

Prasad@indiatimes.com

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello,

In transaction WG22, you can assign characteristics to a Merchandise category (Class). When the article is created with the merchandise category, you can carry out value assignments for characteristics in Article Master basic view.

SAP provides transactions such as CL30N, CL31 to find objects in classes for the specific characteristic values.

Thanks,

Venu

[Former Member]

Dear Venu,

Thanks for your response.

I just want a clarity from you that can i generate any reports (Purchases/Sales) for my characteristics assigned to my MC.?

i have 5 characteristics all to gether for which i said that 3 will be relavant for variant generation and the other 2 i have assigned to my MC.

If iam not confusing i want to ask you the usage of assigning characteristics to MC.?

and also can you pls. let me know whether i can execute any reports on my MCH levels... if yes can you pls. guide me.

Thanks a lot in advance,

Prasad

[bjoern_panter]

Hi

in IS Retail the characteristics assigned to merchandsie ctaegories are used for article maintenance.

This is a more flexible way, as long as you have difference characteristics in your assortment.

At all you should follow this guideline:

- If you need a characteristics valid for all articles -> use a MARA append field

- if you have characteristcis to create variants -> use variant characteristics

- if you have different combinations of characteristics -> use char. profiles

- Avoid unneccessary informative characteristics

- Use char. only iin case the values are more or less fix

- If you have huge changes in values, ise checktables or the new fashion logic for colors and sizes

- season characteristcis do not make sens in all cases

Be very careful and before you setup a retail masterdata article scenarion, please ask.

Depending on your business SAP support provides a wide range of different possibilities.

It is much easier to ask instead of migrate wrong masterdata to a better and easier model.

Inf. charactersitics are very nice for fast prototyping, but not really good for high end volumes in all cases. SAP retail is very flexible and will be able to support unlimited characteristics with up to 10000 char. values. But this makes no sense in all Retail business.

Report to evaluate article based on characteristics are sometime possible. The better place to do such things is a SAP BI

There exists some search helps or the retail article list based on variant characteristcs, but e.g in fashion release, we have some special attributes in basic data screen to fullfill all possible customer requirements.

Article master is full flexible and support modification free enhancement. Unfortunatly only 1% of the customer knows how to handle it. See FAQ notes.

Good luck

[Former Member]

Thanks a lot for u r valuable answer.

So i understand that If there are many variant creating charateristics with many values i use Characteristics profile and assign this profile to an MC.

-> yes, use profiles, if there articles in the same MC use different combination of variant characteristics

Alternatively i can even assign Characteristics to MC and can say relavant to variants,

-> yes

If i assign characteristics to MC i cannot add or change values in Future.

-> yes and no, you can use profiles with different characteristics assigned to this MC.

But in case of Characteristics Profile i can create a new characteristic with my new value and can able to assign to Characteristics profile and inturn to MC in Future also.

-> depends on situation

Pls. Guide me if iam wrong...

-> I recommend to explain the situation with more detailed examples.

The biggest problem here is to find the best way.

I recommend not to use more than 2 variant creating characteristics for an article to avoid end user frustration, because it is difficult to think in x-dimensions. SAP retail can support endless axis of values, but makes this sense ?

Regards

Björn

Edited by: Björn Panter on Jun 24, 2008 11:17 PM

[Former Member]

Hi Bjoern!

Could you please take a look to this thred: http://scn.sap.com/thread/3228529 ?

It is also related to access characteristics in reports, so I can filter my searches (i.e. artcile searches) by characteristics for some standard reports.

Thank you a lot,

Manuel Nascimento