This component allows you to create promotions in order to sell articles at lower-than-normal price. Promotions can be either for merchandise purchased at a particularly good price from a supplier or for inventory reduction.

You can create both retail promotions (for anonymous, off-the-shelf purchases) or wholesale promotions (with special pricing for known customers in your customer master data). Promotions are planned at the corporate level, with data being downloaded to various sites at the appropriate time.

• Customer master record
• Site master record (maintained the same way as for retail sites)

The exact scope of a promotion and the results you expect to achieve can be carefully planned in advance. The projected business volume - both for the promotion as a whole and for individual articles - can be planned in terms of key figures, such as purchase price, sales price, merchandise quantity, and logistic units (for example, pallets), and then compared with previous promotions.

Use this component if you want to:

• Be able to override normal prices temporarily for certain articles for a certain period of time.

• Plan and control promotions at the corporate level for various stores.

• Automate various aspects of promotion processing

• Monitor the success of a promotion real-time against the projected sales volume.

• Better evaluate and fine-tune your promotion strategy by comparing past promotions to each other and to projected sales volumes.

To create promotions, you must first configure the Article Master Data and Pricing components.

In addition:

• Ability to control the degree of store participation (mandatory quantities of merchandise per store, optional quantities, optional participation)

• Assignment of special purchasing or sales agreements to promotions

• Assignment of themes and advertising collateral to promotions

• Ability to set different validity periods and/or delivery dates for stores taking part in the promotion

• Ability to set validity periods for purchasing, sales, and deliveries, for both retail and wholesale customers.

• Announcement of upcoming promotion (optional)

• Automatic allocation of merchandise to stores (optional)

• Split valuation of promotion and normal stock (optional)

• Automatic update of sales volume and other promotion data (during POS inbound processing) while a promotion is running.

• Automatic resetting of prices back to the normal prices when a promotion ends (unless another promotion follows immediately or overlaps the first one).

• Automatic promotion determination when creating sales orders and purchase orders as well as during POS inbound processing.

• Variety of reports and analyses available for evaluating promotions.

This component does not:

• Automatically trigger markdowns on seasonal goods. Although this feature exists in SAP Retail, it is handled through the Markdown Planning component instead of through Promotion.

• Automatically trigger purchase orders when promotion stock is depleted. Replenishment planning does take promotions into account, but quantities are merely suggested by the system.