Distributing Material Groups

Scope of Functions

You can only use this function if you use

If you use several linked R/3 systems in your company, you can now distribute the master data for material groups between different systems. This function is important as many functions require information on the assignment of materials to material groups. These functions include maintaining generic materials and variants, storing conditions on higher levels and assortment listing.

The following functions have been created bearing these requirements in mind:

Distribution of changed and newly-created material groups, including reclassifications.

Transfer of material groups from legacy systems. The legacy system may be a non-SAP retailing system or an R/3 or R/2 system.

Supplying legacy or non-SAP systems with changed and newly-created material group data.

The R/3 system uses the ALE technique for transferring and distributing data. Distribution takes place using IDocs as standardized interfaces.

Effects on System Administration

Information on changes in the assignment of a material group to a generic or single material is also distributed. In order for the system to carry out the necessary checks and document data changes consistently, the system administrator must ensure that such changes can only be performed in a single central system.

Effects on Customizing

In order to guarantee smooth distribution in the customer system, you should distribute the data via an ALE serialization.

A serialization group for distributing material groups is supplied for this purpose. It is called "GRP_W_WGRP" and contains the message types "CHRMAS", "CLSMAS" and "W_WGRP", in this order.

To ensure that the target system also posts the data in this order, you must perform ALE Customizing for serializing message types in the customer system involved.

To ensure synchronization with the independent material master distribution, you should schedule the background jobs for analyzing the daily data changes (variants of the report "RBDMIDOC") so that the change analysis of material group distribution (message type "WGRP") is only started when the job for material master distribution (message type "ARTMAS") has finished.
This increases the probability that the material master data will be transferred to the target system before the material group master data.

You should also schedule the program that posts Status 51 IDocs again to run periodically in the background in the target system.