Use transaction W10T to call the special initial menu for the retailing system.

Choose  Logistics Retailing Master Data Article Data Price Catalog Inbound Processing Data Transfer Select and Edit Price Catalog .

In group box Restrictions, select a Profile.

Select catalog items for processing from the worklist.

To go to price catalog maintenance, choose  Selection Edit or (Link to Price Catalog Maintenance).

Select the work items to be converted.

Choose (Convert Single Article to Variant). Only the relevant working lines, which contain a new single article that is not blocked by the purchasing list, are transferred.

Select the Merchandise Category radio button.

Enter a merchandise category.

Select a Characteristics Profile, if characteristics profiles are assigned to the selected merchandise category.

Confirm by pressing ENTER: In screen area Assign Characteristic Values to New Variants, you see a column for the characteristic value and a column for the characteristic value description, for each variant-creating characteristic that is assigned to the merchandise category/characteristics profile (the variant-creating characteristics can be associated with the merchandise category or a characteristics profile). Up to four variant-creating characteristics are supported. Each GTIN stands for one new variant.

Enter the various characteristic values (variants need to have values assigned to all of their characteristics so that they can be converted). You can also drag and drop characteristic values from the characteristic value list (right side) to the relevant variant line.

In screen area Assign Characteristic Values to New Variants, you can use the toolbar button (Change Layout…) to show additional columns that display more data about the future variants. This helps you to decide which variants should receive which characteristic values, if the article short description of the variant does not give enough information. The layout change cannot be saved permanently, because this conflicts with the dynamic addition of characteristics columns (depending on the selected merchandise category/characteristics profile).

If the required characteristic values do not yet exist, they can be created on-demand by using the pushbutton (Create New Characteristic Value). To do this, you need to select the affected characteristics column or a cell within the relevant characteristics column. You then jump to characteristic value maintenance (transaction CT04 or WRFCHVAL - depending on whether the characteristic uses the old or new characteristic value storage).

The consistency check for the entered characteristic values can be triggered by using the pushbutton (Check Entries). Lines with errors are selected correspondingly. The following errors can occur:

Identical characteristic value combinations are used for different variants

Not all characteristic value columns for a variant have a characteristic value

If none of the characteristics columns for a potential variant has a characteristic value, this variant is ignored in the conversion. No error message appears.

You can edit the article short description for the new generic article in screen area Descriptions of Generic Article. You can select the language by using the language key or language description. You can also hide one of the two language selection columns if necessary, and save this permanently as a layout. You can create article short descriptions in additional languages, or delete them for languages that are not required. You do this by using (Insert Row) or (Delete Row).

If the merchandise category does not have a suitable characteristics profile, you can use pushbutton (Create Characteristics Profile) to create a new characteristics profile as required, and pushbutton (Change Merchandise Category) to assign it to the merchandise category.

Once you have entered the article short descriptions of the generic article, and the relevant characteristic values for the variants to be converted, the conversion can be completed by using pushbutton (Confirm). You then leave article processing.

You can use pushbutton (Save) to save the executed conversion in the database, in the PRICAT tables. Alternatively, you can use pushbutton (Create/Change Article - Immediately) to directly trigger the creation of article master data for the converted variants; in this case, the converted data is also saved in the PRICAT tables first.