Article under which articles belonging to different merchandise categories are sold.

You may want to define a hierarchy article in, for example, the following instances:

• If you want to manage an article, say apples, by value, but at a merchandise category level higher than fruit, say at the level fruit and vegetables
• If a store has cash registers with fewer merchandise category keys than merchandise categories

Each merchandise category hierarchy can have one hierarchy article.

You can create a hierarchy article only when maintaining a merchandise category. The hierarchy article is assigned to the corresponding article category automatically. You maintain existing hierarchy articles in article maintenance.

In Customizing for Valuation and Account Assignment, you can define profiles of your own and use them to manage stocks at merchandise category hierarchy level. You do this in Profiles for Value-Based Inventory Management. Though you can configure these profiles to allow some articles to be managed differently below the merchandise categories, such exceptions are not recommended since they would cause errors in intersite business volume statistics. For this reason, they are not possible with the existing profiles in the standard R/3 System.