Occasionally you may decide to stop carrying an article, either because the vendor no longer carries it, there are cheaper alternatives, the article is outdated, or for some other reason.

You can remove an article by either deleting the listing conditions or discontinuing the article.

When the assignment of an article to an assortment is deleted, only the listing conditions for it are deleted. The article master record still exists and inventory may exist, but you can no longer order the article (you may be able to sell it, however).

When the listing conditions expire (that is, when the valid-to date is reached), you can choose to extend the listing window, if necessary. Seasonal merchandise, such as Christmas toys, may go through automatic cycles of activation and deactivation.

Deletion of the article’s listing conditions can also be done manually. To reverse this, you would have to create the listing conditions all over again.

Discontinuation has greater implications than mere deletion of listing conditions. Discontinuation removes the article master record from the database, along with all data for that article, including the purchasing and listing conditions.

First the logical deletion takes place: the article is still in the system, but for all intents and purposes it is unavailable to users. The physical removal of the data takes place only after a specified interval of time (e.g., 1 year) after the procedure is completed, for safety’s sake. (This time interval is set for each article type in Customizing.) Because this is such a severe action, you should only do this if you are very sure that you wish to discontinue the article across the board (for example, if the article is no longer available from any vendor or if the manufacturer has stopped making the it).

Usually discontinuation takes place in several steps:

1. Discontinuing purchasing

The article can no longer be procured from certain vendors, but can still be sold in your stores. You can further limit the restriction to one site, so that one store is not able to order from this vendor but another store still can. The purchasing discontinuation affects only the purchasing info records, not the listing conditions.

2. Discontinuing sales

Remove the article from one, several, or all assortments (for stores, distribution centers, catalogs, and so on).

3. Discontinuing articles client-wide

There are two alternatives for carrying out discontinuation check routines:

• Simplified check routine

• Full check routine

On the Article Discontinuation Screen you can select which of these check routines you wish to use.

In general, you use this routine as your first choice, since lets you perform all (or a subset) of the discontinuation checks at one time. It is much easier and faster, provided no errors are found. However, you can only use it when discontinuing sales or discontinuing articles client-wide (steps 2 and 3 of discontinuation, as described above).

The check routine has several components, and you can choose which components you wish to run.

You can have the system check the following:

• Purchasing records (for example, open purchase orders)

• Current inventory

• Sales documents (for example, open sales orders)

You can also specify that if the above checks do not return any errors, the following actions are then to be carried out immediately:

• Delete listing conditions

• Set deletion indicators

You can also have the system display a list of the results. This lets you:

• Verify that the deletions were correctly carried out for articles which had no errors

• See a list of those articles which had errors. For these you will need to carry out a full check routine as described below.

In general, you use this routine:

• When you are discontinuing purchasing (step 1 of discontinuation, as described above), since you cannot use the simplified routine.

• After you have the simplified check routine and it has detected errors.

If you attempt to discontinue an article for which inventory or open purchase orders still exist, or for which a promotion is planned, the system generates one or more error messages (since more than one such problem may exist). The Workflow module routes the errors to the people responsible for resolving such problems. In some cases, the system also suggests a way to deal successfully with the problem; existing inventory, for example, can be reclassified as value-only articles at the merchandise category level. The user can either accept the system-suggested workaround or deal with the problem in some other way. Once the problems are resolved, the discontinuation process resumes automatically.

The archiving tool will cause the article to be physically deleted from the system after a specific period of time (depending on the article type).