This component allows you to create promotions in order to sell articles at a price lower than the standard price. Promotions can be either for merchandise purchased at a particularly good price from a vendor or for reduction in stock.

You can create both retail promotions (for sales to anonymous consumers) or wholesale promotions (with special prices for known customers in your customer master data). Promotions are planned at company level with data being downloaded to various sites at the appropriate time.

• Customer master record
• Site master record (maintenance identical to Retail sites)

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

This application component can be used for the following purposes:

• For temporarily overwriting standard prices for certain articles for a certain period of time.

• For planning and controlling promotions at company level for various stores.

• For automating various aspects of promotion processing.

• For monitoring the success of a promotion against the planned sales quantity in real time.

• To better evaluate and fine-tune your promotion strategy by comparing past promotions with one other and with the planned sales quantities.

To create promotions, you must first configure the article master data and Retail pricing components.

You also need the following components for the following functions:

• The option to control the degree of store participation (mandatory quantities of merchandise for each store, optional quantities, optional participation).

• Assignment of special purchase or sales agreements to promotions.

• Assignment of themes and product catalogs to promotions.

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

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

• Announcement of upcoming promotions in stores (optional).

• Automatic allocation of merchandise to stores (optional).

• Split valuation of promotion and normal stock (optional).

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

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

• Automatic promotion determination when creating sales orders and purchase orders as in POS interface - inbound.

• Variety of reports and analyses available for evaluating promotions.

The following functions are not included in this component:

• Automatic triggering of markdowns on seasonal goods. Although this feature exists in SAP Retail, it is mapped by the markdown planning component and not by the promotion component.

• Automatic triggering of purchase orders when promotion stock is depleted. Replenishment planning does take promotions into account. Quantities are merely defaulted by the system.