When you have to manage a large number of stores or a large number of articles, you can reduce the effort required to maintain the large amount of data by defining requirement groups. This prevents you from having to maintain all the data for every combination of store and article.

Note that you can only use multi-step replenishment for stores.

You create requirement groups for every merchandise category. A group comprises all the sites that have the same requirements in a particular merchandise category and that therefore place the same demands on Replenishment.

You maintain requirement groups as follows:

1. You assign requirement groups to merchandise categories in the site master.
2. You list the articles for which you want to define requirement group values in all the relevant sites.
3. You maintain replenishment parameters in the article master at requirement group level (and not at site level).

If you have to change a parameter for an article for the whole requirement group, you only have to make one change. If a particular article is listed in a site, the data at requirement group level is copied to site level.

You can maintain values for specific articles at site level that differ from the requirement group values. These values are treated as exceptions and are protected from being over-written. Some data, such as the RP type, cannot be maintained at requirement group level. This data must be maintained at site level.