Grouping together of goods and services by characteristics, for example, ladies' fashion, office equipment, and maintenance work.

These groups are used as the basis for inventory management, planning, controlling, profitability analyses, and evaluations. You must assign each article to a merchandise category.

Other hierarchy levels (such as main groups and divisions) are possible as statistics groups above the merchandise category. Below the merchandise category, you can create one or more characteristics profiles. By assigning an article master record to a merchandise category or to a characteristics profile, the article inherits the characteristics of the higher-level merchandise categories.

Merchandise categories are stored as classes in the Classification System. You can assign characteristics to the merchandise categories and also distinguish between required or optional characteristics. When assigning a characteristic to a merchandise category, you can identify it as a variant-creating characteristic.

In merchandise category processing, you can define possible values for the characteristics of the merchandise category. For example, if the characteristic is color, you can define that the possible values are only red, white, and blue. As a result, it is not possible to choose values in article maintenance that have previously been excluded.