Merchandise Category: Distribution 

Use

If you have several linked SAP systems in your company, you can use this function to distribute the merchandise category master data among them. This is particularly important as many functions require information on the assignment of articles to merchandise categories.  These functions include maintaining generic articles and variants, saving conditions on higher levels and assortment listing.

Integration

This function uses the ALE technique to transfer and distribute data. Distribution takes place using IDocs as standardized interfaces.

Prerequisites

Merchandise categories can only be distributed if they were created using SAP Retail.

Features

·        Distribution of changed and newly-created merchandise categories including reclassifications.

·        Transferring merchandise categories from legacy systems. The legacy system can be a non-SAP system, or a standard system.

·        Supplying legacy or non-SAP system with changed and newly-created merchandise category data

The following tables are distributed:

Table	Contents
T023	Merchandise category master data
T023T	Merchandise category texts
T023S	Possible hierarchy articles for a merchandise category and reference to the relevant internal class number (KLAH-CLINT) of the assigned hierarchy level

Information on changes in the assignment of a merchandise category to an article or a generic article is also distributed. In order for the necessary checks and changes to document data to be carried out consistently, your system administrator needs to ensure that such changes can only be made in a single central system.

Activities

You should use an ALE serialization to distribute the data. This will ensure smooth distribution in the customer system. SAP supplies a serialization group for distributing merchandise categories for this purpose. This group is called GRP_W_WGRP and contains the message types CHRMAS, CLSMAS and W_WGRP in this order.

Make the necessary Customizing settings in the customer system involved to ensure that the target system posts the data in the same order.  These settings include those made in ALE Customizing for serializing message types.

To ensure synchronization with the independent article master distribution, you should schedule the background jobs for analyzing daily changes to the data (variants of the report RBDMIDOC) so that the change analysis for merchandise category distribution (message type W_WGRP) does not start until the analysis for article master distribution (message type ARTMAS) has finished.
In this way, you can make sure that the article master data enters the target system before the merchandise category master data.

You should also schedule the program that posts IDocs in status 51 again to run periodically in the background.