Master data concepts for articles

Planning and Procurement

Inventory Management

ATP or Re-Scheduling and Allocation Run

Flexible data processing: The solution supports companies to handle accurate end-to-end flow of material across all relevant procurement applications. It also enables data processing based on the characteristic values such as style, color, size, and season, and other flexible segmentation characteristics such as seasons, sales channels, and so on.

Segmentation: The solution allows you to categorize materials or articles based on their physical and logical characteristics. For example, color and size are physical characteristics of a fashion article, quality and country of origin are logical characteristics of a fashion article. Requirement segment is important in sales, for example in sales orders and planned independent requirements. Stock segments are used for the logical distribution of the existing physical stock and the future receipts or procurement proposals, such as purchase requisitions.

Multichannel planning: You can forecast future demand and procure supplies for multiple sales channels. You can also manage the demand of different channels separately, for example retail, wholesale, e-commerce, or franchise, according to the channel-specific processes. MRP on HANA now supports materials (articles in Retail) with segmentation. For materials with segmentation, the system executes the MRP processes based on the rules defined in the segmentation strategy. MRP run happens at the variant level of the generic article. As a result, separate documents (purchase requisitions) are created for each of the variant belonging to the same generic article to fulfill the open requirements at variant level. And the planner or user must spend lot of time checking or going through multiple documents for variants belonging to the same generic article. You can enable grouping of purchase requisition functionality, and during the MRP run the system groups the variants belonging to same generic article into a single document based on the certain criteria.

ATP with segmentation: With advanced methods of requirement segmentation and availability check, you can ensure that high priority channels receive their planned quantities even if their demand is delayed.

Season management: You can define the production of fashion wear according to the season for which it is manufactured. Summer and winter are few examples of seasons. In the fashion industry, a season belongs to a season year and have collections associated with it. The collections in turn have themes associated with them. You can define a validity period for every season. The seasons assigned to the articles are used or determined in both the sales and the purchasing documents. These seasons can then be transferred to the follow-on documents such as, outbound or inbound delivery and billing document.

Characteristic value conversion: You can represent the value of few characteristics of a fashion article on different scales for different countries or region. Apart from defining base characteristic values, the feature allows you to define characteristic values in different country scales. You can maintain characteristic conversion type controls which can be country or region-specific identifiers. You can define the characteristic conversion IDs for an article, customer or vendor, and a user parameter.

Value added services (VAS): You can request for special labels, packing according to certain criteria, or other special services for their goods. Depending on the service requested, additional articles or additional personnel/labour or special skills are required. These services increase the value of the finished goods, which are being delivered. You can handle these services including the costs through value added services in the fashion industry. You can assign the information related to different services using conditions. Later, the services are determined in the application documents (sales order, stock transport order, purchase order). During the special business processes in sales, such as Third Party Order (TPO) and Purchase-to-Order (PTO), the VAS information is copied to the purchasing documents from the sales documents and you cannot change the values in the purchasing documents.

Order allocation run: The unique situation in the fashion industry necessitates an optimized assignment of existing stock to open requirements (sales orders and stock transport orders). For example, the allocation run ensures an assignment of the available stock to the open requirements according to your business requirements when there is a shortage of stock. The allocation run creates a fixed assignment between the requirement records, physical stock (batch managed or non-batch managed) and future receipts. You can only manually undo this assignment. The allocation run is a process based on rules. You can use the settings to sort the stock or requirements, release the allocation to decide when each individual requirement should be processed and the priority.