General Requirements Grouping

You use a grouping rule to combine all the requirements that are selected for an order allocation run into individual groups. The grouping is controlled by the grouping rule of the allocation type used. The requirements of all customers are grouped according to the same criteria. You need the general requirements grouping to carry out an allocation according to the equal distribution rule.

Prerequisites

You have activated the grouping rule entered in the allocation type by setting the appropriate grouping logic to S Default Grouping Rule Only. You can do make this setting in Customizing under Logistics - General SAP Fashion Management Order Allocation Run (ARun) Online ARun Maintain ARun Types .

You must define and activate the grouping rule in the corresponding allocation type. If you want to execute an end-to-end allocation process, the general requirement grouping must be activated. The system assigns the existing stock to the requirements of the individual allocation groups. The allocation logic controls this procedure. If you have not specified a requirement grouping rule for ARun, every order is considered as a single group and allocation is then done based on FIFO (first-in-first-out) logic. If you form requirement groups, allocation can be carried out using the spread logic.

Features

Grouping Rule and Grouping Criteria
In the grouping rule, you determine which criteria the system uses to group the customer requirements. The grouping criteria correspond to individual fields of the sales order or STO. The number of groups is determined by the grouping criteria selection. This does not mean, for example, that if you select two grouping criteria, only two allocation groups will be formed. The number of groups depend on the number of characteristic values of the individual grouping criteria. For example, if you choose the field Sold-to-party, you create an individual group for each sold-to-party using the selected customer requirements. You can also determine the allocation groups by using a combination of several grouping criteria. This causes the number of created groups to increase accordingly. You can only use the group fields that you get through the match code help as grouping criteria. The system assigns the internal group numbers in a random sequence.
External Group Numbers
If you want to use individual release check rules and allocation logic for individual groups, you must flag the corresponding groups with an external group number. The external group numbers are a prerequisite for using allocation groups as sort criteria in the requirements sorting.

Individual Group Release Rules
You can use different release rules for individual allocation groups. You still control the allocation run with the used allocation type. If you want to use this function, you must assign an external group number to the requested allocation group.

External groups can be applied to specific customers (any grouping field) by providing constants.

Example

Grouping Rule	Grouping Field	External Group	Constant	Release Rule
001	KUNNUR	C1	`CUSTOMER_1`	REL1
001	KUNNUR	C2	`CUSTOMER_2`	REL2

Of all the requirements selected by ARun, the release rule REL1 is applied to only the requirements that are created by Customer_1. Similarly, REL2 is applied to only the requirements created by Customer_2.