An article has several properties that are relevant for price determination and the declaration system of the recycling process. You use the article to organize all necessary information by combining it using corresponding assignments (for example, to packaging or recycling partners), regardless of the level of granularity in the assignments. Using these assignments, you can easily and transparently define articles that, for example, comprise 5 packaging items with 12 fractions that must be settled with 7 recycling partners.

To do this, you assign the relevant recycling partners and packaging to an article. Articles and recycling partners must be within the same, valid settlement period.

If multiple recycling partners are assigned to an article, you can use license fee splitting to divide the packaging settlement among the individual recycling partners, depending on the business process. An article can then be entered in a declaration using the declaration system.

REA enables you to use bills of material as input help when you create articles. Bills of material can be used to summarize and group the various components of a product. For example, consider the product “wine bottle” as a bill of material to which the various components (glass, label, wine, and so on) belong. If you also want to use the bill of material to process the packaging that belongs to a product, REA can access bills of material to model the REA article “wine bottle,” and use the material type from the bill of material to filter out the packaging and assign it as REA packaging.

The article information that is relevant for REA generally includes the base units of measure and the weight or volume. Since REA uses the material master as a basis, it does not allow you to process an article in a unit of measure that is not defined in the material master as an alternative or base unit of measure.

You can also reference existing articles (known as REA reference articles). This makes the processing of master data easier. The referencing article then assumes all or certain properties of the referenced REA article. If the referenced REA article changes, the reference articles also change.

You can use the consistency check to verify the accuracy of a large number of articles and determine possible sources of error (that is, whether certain entries in the article master record or assignments are incorrect or missing). When you save the article, the system checks the consistency of the saved data. It then issues the result of this check as an information or error message.