Price phases are not in effect until you activate them. You can choose to activate some articles and not others, or only some price phases for a given article. You can also activate prices either at the store level or the distribution channel level.

When you click the Activate button, a different screen appears. You can select articles for which you want to activate prices and a starting date for the price phases. If you do not enter a date, the system assumes you want to use today’s date as the starting date and will schedule the various price phases accordingly. When you execute the program, the system displays a list of the articles that it was able to activate successfully. Any article that it was unable to activate will be highlighted in red.

You cannot have overlapping markdown validity dates for the same article in the same site. (You might attempt to do this accidentally if an article is assigned to two or more merchandise categories and you are creating different markdown plans for each one.) Since a price is set for each article based on a specific time period, overlapping markdown validity dates would mean that the same article had two different prices at the same time. The system will not permit this, and will generate an error message.

Once the plan has started, the system will automatically update the actual revenues as time passes. Planned and actual statistics for each article are displayed on the same screen: current sales revenue, number of weeks-on-hand, current inventory and value, amount of open purchase orders, etc. By analyzing the constantly updated statistics, you can decide whether you need to modify any part of the markdown plan. You can make modifications at any time, even adding or deleting price phases, as long as the price phase you are changing is neither in the past nor yet activated.

You can use report RWMFA200 to activate markdown price phases in the background.