You can create and maintain articles and materials in SAP Retail without any limitations. To do this, articles and materials must have different identification numbers. This enables you to combine functions that are only relevant for materials with those that are only relevant for articles.

1. You enter the planned future sales data for an article.
2. You pass on the planned data for the whole manufacturing process for this article to a material with a new identification number.
3. You execute the planning run for raw materials and produce the material.
4. Once you post the goods receipt for the material produced in the production warehouse, you then transfer the posting of the stock to the article.
5. You execute the retailing business processes for the article using the usual retail functions.

Sets of master data that have been entered using different maintenance transactions differ in certain respects. This is the case, for example, with certain internal tables. Generally, the following statements apply:

• Although you can use all standard R/3 functions in SAP Retail when using master data that was created using the maintenance transactions for the standard SAP system (materials), you can only use particular retail functions.

• Although you can use all Retail functions when using master data that was created using SAP Retail (articles), you can only use particular standard functions.

You can use the material master maintenance function to display but not change articles that were created using article master maintenance. This is due to the copy logic in article maintenance. The copy logic uses a different table to record which data has been maintained differently. This table is not used in material master maintenance. To prevent inconsistencies, you cannot use the material master to make any changes.

Materials that were created using material master maintenance cannot be processed using article maintenance because the master data records do not contain central additional tables necessary for retail-specific maintenance.
You can convert materials into articles as required using program RMMMMPOI. To find more information on this program, see the relevant online documentation. Please note that you cannot reverse any changes made using RMMMMPOI.