The SAP system provides a wide range of options for data maintenance. For example, you can make changes that are valid in the future, and make any changes to objects that have their own history and whose activation data is not in chronological order. This can lead to problems when data is transferred to POS systems, because the individual segment groups in the POS interface are always transferred in full.

If for example, a price change is transferred on Monday that is valid for the following Monday, and a change to the free goods is transferred on Tuesday (and was only entered in the system on Tuesday) that is valid for the coming Friday, the system reacts in one of three ways:

• The system overwrites the Monday change already transferred with the Friday change. As a result, the Monday change has to be transferred again, and must also take the Friday change into consideration.

• The POS system manages different prices for different dates i.e. the Monday change is not overwritten. As a result, on Monday, the price of the article is correct but the free goods is not. In this case, the Monday change has to be transferred again, and must also take the Friday change into consideration.

• The POS system merges the two changes correctly. In this case, the Monday change does not have to be transferred again. At present, most POS systems cannot run this type of mixed data.

To avoid problems of this type, take the following information into consideration.

Avoid multiple transfers:

• Data should be maintained in such a way that data is activated in chronological order. However, this only applies for the next n-1 days, with n being the lead time of the store (set in the communication profile). Outside this period, maintenance of data is not critical. For example, this procedure should be used to change sales prices in good time, that it, outside of the store lead time.

• Validity periods of an object (for example, sales prices) should not be defined indefinitely, if possible. If they are, and the object is split up at a late date, the object is reinitialized as from the initial date (however, the earliest possible date for this is the day’s date). Periods should be defined so that they follow on from one another, but do not overlap. In addition, the new validity period should start in n days or later.

As mentioned above with reference to articles, EAN/UPC references, set assignments and follow-on items, these objects are only transferred if a main EAN/UPC exists on the date of transfer. As a result, do not delete a main EAN/UPC if the article is still available for sale.

Use the following procedure to ensure that POS outbound operates correctly:

1. Use transaction VK12 to set the to-date for the condition to Today.

During the next change run, the system re-generates the relevant article master record and downloads the remaining price information in a chronological order.

2. You can delete the condition from your system only when the status of the change message has been set to OK.

If your POS systems contain more than one unit of measure for a specific article and you want to delete some of the individual units of measure (while still retaining others), you cannot simply delete the unit of measure concerned. This would result in main EAN/UPCs being missing.

Proceed as described in Deleting Conditions or carry out the following steps:

1. If the POS system is expecting an explicit deletion record, maintain a new main EAN/UPC in addition to changing the validity period for the retail price.

An implicit deletion record is created containing the old main EAN/UPC for the relevant unit of measure when a new change run is used. In addition, a new record is generated for the new main EAN/UPC. This record contains a price that is only valid until today's date.

2. You can delete the condition from your system when the status of the change message has been set to OK.

If your POS systems contain more than one unit of measure for a specific article and you want to delete all of the units, change the to-date to today's date (transaction MM42, POS view).

The system generates a deletion record for all units of measure for the article concerned in your POS systems.

When set assignments are transferred, the period for managing the higher-level set article in the store is taken into account, but the period for managing the individual components is not. You should take this into account when you create the set, by ensuring that the period for managing the set components is the same as the period for managing the set article (when you create the period for managing the set article, this is taken into account automatically). If you do not do this, it is possible that a store may receive sets with components that are not assigned to the store. These set assignments cannot be used and would remain unused in the POS system.

As a result, you can extend the period for managing components. The period should never, however, be shortened.

As is the case for sets, you can extend the period for managing a follow-on item, but you should never shorten it.

If an item is added to an existing bill of material list for a follow-on item, and the same follow-on item is also included in bills of material for other units of measure, the bills of material for these sales units are also transferred again.

To avoid this problem, you should always ensure that bills of material are created in full from the outset, so that you do not have to make subsequent additions.

POS outbound reacts automatically to price changes, which means that the objects concerned are prepared again and transferred to the POS systems.

The only exception to this is price changes for empties articles. The system does not react to this as an analysis of the relevant change pointers leads to a considerably longer runtime when the change message is prepared.

However, empties prices are changed very rarely. When they are, you must reinitialize the article master data by means of a direct request.

The text for the Remarks field is only read via text ID 0001. If a text is to be transferred to the customer, the text must be maintained with ID 0001 for the sales area. In the standard system, this corresponds to the External sales reference.