Mass characteristics allow you to plan less important materials together rather than separately or not at all. In other words, you can plan all your less important materials in one big "container". If you create a product group containing all these materials and copy the mass characteristic’s planning data to it from Flexible Planning, you can then transfer the product group planning data to Demand Management (see Transfer to Demand Management).

You can add mass characteristics directly to the information structure with Master data ® Mass characteristics ® Create. The planning hierarchy is updated automatically in this process. The name of the mass characteristics depends on the masking symbol you specify on the selection screen. The key field of each mass characteristic is filled in its entire length with this symbol. You also specify the level at and below which mass characteristics are to be created in the planning hierarchy.

Creating Mass Characteristics