To plan product groups as part of a planning hierarchy, you must adopt the following approach:

1. In standard SOP, create product group hierarchies, starting with top-level product groups and finishing with materials.
2. In flexible planning, create a planning hierarchy, defining the most detailed planning level as product groups or materials and their plants. These must be the product group(s) or materials of one of the planning levels in the product group hierarchies you created in step 1.



If you want to define product groups at the most detailed level, base the planning hierarchy on an information structure for which level-by-level planning is defined.

3. In flexible planning, plan a characteristic values combination from the planning hierarchy.
4. Copy this planning data from the most detailed level (that is, the product group or material level) to information structure S076 using SOP’s key figure copy function.
5. In standard SOP, aggregate and/or disaggregate the copied data up/down the product group hierarchies you created in step 1. Since you are planning information structure S076, the planning method in this step is always level-by-level.