Due to the fact that the incoming data from retailers and market research companies usually does not provide any units of measure, you can maintain a default unit of measure in Customizing. This unit is used and added during transaction data upload to define the consumer unit of measure. This consumer unit of measure is equivalent to the acoustic signal (“beep”) when the products are scanned at the POS. It does not give any information about the number of pieces or the volume/weight that was scanned.

During the upload of the retailer product master data, the consumer unit is transferred to data harmonization as a base unit of the corresponding object. Within data harmonization you have to convert the consumer unit of measure to the corresponding “known” alternative units (dimensionless, weight or volume). You manually maintain the corresponding conversion factors. The manufacturer products and the alternative unit of measures with conversion factors maintained in SAP ECC can be uploaded to data harmonization.

When assigning objects to a harmonized object in data harmonization, you can define a conversion factor. For the harmonized object you can also define alternative units (dimensionless, weight or volume) with the corresponding conversion factors from the base unit of measure.

With the help of BW extractors, all this information is pulled into the InfoObjects Internal Source Product and Product of the reporting layer. The conversion factors are extracted to the DataStore object (DSO) /DDF/DSUOM and assigned to the InfoObject Internal Source Product (/DDF/PRODUCT) with the consumer unit of measure (/DDF/CONSUNIT) as the base unit of measure. At this point in time, the conversion factors that have been maintained for the harmonized objects are inherited to the objects of /DDF/PRODUCT.

For reporting purposes, you can use of the quantity conversion DSO and its conversion factors and define corresponding quantity conversion types (using transaction RSUOM) that allow the conversion of sales or stock quantities into consumer units or other units of measure you want to report on. That way, you can easily create reports based on a certain unit (dimensionless, volume or weight) without having to calculate unit conversions. The system automatically converts the units during the execution of the query. Quantity conversion type /DSR/FUOMT serves as an example here.

Unit conversion into various dynamic target units, depending on each individual product, is supported at reporting runtime. You can use the quantity conversion types /DDF/PREF, /DDF/NVOL, and /DDF/NWT in transaction RSUOM.

The following table shows the relationship between objects in reporting and in data harmonization: