Purpose
This business process allows you to maintain characteristics for merchandise categories, merchandise category hierarchy levels or other objects.
In addition to article data, the most important master data from the point of view of procurement and sales is vendor data and customer / site data. As it is particularly common in retailing for there to be a large number of articles and business partners, it is essential to group master data to reduce the amount of maintenance involved.
This process is sometimes referred to as object classification. Groups are created in the Classification System.
Characteristics play an important part in classification. A characteristic can describe any feature of an object you wish, an example being the color of a blouse. Characteristics differentiate objects and enable you to run a specific search for these objects in the system (for example, you can list all articles with the characteristic value "red").
The characteristics for each article can be assigned different values. For example, the characteristic Size may have the different values L and XL assigned to it, depending on the article.
Characteristic values are inherited from one hierarchy level to the next. The values in the superior hierarchy level can be adopted as they are in the lower level or they can be amended or enhanced, depending on how the characteristic is defined.
You can describe articles in greater detail using specific required entry fields and optional entry fields, defined by the user.
Always use data type Character string to create characteristics. If you do not use this data type, you cannot use certain functions (for example, value and quota scales).
Process Flow