Assortment 

Purpose

This component allows you to create merchandise assortments and assortment modules and assign articles to them. Articles can be automatically assigned directly to assortments as a result of checking rules during article maintenance or assortment maintenance functions. Alternatively, you can manually assign articles to assortment modules and then in turn assign the modules to assortments. In both cases, the system automatically generates listing conditions for each valid combination of article and assortment.

By assigning assortments to sites you control which assortments — and which articles — a store can purchase or sell. A site cannot purchase or sell an article that is not contained in one of its assortment.

When you create listing conditions, you also specify a listing period. This determines the timeframe during which sites can procure and sell the articles.

Implementation Considerations

This component is required for SAP Retail.

SAP recommends that you use the automatic listing procedures (for example, in the integrated article maintenance function) to establish listing conditions, rather than creating assortment modules or listing procedures manually in the assortment function in order to establish listing conditions. Listing articles manually or creating assortment modules manually requires significant processing time and can have a severe impact on system performance.

Integration

To create assortments, you must also configure the Merchandise Category, Article Master Data, and Site Master Data components.

In addition:

If you want to	Then you must use
Create assortment modules specifically for promotions	Promotion component
Determine whether certain wholesale customers can purchase certain articles	Customer Master Data component

Features

·        Creation of standard assortments for different sites

·        Assignment of assortments to assortment users

·        Creation of assortment modules and assignment to assortments

·        Creation of specialized or temporary assortment modules (for example, valid for rack jobbers or for the duration of a specific promotion)

·        Creation of exclusion modules (articles not allowed to be sold in certain stores) in order to prevent inadvertent listing of articles

·        Ability to assign the same assortment modules to multiple assortments (copy feature)

·        Automatic assortment correction when changes in article master data affect assortments

·        Ability to either list a generic article and thereby automatically include all variants, or list only some variants of an article (for example, separate sizes for misses’ and women’s clothing departments)

·        Choice of manual assignment of articles to assortments, or automatic assignment using predefined listing procedures

·        Ability to search for articles that are nearing the end of their valid listing periods and determine whether or not to extend the listing

·        Ability to determine whether articles delivered to a site for which they are not listed should be automatically listed (“subsequent listing”), not listed and therefore returned to the supplier, or left to the user to decide at time of goods receipt

·        Procedures for discontinuing articles (disabling them but keeping them in the database) and deleting them (removing them from the database)

·        Ability to block purchases from a specific supplier by deleting the entire assortment for that supplier.

·        Ability to associate customers with assortments when creating customer orders or deliveries by having the system check the article listings. You can have the system control whether the customers can receive only those articles in their assigned assortments, or any articles in the entire assortment, or have the checking take place through a user exit.

·        In Customizing you can specify whether you want to allow multiple assignment of assortments to sites, or restrict assignments to a 1:1 combination of site and assortment. If you enable multiple association in Customizing, general assortments can be assigned to sites and/or customers. This speeds processing time, reduces the number of listing conditions that need to be created, and affects how assortments are configured.

Once you enable multiple assignment in a productive system, you can no longer return to the 1:1 assignment restriction.

It is possible to upgrade from an older release of the ERP system and be able to use the multiple assignment function. However, this requires some additional programs to be run during implementation.

 

Constraints

This component does not:

·        Create merchandise categories. That is controlled by the Merchandise Category component.

·        Evaluate sales performance of various assortments. To do this, you would need to create an appropriate analysis in the Retail Information System using flexible planning.

See also:

Article Master