Article Discontinuation Using the Discontinuation Workbench 

Use

You can use this business process to exclude articles from your assortment as of a certain date, for example, if you no longer sell certain articles or if they can no longer be delivered. Discontinuation is particularly important in the fashion industry, whose seasonal nature means that you often have to discontinue large numbers of articles within a short period of time.

The following discontinuation types are available in the Discontinuation Workbench:

·        Client-wide discontinuation of articles

The article must not be procured from within or outside the company, and can no longer be sold.

You use client-wide article discontinuation to archive articles and delete them from the database.

·        Article discontinuation for vendors

The article cannnot be procured from certain vendors for any sites in the company.

You can also use this form of discontinuation to discontinue articles for vendors and sites. In this case, an article must no longer be procured from certain vendors for certain sites in a company.

·        Article discontinuation for sites

The article must no longer be procured for certain sites, within or outside the company, nor be sold in the sites.

The system flags discontinued articles for deletion. As a result, certain functions can no longer be used for these articles.

For more information about archiving and deleting articles from the database, see the CA – Archiving Application Data component under Archiving Material Master Records (LO-MD-MM).

Prerequisites

In Customizing for article discontinuation, you have defined follow-on actions and assigned them to error messages.

For more information, see the Implementation Guide (IMG) under Logistics - General ® Article Master ® Retail-Specific Settings ® Settings for Article Discontinuation.

Process Flow

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       1.      To create a worklist for discontinuation, define the discontinuation type, and enter selection criteria and the processing type.

       2.      The system creates a worklist, carries out discontinuation checks and, if necessary, performs automatic follow-on actions.

       3.      Depending on your settings, the system displays the worklist in the Discontinuation Monitor or saves it to be processed at a later date.

For more information, see Discontinuation Workbench.

       4.      Process the worklist.

       5.      Depending on your settings, the system can automatically set deletion flags for articles that have been checked and found to be correct. Otherwise, you set the deletion flags manually.

For more information, see Discontinuation Monitor.

       6.      You can archive articles that you have discontinued for all clients and physically remove them from the database.

For more information, see Archiving Material Master Records (LO-MD-MM).

       7.      In the Discontinuation Monitor, you can delete the worklists that you no longer require. The system does not reorganize the worklists automatically.