Creating Price Catalogs 

Use

This procedure allows you to manually trigger PRICAT messages (price catalog). This corresponds to the process: Outbound Processing of PRICAT Messages

Prerequisites

1.       You have assigned materials to one or more assortment modules, and one or more assortment modules to one or more assortments. You can also assign one or more message recipients (for example, customers) to one or more assortments. In doing so, you determine which materials are to be included in the message and which recipients are to receive the message.

2.       You have defined a requirements profile (that is, the structure and content of the message) in Customizing. Within the requirements profile you specify:

a.       A site (for site-specific material data to be included in the message). The site is also used to determine the valid units of measure for the materials.

b.       A sales order type, which affects price determination for billing.

c.       Condition types and subtotals for the pricing calculation schema, which determine how the gross purchase price, net purchase price, and consumer retail price are handled in the message.

d.       Which conditions are to be included in addition to the prices. You can enter four condition types.

e.       Up to three condition types to be used for taxes (one of the three condition types can be marked for use as the value-added tax).

f.         In order to determine bills of material, you must also enter a site and a bill of material usage.

If there is more than one bill of material, the system always selects the first alternative.

3.   In Customizing, you have defined the change management that you want to use. You have also defined whether you want to permit planned changes or not.

4.   In Customizing, you have defined which price catalog types exist and have added user-defined fields to these catalog types.

      You can extend the structure of catalogs as required using this catalog type, by assigning the required number of dictionary structures to a price catalog table.

           

            Ensure that the key fields (without the field MANDT) from the corresponding table are included at the beginning of the structures. In this way, they are assigned to the table like an append. This assignment is checked in Customizing before saving and stored in the field structure category (structure category 1 to 9).

            The tables that you can extend on an individual customer basis are:

·         PRICAT_K001: Catalog header

·         PRICAT_K002: Catalog item product groups

·         PRICAT_K003: Catalog basic data

·         PRICAT_K004: Catalog item units of measure, measurements and weights

·         PRICAT_K005: Catalog item texts

·         PRICAT_K006: Catalog item characteristics

·         PRICAT_K007: Catalog item bills of material

·         PRICAT_K008C: Catalog item price/taxes per customer

·         PRICAT_K003C: Pricing scale per customer

Procedure

1.       Call the transaction VPRICAT by choosing Logistics  ® Sales and Distribution  ® Master Data  ® Rebate Agreements  ® Catalogs  ® Pricing catalog  ® Pricing catalog maintenance.

2.       To create the price catalog, choose Pricing catalog  ® Create and enter your selection data. Enter at least the basic data and price determination information.

a.      Basic data

You assign a name to the price catalog and the validity period for the catalog. Also specify the ILN (international location number) which will then be copied into the message. You can also assign the catalog a catalog category to add the customer-defined fields to the catalog.

Enter either an assortment or a customer. By entering an assortment you determine the materials to be included in the message. If you do not enter a specific recipient the message will go to all customers assigned to the assortment. If you enter a recipient but no assortment, then the materials will be determined from all assortments assigned to the recipient.

b.      Price determination

You specify the sales organization, distribution channel, and division for which the message is to be generated. If you do not want to carry out price determination for each message recipient individually, you can specify a template to be used for customer price determination.

You can specify a date for price determination. This date can lie either within or outside the catalog validity period you defined above. You can also enter a calculation schema that differs from the standard calculation used for billing. It is possible to turn off tax and price determination entirely.

3.      Close the dialog box. The system creates the pricing catalog. Alongside each customer in the list is a pushbutton in one of the following colors:

·         Green signifies that all pricing catalog data for this customer have been copied.

·         Yellow signifies that some of the items for this customer have still to be copied.

·         Red signifies that at least one of the items in the pricing catalog is inaccurate.

You can view the error log.

4.      If warnings or error messages appear, go to the catalog from the error log. Double-click on one of the materials that show problems. This takes you straight to the material master data, where you can view the errors. Remedy the errors in the material master so that they do not appear in the next change management.

         Now you can make the following settings:

·         Sender information

You enter the currency used by the catalog plus syntax identifiers.

·         EC Management

Here you specify parameters for the automatic change management and parameters for importing planned changes. You can specify how often you want the change version program to run. You can determine whether or not price catalogs updates that are generated without errors should be automatically sent to customers, or whether they should be approved and/or post-processed first. If the box is not checked, then a workflow item is automatically sent to the person responsible for post-processing whenever price catalog updates are generated.

You define:

·         Whether or not historical data should be deleted,

·         Which valid-from date should be used (if at all), and

·         Under Catalog Change Management, in which cycle (days) change management should be run and the catalog sent.

Under Planned Changes you define how many weeks from the valid-from date planned changes should be read. This is also where you define the cycle (weeks) and on which weekdays the planned changes are determined.

·         Internet

If you plan to make your price catalog available to customers over the internet, you can choose an internet release strategy:

·         No release (no one can view it, perhaps because it is still under development),

·         Release only for known customers (for which there is a customer master record),

·         Release only for customers you have assigned to the catalog

·         Release for all customers who might want to access it.

You can also assign a customer template to the catalog.

 

Customer Information

      In the middle input area are the customer settings, where customers can maintain the partner number.

 

5.      Now carry out one of the following transactions:

a) Select Send Pricing Catalog to transfer the data to your customers. Only the open items (status “yellow”) are copied.

b) If you want to transfer a complete version of the pricing catalog, choose Send Complete Version.

Result

If the process is successful, the system creates one IDoc for each recipient.

To see the contents of the IDocs, you can use transaction WEDI and then choose IDoc ® Display IDoc.