Outbound Processing of PRICAT Messages 

Use

You can use the EANCOM standard message PRICAT to provide your business partners (customers) with up-to-date master data and price information. To do this, you first create a price catalog in the ERP system for a specific assortment and/or partner, then send it in IDoc format to the appropriate partners.

You can also generate change versions (delta versions) manually or automatically when the data changes. For large catalogs this takes place in the background.

The system uses function module GN_INVOICE_CREATE for price determination. It performs billing for the customers and materials involved but only takes into account standard billing items.

Integration

Functions in mySAP ERP

·        Material master data maintenance

·        Customer master data maintenance

·        Price/condition maintenance

·        Assortment planning

·        IDoc creation

Functions in the external system

·        Converting the IDocs to the required EDI message format (PRICAT, ANSI X12 or to another standard, for example, XML)

Data Flow

Creating the price catalog

First you create the price catalog in the ERP system. You can further process the price catalog after it has been generated and before it is transmitted:

·        Define which customers get information about which articles. You do this by assigning materials and customers to the assortments.

·        Maintain the customer settings (for example, partner number) required to send the IDoc.

·        In the BAdIs, complete the user-defined fields that were added in Customizing.

·        Execute the Engineering Change Management selected in Customizing.

·        If the system issues error messages, correct these in the master data and perform Engineering Change Management again.

You can set Engineering Change Management to run regularly in the background.

If there are changes to the data in the price catalog, then you can have the system:

·        Automatically send the updated price catalog information to customers (assuming the system detected no errors). This is the recommended procedure.

·        Send a workflow message to the person responsible for checking/processing the price catalog data, indicating that new PRICAT messages need to be created and, if necessary, errors need to be fixed.

Generating the IDocs

 

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       1.      IDocs are created from price catalog data in the ERP system.

       2.      The IDocs are then transferred to the converter.

       3.      The converter reads the IDocs and converts them to PRICAT format.

       4.      The PRICAT files are then sent to the recipient, for example, a customer or a database. If the recipient is a database, multiple users can access the price catalog information.