Characteristic 

Definition

A planning object such as a product, location, brand or region.

The master data of Demand Planning or Supply Network Planning encompasses the permitted values of the characteristics, the characteristic values. Characteristic values are discrete names or numbers . For example, the characteristic 'location' could have the values London, Delhi and New York.

Use

The characteristics used in Demand Planning are the same as those used in the SAP Business Information Warehouse. You create and edit characteristics in the Administration Workbench. For more information, see InfoObject and Creating InfoObjects: Characteristics.

SAP delivers several characteristics for use in SAP APO as Business Content. These characteristics have the prefix 9A as opposed to 0 for other BW characteristics. As SAP reserves the right to change these characteristics without notice, we strongly recommend that you do not change them.

Compared to BW characteristics there are the following restrictions for the use of characteristics in Demand Planning.

Data types DATS – Date and TIMS – Time are not permissible.

Similarly lowercase characteristic names are not permissible. (You can of course use lowercase in the description fields.

We recommend that you do not use compound characteristics.