Enhancements to department/shop maintenance

No prerequisites

Enhanced storage levels for transportation chain and staging time

SAP recommends that you use the migration report for transportation chain and staging time to copy the data from the general vendor master data to the purchasing vendor master data and purchasing info record data for existing vendors. For more details, see the report documentation.

You can start the report with transaction WRF_TCHAIN_MIGR or using the SAP Easy Access menu as follows:

Enhanced maintenance of substitution article assignments

When you activate this business function, the existing IMG activity Maintain Follow-Up Categories shows a new Control Type column, which you can use for new or existing follow-up type numbers:

SAP Implementation Guide (IMG):  Logistics General Article Master Retail-Specific Settings Settings for Follow-Up/Replacement Article Maintain Follow-Up Categories

The control type enables the enhanced functions in Master Data Maintenance and the operational processes (order, delivery, SAP F&R).

Enhancements to article hierarchy maintenance

No prerequisites

Enhancement to PRICAT maintenance

No prerequisites

Price reference articles

No prerequisites

Mass reorganization

No prerequisites

Logically deleted conditions

When you activate this business function, the existing IMG activity General control, Retail Master Data frame Deletion flag for calculation contains a new flag Deletion flag, which allows the assortment list and POS Outbound applications to consider conditions that have been flagged for deletion.

SAP Implementation Guide:  Logistics General Basic data Retail General control, Retail Master Data (Transaction WSS1).

Authorization check

No prerequisites

Show the short text at the item level in the logon language (default language is English)

When you enter GDS/PRICAT maintenance, the system displays the logon language at the PRICAT position level. English is displayed if the logon language is not available.

Article text at the BOM level (logon language or English)

Article text components at the BOM level can be displayed and are shown in the logon language (default language is English)

Show the description of characteristic value in the base unit of measure and characteristics level; show description of characteristics at the characteristics level.

It is possible to show the description text for characteristic values in the price catalog transaction W_PRICAT_MAINTAIN at the position level and in the characteristics view.

When you enter the maintenance, the description text is displayed shown (for example, the description text “red” for the color characteristic rather than the characteristic value "2").

When you change the SATNR field in W_PRICAT_MAINTAIN and save this line, the system refreshes the screen so that the changed line appears with the other variants. The variant will then appear with new Generic Material Group number under the appropriate generic article.

PRICAT inbound processing – Assign additional EAN to existing article:

In ERP2005, the price catalog inbound interface supports a fixed 1-to-1 relationship between the EAN number and article number in the ERP system. With this enhancement, this relationship is generalized. The vendor can resend data for a previously sent article, using a new EAN number for this same article. In the price catalog, the corresponding PRICAT item can be flagged and the existing article number can be assigned to this PRICAT item. As a result, there is now a 1-to- n relationship between the article and the EAN number in the price catalog.

Department Store/Shop Maintenance

Storage levels for transportation chains and staging time

The storage levels for external transportation chains and their staging time were enhanced to provide more detailed data retention levels to be able to support more scenarios within the scheduling of procurement controlling.

Besides the enhancement ofthe storage levels (see documentation of business function ISR_RETAIL_PLANNING), the reference logic during the creation of master data records containing a transportation chain and a staging time has been adapted.

Finally, the access logic for finding a transportation chain with its staging time within the scheduling has been extended according to the new storage levels.

Assignment of follow-up/replacement article to original article

In order to map the SAP F& follow-up and replacement functionality, the following enhancements have been made to master data maintenance in ERP:

Enhanced article hierarchy maintenance

Retail customers use the article hierarchy to plan their assortment structure and to represent any number of hierarchical groupings of articles, particularly the CDT (consumer decision tree) as used in Category Management.

Price reference articles in the High Performance Retailing (HPR) assortment list

The HPR assortment list is not able to analyze price reference articles. A change of any price reference article could have an impact on other articles that are relevant for any assortment list message/version. Until now, such changes have not been considered for the assortment list change message. SAP now provides the ability to analyze price reference articles. The user can choose to select this analysis by activating an additional parameter in the selection screen when creating the assortment list change message. As this analysis has an impact on the performance, users should only select this option if they are using price reference articles.

Mass reorganization in POS Outbound and the assortment list area

POS Outbound and the assortment list are interfaces that often process mass data. During these and other processes, data is not only sent but also saved in the SAP system. There are some possibilities for reorganizing this data, but one precondition for proper use is a regular use of these reorganization tools. Often, users fail to reorganize and to use the existing tools for reorganization. In other cases, the applications cause a huge data volume within a small time period so that the reorganization breaks down. The result is often a critical situation, a kind of “vicious circle” where reorganization is impossible. This leads to a loss of performance as the data increases steadily, making the situation worse. For this reason, SAP now provides a standard solution to better process the mass data reorganization: an additional report that makes a “rough reorganization” before the existing tools perform the “normal” reorganization.

Consideration of conditions flagged for deletion

The pricing functionality allows you to delete conditions logically. In this case, the corresponding condition records remain in the system but they are no longer valid. Both the assortment list and the POS Outbound application ignore such logical deletions of condition records. As a result, condition changes cannot be processed in certain circumstances. The precondition is that invalid conditions are neither archived nor deleted physically by customers.In such circumstances, this could possibly lead to a loss of data/information in the subsystems. The solution to close this gap in standard impacts the performance of the applications. Therefore, SAP provides this solution for customers who use logical deletions in the pricing function, but its activation will be switchable by a global setting in Retail Customizing.

BADI enhancements for HPR assortment list: authorization check

The full version, change version and manual request of the HPR assortment list often require a direct, customer-specific option of accessing the selection data for analysis or modification purposes; for example, monitoring authorization checks. Thus, it is not possible to perform an authority check for users depending on organization data. Customers are unable to control the different assortment list programs basedon users. SAP now provides an interface in standard to implement such specific enhancements without requiring any modifications.

OAPC – Display of Assortments

The purpose of the enhancement is to restrict the number of assortments displayed within OAPC. In the previous version of OAPC, assortments within a purchasing list were selected according to their hierarchy ID, hierarchy node and assortment type. As a result, large numbers of assortments are displayed, many of which are of no use.

With the previous version of OAPC, users could choose to display only a subset from these selected assortments from the key screen. They make that choice manually, without any automatic selection from the system. The new function enables users to perform an automatic selection.

OAPC – Use of Structured Articles

With this enhancement, the OAPC transaction supports structured articles (sales sets, display) as article categories. Existing structured articles are now accessible from the existing article selection tree and in the overview screen, and users are able to insert them into a purchasing list. From the purchasing list standpoint, these structured articles will be processed the exact same way as single articles. The structured article is considered as a whole, and planning at the component level will not be possible. However, it is possible to display the derived planned quantities on the component level; they are simply calculated using the component quantity and the planned quantity at structured article level.

OAPC – Third-Party Order Processing

Previously, the purchasing list only supported the process of the delivery to the recipients via the distribution center. The requirement for direct store deliveries led to the corresponding enhancement.

Merchandise planning is executed as before, but in cases where the merchandise is to be delivered directly to the stores, the system generates a single purchase order item per receiving store.

In order to identify an item as a “direct-store-delivery-item,” there is either an indicator attached to the item itself or the process of “direct store delivery” must be initiated out of the purchasing list.

OAPC – Filtering of Purchasing List items at Characteristic Level

Previously, the filtering functionality in the purchasing list allowed you to filter the purchasing list items in the overview by setting several filter criteria (characteristic values, attribute values). But this functionality is restricted to visible values in the overview, and characteristic values that are not expanded are not taken into account.

The new development extends the filtering functionality by providing filtering at characteristic level (the system filters for the description of characteristic values), even if items are still not expanded to this characteristic level. Both standard and additional attributes can be used for filtering.