SAP Retail Differences Between Articles and Materials

SAP Retail Differences Between Articles and Materials

 

In the case of the Retail solution, the central object in all logistics processes is the article, whereas in industry it is the material.

 

Retail and industry have different needs in terms of the corresponding master data and maintenance options. For example, to optimally process all its fashion processes, retail needs variants (such as color and size). Industry, however, uses bills of material for special requirements in the area of production planning. Due to the large number of articles in the retail industry, master data maintenance must also be integrated into processing.

 

To best support the different processes in retail and industry, ECC provides different maintenance transactions for materials and articles. Unlike the material master, the article master contains the following additional points:

- Specific additional data is integrated, for example, purchasing info records, listings and sales price calculations.

- Several organizational levels, for example, sites and distribution chains, and for generic articles several articles, can be processed online in one single maintenance transaction.

 

In the material master you can process only one material or one plant at a time, but in the article master the system transfers data from higher levels to the dependent levels, provided you have not maintained these differently. For example, the system transfers data from a generic article to all its variants. It also transfers data from reference sites to individual sites.