Reorganization of SAP Merchandise Groups

Dexterity when changing product groups

In SAP, goods or services with the same characteristics or the same purpose are grouped together in merchandise categories. They serve as sorting and evaluation criteria in Materials Management and thus form the basis for planning, controlling, inventory management and evaluation purposes.

After carefully designing and setting up the SAP merchandise categories in the system, we recommend that you do not make any regular changes. Using material groups in different objects, such as material masters, purchase orders, sales orders or conditions, can lead to posting problems in current transactions if material groups are deleted or changed.

However, if you want to reorganize or harmonize your SAP System, this can also affect the structure of the merchandise categories. In order to meet your requirements, it may be necessary to completely change the structure.

Reorganization of merchandise categories in SAP: The GAMBIT Cockpit

With the GAMBIT cockpit for SAP product group reorganization, deletion or harmonization is possible without any problems (even retroactively). The cockpit allows you to change the assigned merchandise categories in the dependent master data and movement data. This allows new product groups to be flexibly assigned and existing product groups to be deleted.

The step-by-step execution of the reorganization cockpit is clear and enables simple operation.

Mapping tables that contain the assignment of the "old" merchandise category to the "new" merchandise category form the basis for the reorganization of merchandise categories - n:1 entries can be maintained. If this assignment is not sufficient for your restructuring, you can assign "new" material groups to materials individually. In this way, you can change all material groups as a whole or maintain individual materials according to different rules. This offers maximum flexibility to implement your customizations.

Merchandise Category Reorganization in SAP - Step by Step to the Goal

1. The reorganization process begins with updating the material groups in the material master, since this forms the basis for the other objects.

2. the transaction data and conditions are then adjusted. The system checks whether there is a material number in the objects.

3. a) If there is a material number, the "new" material group is assigned, which was stored in the mapping of the material.

3. b) In the case of transaction data or conditions without material assignment (for example, purchase requisition with user-defined text), the mapping "old" would access "new" material groups and thus provide the corresponding information.

4. By using a simulation mode, which shows the result list of the converted objects, it is possible to check the assignment of new to old material groups per object.

5. After the results have been verified, the update run can be performed.

6. After the merchandise categories have been successfully converted in the master data and movement data, you can delete merchandise categories that are no longer used in Customizing.

Following the reorganization of the SAP merchandise categories, we recommend that you reconstruct the Purchasing Information System and Inventory Controlling in the SAP standard system, since some structures use the merchandise category as evaluation characteristics. The contents of the structures are first deleted and then rebuilt from the existing processes. The purpose of the new structure is to ensure that the updated merchandise category structure is used in reporting.

After the reorganization of the merchandise categories has been completed, you have a clean system and can work with your new merchandise category structure. The GAMBIT Reorganisationscockpit is installed once in your system and can be used again and again as required.