Generic Articles in Product Master

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Generic Article is a special type of configurable article that can be used for structuring and maintaining variants of an article. Variants are articles that differ only in certain characteristics such as color, size, or flavor. They grouped together as generic articles.

Generic articles do not exist physically and are not sold but exist as a data reference for variants. Generic articles exist in systems but have no inventory management.

Use

Defining a generic article simplifies the maintenance of variants since you need enter data that is the same for all variants only once for the generic article.

In case any change has been done to any of the fields of generic article then all the non-deviated variants (all the fields of variant which have same values as Generic Article) will get updated.

Customizing for Reference Handling

Reference handling for a variant is based on the customizing details provided in the above customizing and is done at field level.

Before you create generic article and variants, it is advisable to check the customizing in SPRO and make the necessary change if any. (Refer the screenshots below)



 



Propose Flag: At the time of creation of variants, data is copied from generic article only if this flag is marked for the respective field.

Copy Flag: At the time of modification/update of variants, data is copied from generic article only if this flag is marked for the respective field and data is not deviating from Generic Article.

Structure

A generic article can have both variant-creating characteristics and non-variant-creating characteristics.

Variant-creating characteristics

Characteristics define the attributes of a variant. While creating a generic article, you can choose the characteristic class of class type 300 (Variants). After choosing the class, you can restrict the characteristic values for the generic article. Only the restricted characteristic values are then allowed for defining variants.

Non-variant-creating characteristics

These are informative characteristics that describe the article in more detail, for example, the material of which a blouse is made.

For more information on characteristics, see Characteristics Processing.

Creating Generic Article with Variants in the Fiori Application

1. Create a Generic Article in Product Master Application.


2. To create a new article master data record for a generic article, enter values for mandatory field such as: Product Number, Product Type, Product Group, Base Unit of Measure and You must also specify values for the Valuation Class, Tax Classification and Loading Group Fields in the Header section or Reference Values section.


3. For creating a generic article, at least one characteristic class must be assigned with class type 300 (Variants).You can restrict the characteristic values for the generic article. Only the restricted characteristic values are then allowed for defining variants.
   
   


4. After choosing the characteristic values, you can define the variants in the variant facets by clicking on Select Variant Button.In the following variant matrix, the two variant-creating characteristics results in 3 variants.


5. Save your data.Now first the Generic Article is created and then Variant Creation starts in background with a parallel process.


6. Once variant creation is complete, all the variants are displayed in the variant section.


7. Application logs can be view for the background job using Open In button.Demo

For questions about this topic, please reach out the authors of this post:

• Nises Soni (nises.soni@sap.com)


• Vivek Kumar Gupta (vivek.kumar.gupta01@sap.com)