Explaining Material Dimensions

For companies with materials in different sizes and colors it is important to group them with the help of characteristics.

For companies with a huge quantity of characteristic values it is necessary to have a tool for the value maintenance and for grouping certain values together. This ensures a better menu navigation within the search help and the possibility to select a group of values.

The type of characteristics ("Color", "Main Size" and "Second Size") makes characteristic-based processes easier.

Characteristics refer to attributes of an object, such as the color of a blouse or the size of a T-shirt.

It is possible to create characteristics for material groups or material group hierarchy levels. Within a grouping, the values of the characteristics are passed on from one level to the next. The values of the superior hierarchy level in the subordinate level can be copied, restricted or added, depending on how the characteristic is defined.

There is a difference between:

• Variant-creating characteristics (suitable for creating generic materials) → These should not be assigned directly to the material group / material group hierarchy.
• Non-variant-creating characteristics (for display purposes only).

Characteristic values are the concrete attributes of a characteristic. For example:

• characteristic = color,
• characteristic values = red, blue, yellow.

Characteristics can be valued differently for each individual material, for example, a material with the characteristic 'Color' can receive the value 'Red', while another material can receive the value 'Blue'.

Characteristics can be grouped under characteristic profiles. Several characteristic profiles can be assigned to one material group. When a material is created in the material group in question, it is possible to select one of the assigned characteristic profiles. The characteristics of the characteristic profile determines the possible variants (matrix/list) for the generic material.

The new characteristic value storage supports only offers a better handling for characteristics with huge quantities of characteristic values (Colors and Sizes). The characteristic values are not assigned directly to the characteristic within the characteristic maintenance.

The transaction WRFCHVAL is used to define the characteristic values (incl. customer-specific attributes).

The transaction WRFCHVALGRP is used to do the characteristic value grouping

The characteristics can be typed as color, main size, secondary size or not typed. The color/ size information is redundant stored within the material master data when creating variants of a generic material.

This information is extracted to BW.

A characteristic of a fashion material can be measured using different standards or scales in different countries or geographical regions. For example, a shoe of the same size is considered size 9 in the UK while it is considered size 10 in the US. Hence, the shoe has both the sizes marked on it. To facilitate this, a characteristic conversion mechanism is necessary to ensure that on every fashion material, sizes in all the relevant size standards are correctly marked.

Characteristic value conversion only applies to variant creating characteristics that are attached to the generic material master.

This slide shows a general overview of how conversion type identifier is linked to material master, vendor master and customer master records so that when a combination of the material and customer / vendor is used in a process document, then appropriate value conversion gets applied to the material / variant description by default.

For successful characteristic conversion to take place, you have to first create a conversion logic. This conversion logic defines when the conversion has to take place and how the system converts each individual value with a specific conversion type based on certain rules. You define a conversion type in the Customizing. Once you define the conversion type, you then maintain the conversions specific to variant values in the same customizing activity.

Characteristic value conversion is available in sales and purchase documents. You use the characteristic value conversion pushbutton to carry out characteristic value conversion of materials in the sales order.

The Item Overview tab can have more than one item. Multiple variant creating characteristics can be associated with a material. Hence, after applying characteristic value conversion on such materials, the output for these materials would be the concatenation of the converted characteristic values and displayed in the description column in the sales documents.

The relevant customizing is to be found at IMG → Logistics-General → Fashion Management → Cross-Applications → Characteristics Value Conversion

Characteristic value conversion can be carried out based on any one of the following criteria:

• Material
• Customer/vendor
• User defined parameter (FSH_SC_USR)

Based on your requirement, you have to associate conversion ID to with one or more of the above. You do this in the following manner:

• Material - In the Material master, you have to maintain the Mat. Conv. ID to associate a conversion ID with a Material.
• Customer/Vendor - In the customer master, under Sales Area Data, maintain the Customer/Vendor ID using the Fashion specific data pushbutton.
• User Parameter - Use transaction SU03. In the Parameters tab, maintain a unique value that represents a conversion indicator.