Working with Reference Characteristics and Organizational Areas

When managing reference characteristics and organizational areas, you'll use the Basic data and Additional data tabs.

In Additional data, you can define:

• Reference characteristics

• Links between documents and characteristics

• Handling and display of characteristics in value assignment

The characteristics you have created so far describe the attributes of a product.

You can also combine characteristics with the master data field information in the SAP system to enable object searches. To do this, you'll work with reference characteristics.

The following video introduces the concept of reference characteristics.

And this video explains how table references can let you use information from the object master record in classification, avoiding inconsistencies..

You create reference characteristics normally, except the characteristic does not have values. Instead, the characteristic refers to the table and field of the object.

The characteristic is assigned to the class and is available for normal classification.

You can also use reference characteristics to find objects. The following video explains how.

After you have set up all the characteristics of a product in a class, you can set up your own class for individual enterprise areas.

You can assign an object to more than one class. The classes may be different from either an organizational or technical point of view. If you use multiple classification, an object that you classify can have values assigned to all characteristics of all classes to which you assign it. However, you can assign only one value (or set of multiple values) for each characteristic and object.

The following video explains this process.

The following video explains how organizational areas work.

Suppose you have assigned different classes for purchasing, sales, or production for your product, and now want to transfer these characteristics to a class. However, you want users to have access to only those characteristics they need.

Authorization objects, shown in the figure below, can meet this requirement.

With these authorization objects, you can control:

• Who sees which characteristic in an assignment transaction

• Who can change characteristic values in the transaction of assignment

• Who can see which characteristics in the transaction of "Find Objects"

• Where to find other authorization objects.