Wednesday, October 15, 2008

SAP Hierarchical Accesses Pricing And Conditions

Use

Hierarchy accesses are used to optimize pricing for hierarchical data constellations such as a product hierarchy. When using hierarchies of this kind, it may be necessary to use any number of partial quantities (taken from the specified quantity of characteristics) to define the keys of the condition tables. A simple example of this would be a price which is fixed for sales organization and distribution channel but otherwise depends upon either customer, material or both.

Without hierarchy accesses, you would need to create a condition table for every combination and assign all accesses to this table in a hierarchy within an access sequence. This would not only take a great deal of time, but it would also reduce system performance and force the system to use a rigidly fixed sequence of accesses.

This represents a major drawback, especially for hierarchical data such as that representing a product hierarchy or a customer hierarchy.

Using the hierarchy access function, the system can find variants of this kind with a single access to a condition table containing all the necessary fields in the variable key. It can then determine the required condition record according to the relevant criteria.

Prerequisites

When creating an access sequence in a condition table for the fields of an access, the user has the option of defining which part of the key remains fixed and which part can vary (these are the free fields and the optional fields in condition maintenance). During access sequence maintenance, you assign priorities to the fields in the variable part of the key. These priorities are used to evaluate the relevance of the condition records determined using the fixed part of the key.

In Customizing for Pricing, you need to make the following settings in the access at field level:

  • Processing type in access (field PType): A = Free field. Free fields are optional fields during condition record maintenance, so that any combination of characteristics can be created for an access.
  • Evaluation of characteristics (field Prio): Priority is measured from 01 (high) to 99 (low).

The records with the highest priorities are then made available in pricing.

The quick entry screen for the condition records is not used. Mandatory entry is not used for the optional fields.


There are currently problems in the hierarchical accesses when using the deletion indicator.

Determining condition records using the priority for hierarchical conditions takes place before Pricing. However the deletion indicator is not checked until Pricing has begun. This can lead to the following:

A condition record may have top priority for the hierarchical accesses and be transferred to Pricing. Using one of the deletion indicators however, the condition record is then sent out of Pricing without a replacement.

For this reason, you should avoid using the deletion indicator when working with hierarchical accesses.

As an alternative, you can set the validity period for the condition records in the past and use this to remove the current Pricing.

Example of Pricing with Free Fields

You want to set up Pricing for materials which are assigned to a product hierarchy. You mark the hierarchy levels as free fields and enter a priority. As a rule, the priority should increase as you move from general to more specific criteria:

Field

Processing type in access

Evaluation

Sales organization



Material group

A

5

Main group

A

No comments:

Archive