Customer Hierarchy and product Hierarchy

Question

Hi friends what is customer Hierarchy and what is product hierarchy?
please explain step by step with examples.
mail id: [email protected]
Thanx.

Answer 1

Hi Sirivas,
CUSTOMER HIERARCHY:
Customer hierarchies are available in Sales and Distribution, so that you can create flexible hierarchies to reflect the structure of customer organizations. If your customer base includes multi-level buying groups, cooperatives, or chains of retail outlets, for example, you can create hierarchies to reflect the structure of these groups. Use customer hierarchies during sales order processing and billing for determining pricing and running statistics.
 A customer hierarchy consists of nodes.
 To create a customer hierarchy:
1. Create master records for each node.
2. Assign the nodes to each other.
3. Assign the customer master records to the relevant nodes.
 Hierarchy nodes are only valid for a certain period of time. They may also be moved. If a node is moved, the system automatically reassigns all related nodes and customer master records.
With customer hierarchies, you can assign price or rebate agreements to a higher level node. The agreements are then valid for customer’s at all subordinate levels to this node. You can create pricing condition records for each node indicated as relevant for pricing. If one or more nodes in the hierarchy path of a sales order contain pricing information, the system takes them into account automatically during pricing.
'How to check'
All the customizing is in SD/Master Data/Business Partner/Customers/Customers hierarchy
All the customizing is in SD/Master Data/Business Partner/Customers/Customers hierarchy
1) Define hierarchy type: just put and ID and a name to the new hierarchy.
2) Set partner determination: if you want to user the hierarchy in price determination, then, in the orders, at the header level, you have to have a Partner Procedure with a partner function for each level. In the partner procedure, in each partner function you must indicate the source partner function. With this information, in the order, you obtain the business partner for each partner function.
3) Assign account groups: you indicate which accounts groups are allowed for being part or your hierarchy.
4) Assign sales areas: simple you indicate which sales areas are allowed in your hierarchy. (Here you can customize common sales areas, just for not having to build de hierarchy in all the different sales areas).
5) Assigning hierarchy type for pricing: you indicate which classes of documents uses hierarchy in pricing determination.
It is possible to maintain so called customer hierarchies. This might be useful when for example you create a condition discount for a customer that is part of such a hierarchy structure. All subnodes in the hierarchy below that customer, will thus receive the same discount.
Customer hierarchy setup, firstly decide the hierarchy type to be used.
The standard is type A.
You can also assign a partner function to the customer so that the higher level customer in the hierarchy is copied into a sales order as a partner function - but you don't need that right?
Next assign your customer account group to the hierarchy type. And enter the combinations that will be allowed for creating the hierarchy.
You want to assign a ship-to to a payer. So enter the ship to account group and enter the payer account group as the higher level.
You must also make an entry for permitted sales area assignments. So if you want to a hierarchy for customers in the same sales area then enter the sales area and enter the same one as the higher level sales area.
All these settings can be found in the IMG. Under SD - master data - business partners - customers - customer hierarchy
You use for example customer hierarchy when you have an company like Unilever and you agree both on a discount. Unilever does have different locations / businesses and you have to maintain the discount for all customers. If you use a customer hierarchy you can maintain the discount for the partner in the top of the hierarchy and in this way it will be valid for all customers in the hierarchy.
Product Hierarchy:
The product hierarchy on the Basic Data screen is used to depict the competitive materials of competitor 1 in relation to those of competitor 2. Here, your own company and its materials are also regarded as a competitor and as competitive materials respectively. You can use this representation as a basis for market analyses.
Normally we enter competitive materials using material type WETT. When entering your own materials as competitive materials, you can, however, display the product hierarchy on the Basic Data screen for other material types too.
Requirement type determination is based on the "Origin of requirement type in requirement type determination"
In this field you can select an alternative search strategy (source):
Source 0 = Material master strategy, then item category and MRP type
Source 1 = Item type and MRP type strategy
Source 2 = Item type and MRP type strategy (as for source 1) with additional check of the allowed requirements type
e.g. If you set value "0" system will first strategy group in material master based on that it will determine requirement type and no value found then it will determine requirement type based on item category and MRP type.
Above settings can be found at SD --> Basic Functions --> Availability Check and transfer of requirement --> Transfer of Requirement --> Determination of Requirement type using Transaction
For make to order std strategy group 20 is used to which req type KE is assigned.
Check
Check in Tcode OVZH, what requirement class is assigned to your requirement type
Check in Tcode OVZG, what value is assigned to field "Consumption" in requirement class because that determines consumption posting.
The product hierarchy is used to group materials by combining different features. It is used for analyses and pricing. A product hierarchy can consist of up to Eighteen characters. Its features can be combined in various ways.
Example: A dishwasher can be described by product hierarchy 000010000200000002. This series of characters states that dishwashers belong to the category electrical appliances (series of characters 00001, position 1-5), and also to wet appliances (series of characters 00002, position 6-10) and, finally, to dishwashers (series of characters 00000002, position 11-18).
One can maintain the product hierarchy via transaction "OVSV" and "V/76.
Path = IMG-Logistics General-Material master-Setting for Key fields-Data relevant to SD-Define Product hierarchy.
The product hierarchy is maintained in the Basic Data view of the material master record, and is used for evaluation as well as price determination in materials management.
The standard SAP allows only 3 levels, but you can go up to 6 levels, for additional 3 levels u will have to take abapper help and add 3 more fields and corresponding data element into structure. So that in material master drop down you will see 6 levels.
The transaction which will be useful to change product hierarchies for material master will be V/76.
Yes, You can print the levels of the product hierarchy through a report.
Use the view SE16 - V_T179 (Table Name) to display Product hierarchy with level numbers.
Field Name is PRODH
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Thanks and Regards,
Sateesh.Kandula