PRICAT Inbound - Documentation/Clarification Required

Question

He all,
I have been configuring PRICAT inbound for a customer but am finding that there are some inconsistencies in the implementation that I cannot resolve via the documentation (largely because it appears not to exist). The most pressing questions for me at the moment are:
How do you implement Catalog Groups? I can branch from W_SYNC to the transaction W_GROUP_MAINTAIN. In this transaction you carry out 'Max groups', Catalog Group and Purchasing Group assignment for each vendor. However, there is no documentation in the transaction and I cannot find any on help.sap.com, so am trying to work out:
What does the Max Groups function do? I can see that it has one of three possible values, but not where or how these values are used.
How do you configure the Catalog Groups? There are none delivered with the system and I have been unable to locate any programs which update the field WRF_INBOUND_001V-CATALOGUE_GROUP. There does not seem to be a check table associated with the field although it appears value ranges can be added to the domain CATALOGUE_GROUP if you have a developer's key, but this seems unlikely to be a standard path for implementation?
And some conceptual questions:
What is the functional and operational difference between the transactions PRICATCUS1, PRICATCUS2 and PRICATCUS3 and the seemingly analagous W_PRICAT_ASSIGN_001, W_PRICAT_ASSIGN_002 and W_PRICAT_ASSIGN_003.
In the case of PRICATCUS1, the main difference appears to be that you do not need to enter a vendor. This makes sense if you want to, for example, review a vendor's catalog before deciding whether to buy from them, in which case the vendor does not yet exist. However, if you maintain the ILN using WPRICATCUS1 and assign a purchasing group, processing of the inbound IDOC still fails because there is no link between the ILN and an existing vendor in SAP, so I do not see the advantage of not entering a vendor?
For PRICATCUS2 it is the same story: You can maintain the merch cat mappings at ILN rather than vendor level as in the W_PRICAT_ASSIGN_002, but what is the advantage of this?
For PRICATCUS3 and W_PRICAT_ASSIGN_003, the transactions are identical.
If anyones can clarify the above or has detailed documentation on the new PRICAT functionality, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Luke

Answer 1

That is correct. There are typically no pk/fk constraints on any of the warehouse tables. As you can imagine, they would be a lot of trouble to deal with during the execution plan.
- Austin