What Are They?
A characteristic is the text value to be planned. Characteristics include things like sales, region and customers. When thinking in spreadsheet terms the characteristics are the column and row headings (although most often the row headings, as the columns are almost always the time characteristic – month, week, year, etc..) The intersection between characteristics is called a Characteristic Value Combination CVCs. Characteristics also have a hierarchy as do CVCs so…
- Sales by Week by Region – is one intersection of the sales, time and geography characteristics
- Sales by Month by Year – is a second intersection of the same characteristics.
All valid CVCs are added to the Planning Object Structure. You can find out more about POSs here.
http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/planning-areas-and-planning-object-structures/
Database Design
Combining intersections in this way, with large data sets and large number of intersections is very computationally intensive. It can not be accomplished with a normal relational structure — which is designed for transaction processing, not for analysis. The two mechanisms that computer science has arrived at to accomplish this task is the data cube, and the star schema overlay onto a relational structure. We go into detail on these topics here:
http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/dp-bw-dimensions-and-fact-table/
Characteristics in SCM
Its important to recognize that DP and SNP use different characteristics, and thus different planning areas and planning object structures are created for DP and SNP.
[...] stored) surrounded by multiple dimension tables. For details on characteristics, see this post. http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/characteristics-in-scm/ What Are Dimensions? Dimensions are what is being analyzed and are called characteristics. A [...]
[...] http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/characteristics-in-scm/ The master planning object structure is a table that is created via APO functionality but is actually stored in the BI environment. the master data stored is called characteristic value combinations. The POS stores every unique combination of CVCs. This will be used to help control disaggregation when data is manipulated at summary levels. It will be a primary input for your planing areas.(F2) [...]