Edit Derivation Strategy - Profitability Analysis
Application component: Profitability Analysis
App type: SAP GUI
Description: Characteristic derivation attempts to determine the values for profitability-relevant characteristics in a business transaction. Some characteristic values are transferred automatically and then used to determine other, logically dependent characteristics. The derivation process uses information in the source document as well as information outside it. The profitability segment to which the account assignments are made is generated using the characteristic values as determined by the derivation process.   Characteristic values that are not known in the business transaction are derived in CO-PA Example You are using the Customer Group field from the material master (table KNA1) as a characteristic in your operating concern. The system recognizes that the customer group depends on the customer number and is therefore able to automatically determine customer group KG1 for customer K1 by reading the customer master record. 
Key features: Characteristic derivation is performed with the following: Manual account assignments, including:   Settling orders and projects   Direct postings from FI   Manually created CO-PA line items   Manual entry of planning data   Only a few characteristic values have to be entered manually. The remaining characteristic values can be derived. Automatic transfer of data from other applications, including:   Billing documents   Transferring overhead   External data transfer   Some source applications can supply values for only a few of the characteristics used in an operating concern. Characteristic derivation fills in the remaining characteristic values, provided that they can be derived from those supplied by the source application. Characteristic derivation consists of a series of derivation steps (the derivation strategy). Each step can be used in turn to derive values from other characteristics. For each operating concern you define, the system generates standard derivation steps that automatically contain all the known dependencies between characteristics. The standard derivation strategy contains: Steps for deriving fixed characteristicsSteps for deriving the characteristics you selected from SAP tablesSteps for determining units of measure for the quantity fields assigned in the Sales and Distribution (SD) application or in planning In general, you can copy the standard derivation strategy as it is. If you have created user-defined characteristics, you should nevertheless enhance the standard derivation strategy with several additional derivation steps, provided that logical dependencies exist. For information on additional options for changing the standard derivation strategy, see Changing the Standard Derivation Steps. Each derivation step describes how a group of target fields can be populated with values derived from a group of source fields. One or more values are derived from the combination of values in the source fields and then entered into the target fields. For information on which fields are valid as source fields and target fields, see Source and Target Fields. There are different derivation types to represent the different logical dependencies between source and target fields. For more information, see Derivation Types. You can modify the order for processing the individual derivation steps by entering conditions governing how the step is carried out and by specifying step and field attributes. For more information. see Influencing the Standard Derivation Procedure.