Thanks Jurgen, Sumant and Dev. Your replies match our thoughts at this point, we wanted to check if any online experts might have found something we did not.
For information in this thread we did consider the following for a solution but none of these work for our IS-Retail system and business situation currently, or there is a signifcant development effort...
1. Setting up a new article, duplicating for the other Order unit, would not cover all scenarios we had.
2. Using vendor hierarchy with a new duplicate vendor solely for ordering purposes. This was promising technically and allowed a second info record, but for various business reasons the solution was rejected.
3. Appending an order unit field to EINE. Similar to your suggestions above for a Z table. The challenge we are finding here is how many places we have to "enhance" the SAP code in addition to any of our Z code.
4. Creating a new Z info record category so we could have a second info record for the same article/vendor. This would also be a large development effort.
We have a similar issue with vendor sub-range (eina-ltsnr), an article can be in one purchasing sub-range for all purchase organizations and sites that order the article in one client. The level this sub-range data element is retained at is also causing us challenges and the solution will be similar to what was considered for the order unit.
Thanks again.