What measure can be taken to keep the effort involved in maintaining price conditions low across multiple company codes?

Utilizing a reference purchasing organization is an effective measure for maintaining low effort when managing price conditions across multiple company codes. A reference purchasing organization serves as a centralized entity that can standardize pricing conditions, which reduces redundancy in data maintenance across various company codes.

By setting a reference purchasing organization, price conditions need to be maintained only once, rather than for each individual purchasing organization. This not only simplifies the process but also ensures consistency in pricing strategy across the organizations, thereby minimizing discrepancies and errors that may arise from managing multiple individual agreements.

The other options, while they may have their own merits, introduce additional complexity in managing prices. Establishing individual purchase agreements for each organization would lead to higher maintenance efforts since each agreement would need to be updated separately. Implementing an automatic price adjustment feature may streamline some processes but doesn’t address the underlying issue of multiple price conditions needing management. Consolidating all purchasing organizations could create operational challenges and doesn't inherently simplify the maintenance of price conditions. Therefore, the use of a reference purchasing organization is the most efficient approach to keeping maintenance efforts low.