Inbound delivery receiving point change

Say, we have following scenario:
There is external Vendor in US supplying to our production plants raw and pack materials. We have two production plants in Europe located not far from each other (eg. 50km). These production facilities are defined as separate storage locations of single plant code.

At the moment when creating purchase order, and even when goods are shipped from Vendor location we cannot say which of the 2 production plants should be the recipient. This depends on dynamically changing production situation.
Due to long transit time over the ocean, final destination is only decided when goods are arriving to destination port.

But the inbound delivery is already created in SAP for the shipment. Also the receiving point is defined at the inbound delivery.
If we now try to change storage location directly at existing inbound delivery – which would point to another receiving point – we get error message VL376 “Goods receiving point &1 for plant &2 and storage loc. &3 not allowed”

Question is – can we workaround this error message so that we do not have to recreate inbound delivery with another storage location?
The answer is: YES.
And we can do it by defining alternative receiving point for storage location

Example:
Plant 5053 -> linked with default receiving point ‘UA24’
Plant 5053 & sloc 5002 -> linked with receiving point ‘UA24’
Plant 5053 & sloc 5003 -> linked with another receiving point ‘UA25’ representind different warehouse

If you try to change in inbound delivery storage location from 5002 into 5003 (or vice versa) we receive error as above. Solution is to delete existing delivery, make changes in purchasing document for the receiving location, and create new inbound delivery.
Which is of course not nice..

In order to workaround the above:
Goto IMG configuration for receiving point determination

Maintain alternative receiving points for each of the storage locations.

Note that the secondary alternative storage locations are supplied with sequence number ‘2’. That is needed so that those are treated as 2nd priority ones.  The alternative receiving point means that it is allowed for given  combination of plant/storage location. It will not be proposed when  generating inbound delivery document 
For details you can check code of standard FM ‘SD_SHP_REC_POINT_DETERMINE’ which determines and checks receiving points.

Once the above is done, you can freely change receiving storage locations without impacting inbound delivery receiving point. Watchout is that receiving point will not be changed at inbound delivery document. That you cannot workaround without regenerating inbound delivery.

Cheers,
Dominik