Business process: Inventory reconciliation is used for displaying stock balances from third party warehouse system to SAP. This data can be used by SAP customized report and display any out of synch stock balances between the two systems. The inventory balance extraction would be initiated from the third party warehouse system during a specified time frame when no warehouse activities are going on and sent to SAP. Also for warehouse which operate on 24/7, its better that the extract from warehouse to SAP is schedule on weekly basis rather than daily as any unposted transaction would appear as discrepancy.
In order for inventory reconciliation to work, the inventory buckets from third party warehouse system (e.g available stock-A and unavailable stock-B) should be mapped to SAP unrestricted stock or unavailable (blocked) stock.
Prerequisites required for this functionality to work:
· Material should be existing in both the systems
· The base unit of measurement of material in SAP system and third party warehouse system should be same. This will help in the sense that no conversion of unit would be required when the stocks are compared
· The third party warehouse system will not send an inventory adjustment record for a material that does not have any inventory in it. It is considered an inventory discrepancy if there is SAP inventory for a material that is not sent from WM system.
Business Process Flow:
How this functionality can be achieved:
A SAP custom function module can be developed which will compare SAP unrestricted stock with third party warehouse available stock- ‘A’ and SAP blocked stock with third party unavailable stock- ‘B’. There would be two customized Z programs required for this design. The first one would be RFC enabled function module (customized Z_INV_RECON program) will be called directly from the SAP Business Connector and this Z_INV_RECON program will compare the inventory levels and post discrepancies into the customized Z table. The second program would be on-line report (Customized Z_RECON_RTP program) that reads the data from the customized Z table based on selection screen parameters entered by the SAP user.
An RFC enabled function module will be called by the SAP Business Connector to post the WMS and SAP inventory reconciliation data in a custom SAP info structure. For creating RFC function module (Z_INV_RECON) to compare data and post into the information structure we need to create a Z function group in a development class. This RFC enable function module should be created in Z function group and create custom structure that is passed into the RFC function module by the SAP Business Connector map. Now select all material and inventory quantities in a plant and compare the quantities and if a difference exists in the blocked or unrestricted quantities between SAP and WM system, store in the information structure.
Now create Z_RECON_RTP on line report in development class and Select data from Z custom table based on selection screen input and display the data. This report would display the stock available in SAP and Warehouse system and also the stock differences which exists between the two systems.
A custom transaction can also be developed for the report Z_RECON_RTP and authorization should be assigned to users for this transaction who would be entitled to view the stocks discrepancy.
