Free Good Sales Order control via Third Party System

[jignesh_mehta3]

Hello All,

In most of the industries there is a concept of issuing Free Goods to prospective Customers. Also whenever new Products are introduced in markets, free samples are given to existing Customers.

We can create Free Good Sales Order in SAP, in standard system Delivery Block is proposed in this Sales Order, which an authorized person can remove & subsequently Delivery / PGI is created.

Now, imagine a scenario where the Authorized person (to remove the Delivery blocks in Free Goods Sales Order) is very busy / travelling & not having access to SAP. Even if he has access to SAP, Sales Managers & Leads generally do not have time to login to SAP system & remove the Delivery blocks in such Free Orders which may be in hundreds every day. Also given these days of Smartphones & Tablet PC’s, it is difficult for Sales Managers to physically login to SAP system from their desktops / Laptops.

To resolve the above issue, we developed a ABAP code & couple of BAPI’s to control Free Good Sales orders.

1.   Whenever a Free Good Order is created, system proposes Delivery Block (via inserting Delivery Block in Sales Document Type)

2.   With help of Basis Team, we removed the Authorization for Activity 43 (Release) for Authorization Object V_VBAK_AAT for ZFRS (Free Goods) Sales Order Types. Due to this, nobody can release the delivery block in Free Goods Sales Order through T-Code VA02. (Except for couple of Master SAP User ID’s

3.   A BAPI was created which fetches that basic Sales Order data like: Sales Document Number, Order Date, Sales Area, Sold-To-Party, Material Number, Description, Sales Unit, Quantity, Value, Plant, etc

4.   The client’s Third Party application is Lotus Notes & their developers scheduled the Lotus Notes application to call the above BAPI every 30 minutes to fetch the Free Gods Sales Order created in last 30 minutes. Subsequently a workflow is triggered in Lotus Notes & based on total value of the Order the multiple level of approvals are requested. Once the final approval (Accept / Reject) is received in Lotus Notes, it sends the data back to SAP.

5.   To fetch the incoming data from Lotus Notes, another BAPI was created which receives the Sales Order Number & Accept / Reject data.

6.   If the incoming data is A (Accept) the BAPI removes the Delivery Block in Free Goods Sales Order.

This above development provides freedom to Sales Managers to approve the Free Goods Sales Order while travelling & without login to SAP system.

Thanks,

Jignesh Mehta