Delivery groups for SBOMs

Delivery groups as we are aware governs how two or more items are shipped together. Delivery groups are activated at the item category level during customization. When we use an SBOM (Sales Bill Of Material) we would have a header material and 1 or more sub-components. Usually in hi-tech industry we use SBOMs in sales orders especially for computer peripherals.

The delivery group and the SBOM share a direct link. The header material and the sub-components are assigned a delivery group in the sales order processing mode so that they ship together. How this is handled depends upon which sub-function of delivery group processing is selected.

The following configuration is required to link the delivery group and the SBOM and make them work coherently in the sales order.

The setting needs to be made at the item category for the SBOM main item.

Delivery groups can be processed by SAP in following ways:

1) Forming a delivery group with the same delivery date: In this case, the BOM header materials and its sub-components all have the same delivery date. This delivery date is determined from the latest schedule line of when the last item becomes available.

In this case, the material that has a schedule line later than that of the rest of the items is line 20.

Line 20 can be delivered partially on 13th October and then on 30th December (which is after the RLT period).

Here we see all the items having the same delivery date of 30/12/2014 – This date was derived from the line item 20 schedule line structure. The moment you save the sales order, SAP will delete the earlier schedule lines of items where there is a confirmed quantity and create 1 schedule line with the total confirmed quantity for all lines.

In this case, there will be a complete delivery of the SBOM header and its items.

Having saved the changes to this sales order, its worth checking how CO09 shows the inventory visibility:

SAP shows a confirmed quantity of 5 units after the end of the RLT.

2) Correlate Schedule lines: This is another option of processing delivery groups where the SAP creates correlated schedule lines. This option works only if partial delivery is permitted. To use ‘correlated’ schedule lines , we should use option ‘A’ in the delivery group field.

SAP partially delivers the items – with the first delivery of 3 units on 14th October and 2 units on 29th December. The same applies for all items in this SBOM. Navigate to the overview screen of the sales order and click on the ‘procurement’ tab.

SAP creates the schedule lines of the other SBOM components in the same way as it did for line 20.

Let us check how the delivery groups look like in the overview screen of the sales order:

Now if we look at the stock availability using CO09, this is what it would present:

Since SAP has correlated the schedule lines for the line items (and partial delivery is permitted) we see 2 confirmation lineson two separate lines. The first being for 6th October, for 3 units and the second for 12th December which falls after the RLT for the remaining 2 units.

The above explains the functionality of delivery groups for SBOM materials/components. If you have any thing to add to make this document even more useful to fellow consultants, please let me know.

—

Siddharth Sridhar