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stefan_resag
Employee
Employee

In this document I would like to collect a set of principles and how-to's when working with the complete delivery feature for sales orders in SAP Business ByDesign.

Background: For sales orders marked as 'Complete Delivery' on header level all sales order items with the same requested date and delivery rule 'Single delivery - full quantity' are assigned to the same delivery group. Automatically the delivery rule 'Single delivery - full quantity' is proposed for new items.

The complete delivery flag has impact on the following two process steps:

  • Availability check
  • Release of sales order to 'Outbound Logistics'

How does the availability check with complete delivery work?:

  • First the confirmed dates and quantities are calculated for each sales order item with the item delivery rule 'Single delivery - full quantity'.
  • In a second step the availability check result is adjusted in the following way for all items of the same delivery group:
    • Items with a red ATP indicator stay unchanged
    • Confirmations of all other items are shifted to the confirmation of the 'latest item'. Example: Item 1 has sufficient stock on hand, but item 2 has only a supply later than the requested date. Then also the confirmation for item 1 is shifted to the confirmation date of item 2, meaning, both items 1 and 2 get a yellow ATP indicator.

How does the release of sales orders to 'Outbound Logistics' work?:

The complete delivery indicator simply ensures, that all items of the same delivery group will be released at the same time. That means: if only one of the sales order items of a delivery group has a red ATP status, no item of that delivery group can be released.

What does this mean business wise? To simplify the discussion I will for now focus only on scope of check 'Stock'. The above described ATP behavior shall ensure, that those items, that are fully available, get a reservation for the requested quantity. This ensures that other order do not 'steal' those quantities.

Remark: In case only a partial quantity is available, no reservation is done for those items. This however then also means, that this quantity is still available for other sales orders and it will be more difficult to get a confirmation for the remaining parts.

Now the tricky thing is, how to ensure that complete delivery orders can be shipped at all, especially when there is a mix of complete delivery sales orders and other sales orders with multiple deliveries.

Let's assume that a customers is using the confirmation update run, sorted by requested date. Let's also assume for a moment that all items have a requested quantity of 1 ea.

The following table shows the ATP result after the confirmation update run:

ProductInventorySO1 + 5 daysSO2 + 10 days
A2GreenGreen
B1GreenRed
C0Red-

We have two complete delivery sales orders, one requesting products A,B and C 5 days from now, and a second one requesting only products A and B 10 days from now.

Currently it is not possible to ship any of these orders, because no order has a confirmation for all items. Now there are multiple ways to react on such a situation (which in any case is a pure business decision that cannot be taken by the system):

  1. Do not do anything, and keep the ATP reservations as they are. As soon as inventory for C is available and the confirmation update run is executed, SO1 can be released to outbound logistics execution.
  2. Decide to ship SO2 instead. However that means that shipment of SO1 needs to be postponed in case B cannot be supplied on time. So before doing this one should definitively check the supply and demand situation for B. To now move the ATP confirmation for B from SO1 to SO2 one simply needs to cancel the confirmation (Action in 'Customer Demand' view) for SO1 for B and redo the ATP check for SO2 for B. After that SO2 can be released to outbound delivery execution.
  3. Decide to do a partial delivery for SO1, if the customer is fine with it. There are now two ways of switching to a partial delivery mode:
    1. The requested delivery date for product C of SO1 is moved to the future. The system will automatically create a new delivery group for this item and then the items for A and B can be released to outbound delivery execution. If more than one item is moved to a new date, automatically the system assigns all items with the same new requested delivery date to the same delivery group.
    2. Change the item delivery rule, e.g. to multiple deliveries. If the item delivery rule is different from 'Single delivery - full quantity', his item will not be assigned to any delivery group.

Remark: It could always happen, that after inventory of C gets updated and before a new confirmation update run is triggered, a new sales order for C gets ATP confirmation.

Now coming to the more complex scenario, where item quantities are bigger than 1 ea. The major difference is that for complete delivery orders, partial reservations of quantities are not supported. As a result it is a little more difficult to get a confirmation for complete delivery orders. Again SO1 has an earlier requested date than SO2 and the table below shows the result after the confirmation update run sorted by requested date:

ProductInventorySO1 Req. QtySO1 ATPSO2 Req. QtySO2 ATP
A32Green1Green
B12Red1Green

As said, SO1 gets a red ATP for B, because of the Single delivery - full quantity' delivery rule. Since no quantity is reserved for a red ATP the quantity of B is still available for SO2. In that case one could release SO2 to outbound delivery execution and now SO1 has to wait for 2 new parts.

Again it is a business decision if SO2 should be released or not. However there is not a perfect way to tell the system that the inventory of B should rather be reserved for SO1.

  • One could cancel the confirmation of B for SO2: then the release of SO2 is not possible anymore, but the next confirmation update run will again revert the manual adjustment
  • One could switch to multiple deliveries for B in SO1. As a result also partial confirmation is possible. However the item will be withdrawn from the delivery group and a complete delivery cannot be ensured system-wise.
  • One could force confirmation for B in SO2, but then outbound logistics execution might run into a missing parts situation in case they try to ship before inventory is there.

As a consequence one should be very careful using the complete delivery feature for those sales orders with a item quantity close to or higher than the average quantities, in which a product is supplied. It will be very hard to get confirmations for those items. This is of course also true for items using the delivery rule 'Single delivery - full quantity'. So the description also applies for non-complete delivery orders using this item delivery rule. However in combination with complete delivery orders it leads to a slightly more complex situation.

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