Technical Articles
Third Party Logistics Outbound Delivery Not Released Automatically After Upgrade.
In Business By-Design many customers have been reporting incidents saying that SAP has wrecked the automatic release functionality of the 3PL outbound deliveries. All the 3PL outbound deliveries created before used to be released automatically provided that the below setting was maintained.
However, now you see that there are outbound deliveries in the system which are not released. Please be assured that we did not wreck the 3PL outbound delivery release setup, but in-fact we have improved up on the previous behavior of the system. Skeptical aren’t you ? let me explain with a before and after scenario below.
System behavior before the changes were introduced:
It is true that what ever outbound deliveries got created in the system were released automatically earlier, but the problem was there were a large number of cases where the outbound delivery document itself was not getting created in the system due to errors. When I say errors, it could be due to inventory lock or financial period blocked for posting. What you were left with was a Business Communication Monitor with lot of errors with no outbound delivery document created.
For eg: If your warehouse provided sent you 10 Outbound Delivery Execution Confirmation (ODEC) messages, you would have 5 outbound delivery document created and released, the rest 5 3PL requests will have no outbound delivery created but a BCM monitor with 5 error messages.
System behavior after the changes were introduced:
The system will create outbound deliveries for all the ODEC messages you receive from your 3 PL warehouse provider. This is the major difference in system behavior. . Now, if there is no inventory update errors in the ODEC messages the system will release the outbound delivery automatically. The rest of the outbound deliveries will remain unreleased. One of the major reasons why the outbound delivery document will stay unreleased is because of the infamous “Inventory Lock Error”.
In the above situations you had to report an incident to SAP and wait for SAP to manually process the messages. Since the outbound delivery documents has already been created manually in the system you can choose to manually release the outbound delivery document without any errors. if you can afford to wait till the next set of ODEC messages to be sent by your 3PL provider then these outbound delivery document will be released automatically provided that there are no lock errors created by the next set of messages. In most cases the system will automatically take care of the release of outbound delivery.
We have also provided an additional view Delayed Business Object Processing under the Application and User Management work center. The end user can navigate to this view and see all the outbound deliveries which are created and not released automatically released by the system.
You can select the outbound delivery and choose the re-start button once you have fixed the financial period blocked for posting errors or lock error removed.
So in short, outbound delivery documents will be created for all the ODEC messages sent by your warehouse provider, even if there are inventory update errors. The outbound delivery documents which are not released automatically will require your attention since there has been an inventory error.
Simple and straight forward explaination...
Thank you Emopin.
I have made a few changes in the blog to exactly reflect the behavior.
Dear Anand,
This issue has been reported by at least two our customers. Indeed, we noticed that the object ID is the Delivery ID.
"For eg: If your warehouse provided sent you 10 Outbound Delivery Execution Confirmation (ODEC) messages, you would have 5 outbound delivery document created and released, the rest 5 3PL requests will have no outbound delivery created but a BCM monitor with 5 error messages."
This is indeed the intended behaviour of the system
However, i have a question regarding the following document especially regarding this :
" if you can afford to wait till the next set of ODEC messages to be sent by your 3PL provider then these outbound delivery document will be released automatically provided that there are no lock errors created by the next set of messages. In most cases the system will automatically take care of the release of outbound Delivery."
Correct me if i am wrong but here is my understanding :
Today, it appears that if the systems is blocked by the release of one of the deliveries (Objects), this will cancel all the release for a set of ODEC messages, and this will be solved automatically when the next set arrives if the issue has been solved (like opening Accounting periods for example).
What in the case a Customer has more than 150 outbound deliveries that have to be released at once, and that are blocked only because of one "not allowed negativ stock for product?"
Am I understanding this the right way? It seems for me that this is not an improvement for the customers
Thanks for your valuable help,
Victor Sauvageot
Hi Victor,
"What in the case a Customer has more than 150 outbound deliveries that have to be released at once, and that are blocked only because of one “not allowed negativ stock for product?” . The system will not block all the 150 ODEC messages if one of them is with errors. The system will release all 149 of them and the one with error (inventory lock, accounting period) etc will have the outbound delivery document created without release status. This can either be released manually or the end user can wait for the next set of ODEC messages to arrive. If one ODEC message in a group has an error the system will not block the release of all the ODEC messages in the set.
This would happen only if all the 150 messages are trying to update the same product in the same planning area at the same time. Then you obviously get an inventory lock error and you can choose to individually release them from the Delayed Business Object Processing view. I hope this helps.
Regards,
Anand
Thanks for your explanation, Anand.
We (and our customers) are not pleased to see such an improvement, decided by SAP dev team, without warning in advance the SAP customers that use 3PL communication arrangement.
This has a real impact on the business. Our customers are in the case of a mass integration of the ODEC in SAP: all the messages are trying to update the same products at the same time, and SAP blocks the whole set. So, this is not a “normal” blocking (stock shortage, or financial period blocking), but this is a pure technical blocking (SAP can’t issue several times the same product at the same time).
Why don’t you create a queue for the ODEC messages, in case of inventory lock? It would be really better if SAP would try to restart the messages integration of its own, using this type of queue.
In addition, the use of the “Outbound Delivery Release Run” (in Third-Party Logistics WoC) to mass release the OD is not possible: if there is even only one “normal” blocking (stock shortage, or financial period blocking) in the list of OD to release, the run rejects the whole set, and do not release anything. It would have been better, in this run, to have an option like “ignore errors”, in order to be able to mass release at least the “technicaly” blocked OD.
Hoping this long message is enough clear!
(Remark: when those major regressions will be corrected, this evolution will appear as a great improvement).
Etienne Gouband
Hi Etienne,
Thank you for your detailed feedback. We are enhancing the functionality that is introduced above and will look into your suggestions as well. I will update these feedbacks to my technical team and keep you informed of the enhancements in the above functionality.
Regards,
Anand
Hi Anand,
you mentioned a view Delayed Business Object Processing under the Application and User Management work center, but I don't see it.
has it been (re)moved, or do I need specific authorisation to see it?
Thanks,
Marcel
Hi Marcel,
Yes, your key user needs to assign the view Delayed Business Object Processing to your user for you to access it. Please find the screen shot (HTML5 UI)to see the view ID which needs to be assigned to the user. The Key user needs to follow the below steps to access the below screen.
Once the above actions are performed the user with the above view assigned will be able to see the Delayed Business Object Processing view. I hope this helps.
Regards,
Anand
Good one Anand:)