Sample Shipments Sales Process

[TAitchison]

Hello folks,

I'm currently working on a project to address sample shipments and was considering a FOC sales order to address this. However, within our sample process, the materials we ship on samples are very often not the same materials we would ship to a customer...customers receive full cases for example but samples may be individual each components. Some samples are put together as one offs...sort of a sample kit if you will.

The customers we often ship samples to are also not the same customers we ship sales orders to.

I'm concerned at the amount of master data maintenance involved with materials and customers to drive these as sales orders in SAP. And i am wondering if anyone has addressed this process with similar concerns and what was the strategy?

Best Regards

[Former Member]

Hi Thomas,

Could you provide a simple comparison example of the sample process vs. your normal sales process?

Are the items/components of these items shipped together ideally belongs to a same main group or something?

From the description that you mentioned, ideally yes, the Free Goods can be considered in the case of sampling to your customers. Ideally, if i understand it correctly, the customers that you ship these samples to are new potential customers, hence they are a different set of customer master as compared to the customer master you normally create sales transactions for. However, other possibilities could be considered if you could provide more information on what are the concerned areas that you may have..

Going back to the above question, if the individual items shipped belongs to a main item, maybe you could also explore the possibility of using a [Sales BOM|http://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/92/58bfb9417011d189ec0000e81ddfac/content.htm

].

As I am unclear on the exact process of this sample shipment, maybe you could read further from the link above and see if it fits your scenario.

Hope the above helps.

Thanks.

[TAitchison]

Thank you for your reply.

The regular sales process would be to ship generally truck load quantities of finished goods to customer DCs. Finished goods are food products generally sold in CASE UOM.

A sample might be requested to be sent to broker network, or trade shows etc... or possibly to a new potential customer but often not. The material in the sample would either be a component of the finished good BOM or might be an inner pack to the finshed good material. For example, i would normally sell say, a case of snack chips but for a sample i will send you a bag of the same. We do not maintain material master on the inner packs EA level. Only on the saleable UOM (case).

So you can see the customers are not the same base as regular shipments nor are the material ones that we would normally maintain. We have many many finshed good materials and potentially any of these could result in a sample being requested.

My concern is that the master data creates way more overhead in this process than is desireable.

Best Regards