BOP job in APO changing Price in (r/3) Sales Order

[Former Member]

Gurus,

We have a BOP job that runs in APO on daily basis and confirms materials in Open Sales Orders in R/3 system.

Recently, I've noticed tht not only the BOP job is confirming the material quantity but it is also changing the conditions (types) values of the concerned line-item in the Sales order. In some scenarios, it has also changed the Item Credit Price and eventually Net Price.

This is posing a problem in business process because the Invoice are getting created with incorrect price.

I would appreciate any inputs on the possible causes as why BOP job is resulting in the change of: condition record values, credit price as according to my knowledge it is only suppose to do the material confirmation after ATP check.

Thanks

Dj.

[Former Member]

Manik

Are you running BOP with or without rule evaluation ? Either way, BOP deletes and recreates sub-items that are changed. So what is probably happening is that pricing is re-determined based on current pricing procedures in ECC.

Rishi Menon

[Former Member]

Hi Rishi,

The SAP version is 4.6C and APO 3.0A. The BOP is running with rule evaluation. I've checked some Orders and the pricing is not getting re-determined that is where the confusion lies

Would appreciate any inputs.

Thanks

Manik

[Former Member]

Manik,

The ATP check and hence BOP ALWAYS precedes price determination. If conditions have changed between the time order was created and BOP was run then new pricing WILL be carried out. If NOT then pricing can change because of following reasons

- The delivery date has changed and hence a new condition was picked

- The confirmed qty has changed - for good or bad and hence net value is changed

- Both have changed

- If there are sub items and multiple schedule lines you also need to see if pricing is applied differently based on delivery quantity.

These are generic reasons. To know if some thing has changed after BOP you can refer to the change log of the document/field.

Hope this gives some directions

Guru

[Former Member]

If this helps draw any conclusions.. additional contextual info, based on my research many moons ago esp. on this re-pricing thing and options to counter/minimize that. I thought this might help you and others asking similar questions.

You should pay particular attention to the settings unique to your environment and not take this at face value and propose or carry out changes without reascertaining that re-pricing during BOP is indeed a nuisance. Per standard SAP, pricing is indeed carried out during BOP whether you like it or not. Options below are only to help minimize or completely avoid re-pricing at BOP

During online check you have an additional option of accepting "one time" delivery, notwithstanding the master data controls of partial delivery, vis-a-vis BOP that doesnt have this default option. So if you accepting one time delivery during sales order creation, this could be a possible reason why pricing results could be different pre and post BOP.

If you always accept full delivery or a proposal then no problem but keep it same for online and BOP result acceptance. This is just to minmize changes when pricing is carried out. Delivery creation in such a scenario should be followed by immediate closure of residual quantities in sales orders, if any, and BOP itself should be immeiately followed by delivery creation if they are due.

To avoid complications, if avoidable, you can carry out pricing during invoice creation as final version of truth. This will keep ATP confirmation and pricing entirely separate. This is just a suggestion and should make sense in your business depending on order to billing cycle time, typical customer delivery lead times, acceptable checking horizon value, impatience of your customer, pre-sales documents and pricing there etc.

To completely protect the pricing at the time of order creation, you might need to make a minor modification in one of the several sales order exits. However here too you might need to build a mini pricing engine depending on how sophisticated the pricing needs to be depending on change in quantity and date.

Another driver is whether or not you are contract bound in terms of delivery quantity and price protection in long lead time environments. We are now talking strategy now. you would need to consider several alternatives here.

Thanks

Guru

[Former Member]

Guru,

That was quite helpful.

Thanks!

Manik