Pricing condition disappearing from sales docs

[Former Member]

All,

We're encountering some very strange issues with one of our Z pricing condition types, a freight surcharge condition called ZFMM, This condition has a requirement associated with it that only activates it on specific item categories, shipping types, and incoterms. Typically, this condition pulls in correctly on relevant items when a quotation or sales order is first created. But then, for reasons we cannot identify, this condition will sometimes disappear later on after subsequent changes are made to the sales document. The next time someone goes in to edit the document then, depending on what they are doing, they may receive incompletion errors saying that this condition is missing from pricing on whichever items it has disappeared from... OR it may disappear but not give them any kind of error, which is even worse. This causes major problems with pricing, and in one case we actually invoiced a customer for tens of thousands of dollars less than what they should have paid because this freight had disappeared from several items.

We have tried everything we can think of to isolate and reproduce this issue, with no luck. Combing through change logs on the sales document items that exhibit this issue has not revealed any clear pattern of changes that cause this to happen. The best I can say is that it seems to have something to do with changing dates on the items, such as the requested delivery date, pricing date, and billing plan dates. But no matter how we have tried to manipulate these dates on test sales documents, we have been unable to make this issue occur on demand.

In the pricing analysis screen, we have seen two different types of behavior when this condition has disappeared. In both cases, the analysis says that the "condition record exists, but has not been set". In one case, we get an error saying that a mandatory condition is missing when we go to the Conditions screen. When this happens, we can do a pricing update to get ZFMM will come in again. But in the other case, no error is given, and even updating pricing will not bring the condition back into the document; it still says it exists but has not been set. When we try to manually add it (which is allowed in this condition type), we get an error saying that ZFMM is not even in the pricing procedure - which of course it is.

Was wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this, or has any other insights as to where we might go from here. We're pretty much at a loss at this point after having fought with this on several sales docs with no luck. And searching this forum hasn't turned up much in the way of similar issues, except one, and his question was not answered.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

- Greg

[Former Member]

Am I reading this right, you're using a VOFM to trigger an order incompletion if a value is not found.  Why would a value not be found if you have the fields in an access sequence and are maintaining values for them? 

Do they ever disappear if the VOFM is not attached to the condition?

[Former Member]

That is basically correct. We are using the requirement to make it so that the condition is only activated for specific combinations of values, which is what the purpose of a requirement is as I understand it. The condition is required, so, when it is activated, it must be there on the item for the order to be complete.

We do it this way for two reasons. The first is so that our business does not have to maintain hundreds of extra $0 value condition records for all the other potential combinations of the key values (which include the three I mentioned, plus material and destination country) that should not involve freight charges. The second reason is to cover for cases where the condition records have not been maintained (such as when we sell to a new country for the first time), or have expired, and to prevent the order processor from deleting the freight condition from the order. Since our main products are heavy capital equipment, freight charges are a substantial part of our pricing, and can go well into the tens of thousands of dollars for a single order. Accidentally missing these charges prior to invoicing means we could eat a significant amount of money.

[Shiva_Ram]

In both cases, the analysis says that the "condition record exists, but has not been set".

Can you take a look at OSS 1460297 - Message VE108 in pricing analysis for a sales document for resolution?

Regards,

[od_manikandan]

Hai Mr Greg,

Can you give a screen shot of the condition type ZFMM - V/06 screen.

Regards,

Mani

[Former Member]

Thanks for the reply Mani. Here you go:

[Shiva_Ram]

Can you also put the access sequnce->field settings screen shot here?

Regards,

[Former Member]

Here you go Shiva:

[Former Member]

Sounds like they are reading things in memory to determine the pricing (item category, shipping type, incoterms) but those are not in memory upon order updates so they are dropped.  Can you add the fields to the pricing catalog structure and put them in the access sequence for this condition the old fashioned way?  I prefer to update the pricing structure rather than use VOFM routines myself.

[Former Member]

Thanks John. Those values (item cat, shipping type, incoterms) are already in the access sequence. The problem is that this is a required condition in the pricing procedure, but we only want it to be required for certain combinations of these values. The majority of combinations do not require this condition. So that's why the requirement is used.