Sales Order Specific Stock in Common Inventory

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

Business Requirement: Plants wanted to sell Materials to their Customers. But these Materials are not common materials and each quantity of a material is Unique. These materials are not in the Plant Inventory for Sales & all these materials are purchased from Vendor, receive the stock in their Plants and later shipped to Customers.

Standard SAP Process Mapped using Item Category – BANC:

Sales Order / Purchase Requisition / Purchase Order / Inbound Delivery / Goods Receipt / Vendor Invoice / Outbound Delivery / Customer Invoice.

However, Business have the following concern:

From the above proposed SAP Process, the Incoming Stock through Goods Receipt is posted as a Sales Order Stock (Special Stock from FI Perspective) and not as a Common Inventory Posting, which is a Standard SAP process. However Business wanted to receive this Incoming Stock as a Common Inventory Stock and not as a Special Stock specific to Sales Order.

Problem Statement – We need to have the Sales Order Item linkage for the Incoming Material in order to deliver to Customer the same material that is ordered through Sales Order Item. If there is no Sales Order Linkage, it will be a common inventory stock which can be delivered to any Sales Order.

Please let us if you have come across any special scenarios.

[VeselinaPeykova]

Hello Sarvesh,

I agree with , that the requirement seems rather odd.

It could be, that the business did not provide you with the full picture.

But these Materials are not common materials.

I wonder whether the received materials for two different sales orders share the same physical properties and prices.

Imagine that on the same day they receive materials for two sales orders from the same vendor with the same truck - how would the warehouse employees distinguish which materials to allocate to which outbound delivery? Does the vendor apply special labels to these products? Or the warehouse people relabel the materials based the information from some accompanying documents?

This is a complete shot in the dark, but maybe you can store some additional information in batch characteristics?

If the received materials are completely different, then I agree that it makes more sense to manage them as separate codes.

[Former Member]

Customer 1 orders Material 1 for quantity 1.

Customer 1 orders Material 1 for quantity 1.

Here, the customer and material are same but each time when they order it, each quantity of the material is unique and attached to a special code number. So when we receive it from vendor we should know to which sales order it has to be delivered. Hence we proposed to have a Standard Purchase Order process (Item Category - BANC) where we receive the stock from vendor as a sales order stock in MMBE. Whereas customer wanted to receive it in the common inventory.

[Former Member]

Sarvesh,

Using your example, the same customer, the same material, two different sales orders, using Unrestricted stock (not sales order stock), there is nothing to prevent the warehouse from shipping the stock from order 'A' against order 'B'.   I will assume that this is not acceptable.

If this is truly your requirement, You can enable Batch Management.  You then use custom development to put a unique batch number in each sales order, and create custom development to link the batch numbers throughout the entire supply chain (Purchase Order, receipts, issues).

I personally would not recommend this.  If you pursue, you should ensure that ALL POSSIBLE SCENARIOS are tested. I will tell you from experience that you have not actually heard all the requirements yet from your client.  The client will continue to to tell you of new restrictions that he wants this process to support.

Bear in mind that if you also use MRP to plan these materials, this will pose additional problems for your PP/MM analysts to solve.

Best Regards & Good Luck,

DB49.

[Former Member]

Hi DB49,

Thanks for your answer. I need some convincing factors to explain the Client that the Incoming Stock will be always Sales Order Specific in order to avoid wrong material shipment to diff order. 

[Former Member]

Sarvesh,

Wrong material?  We already discussed that.  You need to use a customer specific material number.  You will prevent the wrong material number from being shipped by using listing and exclusion.

So:

Customer A   use Material number "X".

Customer B, who wants a material which has the exact same Form/Fit/Function of X, use material number "Y"

Each customer, for a given F/F/F, gets their own material number.

The additional solution that I spoke of; when you want that one customer could have many orders, but you want each order to be ordered, tracked, stocked, and shipped INDIVIDUALLY, requires Batch management plus custom development.

Best Regards,

DB49

[Former Member]

It doesn't answer to my question.....

[Former Member]

Sarvesh,

The short answer to your question is that if you wish to fulfill this business requirement, and not use sales order specific stock, it will require YOU to create some enhancements; and perhaps also some custom reporting. 

Once you and the client have agreed to pursue this path, it will be up to YOU to convince the client that YOUR enhancements will meet all his business requirements.

Good Luck & Best Regards,

DB49

[Former Member]

Sarvesh,

Lets see.  I see some requirements:

But these Materials are not common materials and each quantity of a material is Unique.

and

These materials are not in the Plant Inventory for Sales & all these materials are purchased from Vendor, receive the stock in their Plants and later shipped to Customers.

and

However Business wanted to receive this Incoming Stock as a Common Inventory Stock and not as a Special Stock specific to Sales Order.

I don't know the details of your client's vision, but in standard SAP 'common stock' is available to any customer for any order.  I assume you made that clear to the client.

What did the client tell you when you pointed out how his requirements are contradictory?

The easiest way to fulfill most of these...odd...requirements would be to create a special material number for each customer order that you have to service in this way.  You could then use SAP's standard functionality of Material Listing and Exclusion - Basic Functions and Master Data in SD Processing (SD-BF) - SAP Libr...  to ensure that only specific customers got the specific materials that were ordered for them.

Best Regards,

DB49