Customer Consignment Handling

[Former Member]

Hello there!

I know there's many posts on this topic, but unfortunately I can't find a good way to deal with this at our site properly, based on the answers I find.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter; I think we have to think new solutions.

I'm fairly new to the company's way of handling this, but in general:

- We deliver some products free of charge, as a KB-order; this is still our property and we want to be able to track this.

- We also deliver some products for "loan"/"borrow"/"testing"/"sample" purposes, also as a KB-order.

- We also use KB-orders for it's true purpose, filling up some customers stock for their planned operations.

Now, there's been a lot of manual handling on the follow-up aspect of this, and a fairly chaotic handling at that.

Mostly, we write a contract with a customer (not a SAP contract), agreeing to a specific period of testing for instance, but they haven't been using SAP to handle these dates. They create a standard KB-order, and it falls down to "someone.. has to follow-up".

There's no obvious fields to put an 'end date' in a KB-order as I see it, but thinking we can use a field for this purpose, and make it mandatory to fill for KB-orders. That way we can put together a query and track the orders.

We want to be able to track the consignment stocks and "validity date" (an agreed end date), but I struggle to find a good way of doing this.

MB58 (or table MSKU) offers a good overview, but theres some lacking in traceability (at least in larger scales), since the stock isn't linked to the KB-orders directly. As far as "end date"-agreements are concerned, we don't get any good information from this table.

Generally my question is:

Is there a good way or a good report to track "on which KB-order(s) did this stock come from"?

Immediate problem here is probably, when a customer gets several KB-orders on a material that's not batch-managed or serialized, a stock of 10 pieces (as seen in MB58) could very well be linked to several KB-orders.

With this way of thinking (company-wise), I'm thinking the only way to handle this information is to think of a KB-order as an active order. Untill all the material quantities are either picked up (KA) or issued (KE), the KB-order isn't completed.

If so, I would need to create a query with alot of linking to the VBFA-table I'm guessing.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling.. but do you have any thoughts on how we could handle this in a better way?

Are there any other order-types we could use that could handle this better?

Anxiously waiting for your valuable input

[VeselinaPeykova]

The way I see it, the real challenge would be how you would know in the case of consignment issue and multiple fill-ups, from which exact delivery it would be taken... And fill-up to issue can be m:n, so unless you have a way to get the customer to provide such information (I understand that he does not use SAP, but if you have some labeling either on SSCC or on document level, then maybe you can get some level of traceability).

Another approach is first-come/first-served, but it really depends on the industry specifics, volumes and legal requirements.

Can you check with the business how they currently manage such situations?

[Lakshmipathi]

These pre-sales activities can be captured if CRM is integrated

G. Lakshmipathi