In the last decade, component suppliers have had to follow the example of the manufacturers they supply: to survive the changing market, they have had to reduce costs, increase quality, and increase speed of delivery.

The push to improve business processes has brought about many innovations in the industry, such as just-in-time processing. SAP has taken these innovations into account to provide component suppliers with the functions they need to better manage their business.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) plays an important role in scheduling agreement processing.

There are two important differences between standard scheduling agreements and scheduling agreements for component suppliers. Scheduling agreements with delivery schedules:

• Contain schedule lines in the delivery schedule, not in the actual scheduling agreement item
• Can be influenced by the customer who requests the release of a specific quantity of materials on a specific day
  
  In standard scheduling agreements, quantities and dates are fixed. Quantites and dates in scheduling agreements with delivery schedules are constantly changed and updated.
  

We have added the following to standard scheduling agreements in order to accommodate the component supplier's special requirements:

• Control functions
  There are many settings for scheduling agreements, giving the component supplier the flexibility needed to create and control documents to meet a company's specific needs.

• A variety of sales functions for:

• Engineering changes
• Packing proposals
• Open quantities
• Returns

• A variety of functions in delivery schedules for:

• Intermediate documents (IDocs)
• Checks on incoming delivery schedules
• Requirements planning and delivery
• Tolerance levels
• Analysis
• Year changes
• Cumulative quantities

• Special shipping, billing, and external agent functions
• Planning delivery schedule processing
  
  The planning delivery schedule, a new type of internal schedule, has been designed to help the component supplier realistically plan requirements.
• Delivery order processing
  
  The delivery order is based on the pick-up sheet used in the Material Information System (MAIS).

Scheduling agreements with delivery schedules are not supported in assembly processing or third-party order processing.

Also, copying control for sales documents does not support copying data from a preceding document into scheduling agreements with delivery schedules. You can, however, copy data into other documents from scheduling agreements with delivery schedules using the Create with reference to function.