Reservation (SAP Library - Inventory Management and Physical Inventory (MM-IM))

Reservation

Purpose

With this component, you make a request to the warehouse to keep materials ready for withdrawal at a later date and for a certain purpose. This simplifies and accelerates the goods receipt process.

A reservation for goods issue can be requested by various departments for various account assignment objects (such as cost center, order, asset, etc.).

Features

The purpose of a reservation is to ensure that a material will be available when it is needed. It also serves to simplify and accelerate the goods issue process and prepare the tasks at the point of goods issue.

It is also important that reservations are taken into account by Material Requirements Planning (MRP), which means that required materials are procured in time if they are out of stock.

Planning a Goods Issue

You can handle both planned goods issues and unplanned goods issues.

You can also use reservations to plan goods receipts and stock transfers (see Planning Goods Receipts and Planning Stock Transfers and Transfer Postings). This section deals only with reservations for goods issues.

Information in a Reservation

In a reservation, information is stored that is relevant for the goods issue and for materials planning, for example:

What? (which material?)
How much? (in which quantity?)
When? (for which requirement date?)
From where? (from which plant or warehouse?)
To where? (to which recipient or customer?)

A reservation document consists of a header and at least one item. The header contains general data about the reservation (creator, movement type, account assignment). The items describe individual planned movements (material, quantity, requirement date).

You can create a reservation for exactly one purpose only; that is, in a reservation, you can only enter one movement type and one account assignment object (for example, a cost center).

Reservation Level

The system makes reservations at plant or storage-location level. For materials handled in batches, you can also create reservations at batch level.

Manual and Automatic Reservations

The R/3 System supports manual and automatic reservations. Manual reservations are entered directly by the user. Automatic reservations are generated automatically by the R/3 System. There are two types of automatic reservations:

Reservations for orders, networks, WBS elements:

When an order, a network, or a project is created, the components from the warehouse are reserved automatically.

Stock transfer reservations:

If reorder point planning is used at storage location level and the available stock on hand falls below the reorder point, the system generates a stock transfer reservation in the plant for the replenishment quantity.

You cannot manually process automatic reservations. For example, it is not possible to change reservations for an order directly. You have to change the components in the order. The system then updates the reservation automatically.

What are the Results of a Reservation?

When a reservation is entered, the following events occur in the system:

The system creates a reservation document, which serves as proof of the request.
In the material master record, total stock and unrestricted-use stock of the material remain unchanged. Reserved stock is increased by the reserved quantity.
In MRP, available stock is reduced by the reserved quantity. This is visible in the current stock/requirements list. The reservation causes an entry to be made in the requirements planning file.

Displaying Reserved Stock

There are two functions available for displaying reserved stock (also refer to Reporting in Inventory Management ):

Stock overview at plant level:

When you use this function, the system displays the total reserved stock for the material at plant level. From the stock overview, you can choose Environment ® Reservations to display a list of the reservations for the material.

Current stock/requirements list:

When you use this function, the system lists all of the open reservations for the material at plant level, along with the reserved quantity for each.