Stock Determination 

Use

Stock determination enables you to implement various strategies to withdraw material for goods issues and stock transfers. You configure these strategies in Customizing. Based on the material requirements entered, the R/3 system determines how and when the material should be withdrawn, and from which storage locations and stocks.

When planning your materials requirements, it is not always important that you define the stocks and storage locations from which the materials are later to be withdrawn. Automatic stock determination takes care of this decision for you, thus preventing you from defining these parameters too early and restricting your business processses unnecessarily. The R/3 system does not determine the values you require until the goods movement is posted.

Based on the stock determination strategy you predefine, the system makes decisions on material withdrawal depending on the material, plant, and the business process.

You can use stock determination for the following stocks:

Scenario 1:

The backflushing of material in repetitive manufacturing or for a production order should be carried out for a company’s own stock first of all and then for vendor consignment stock. The most reasonable vendor’s stock should be used first.

Scenario 2:

There is always a preferred vendor for all forms of material withdrawal. Material should be withdrawn from this vendor’s stock first. If there are several preferred vendors, you can use split valuation for price and quantity.

Scenario 3:

When staging material for production, you should firstly withdraw from a central buffer store a particular component manufactured in-house. When this store is empty, you should be able to withdraw the components from the issue storage location.

Scenario 4:

If you cannot cover the requirements from the stocks on-hand, you should withdraw the remaining quantity from the pipeline supply.

Integration

Stock determination functions are of significance to the integration of the R/3 System as a whole, and can be used in several R/3 application components. You can use stock determination in the following application components:

In Customizing, you can define how stock determination interacts with the settings of the Warehouse Management System and Batch Determination.

Prerequisites

In order to work with stock determination, you must configure the following:

Activities

The R/3 System can carry out stock determination in two ways:

Using this procedure, you do not have any way of intervening in the stock determination process as processing only takes place in the background. It is entirely up to the R/3 System to determine the stock from which materials are withdrawn and posted.

If you have configured online processing in Customizing, you can have the R/3 System display the result of stock determination in a dialog box and you can change the result manually.

If the stock determination procedure did not remove materials from the stock you requested, you can only cancel this posting via a reverse posting in the application you are using.

You should always prepare each strategy thoroughly and configure and test the application components extensively before you start using them.