A customer scheduling agreement is an outline agreement with the customer containing delivery quantities and dates. These are then entered as schedule lines in a delivery schedule. You can either create schedule lines when you create the scheduling agreement or you can create them later.

You fulfill a scheduling agreement by creating the deliveries in the schedule as they become due. You process deliveries for a scheduling agreement in exactly the same way as you process a normal delivery. After you have carried out the delivery, the system updates the Delivered quantity field in the scheduling agreement item with the delivery quantity. The following graphic shows the document flow for scheduling agreements.

You would use this component if you had outline agreements with the customer that contained future delivery quantities of materials that would be sent at certain times within a fixed time period.

If you work with scheduling agreements for the component supplier industry you also need to choose the "Electronic Data Interchange" (EDI) component.

The same functions are at your disposal for processing scheduling agreements as there are for the sales order, including pricing and availability checks.

In addition to the standard scheduling agreements you can also manage scheduling agreements for the component supplier industry, with their special features that include:

• Working with scheduling agreements with EDI output
• Entering scheduling agreements in a forecast or just-in-time (JIT) delivery schedule
• Using different types of cumulative quantities
• Taking into account the automatic fiscal year change used by the component supplier
• Managing engineering change statuses
• Storing packing proposals
• Creating correction deliveries for the scheduling agreement
• Working with external service agents