Requirements Planning: Using Delivery Relationships 

Use

You can use the delivery relationship function to determine which recipients (plants and/or customers) are supplied by a distribution center and with which articles.

It is useful to determine delivery relationships if a forecast is carried out for the distribution center on the basis of consumption values for the recipients supplied by this distribution center (Post Distribution Forecasting). As it is not possible to enter any information in the master data of the distribution center about which recipients are supplied by a distribution center, it is necessary to restrict the recipients that are supplied.

Implementation Considerations

To be able to use the functions, you need to make the settings in Customizing. In Customizing for determining delivery relationships, you can determine how a determination takes place. Here you set up profiles for determining delivery relationships.

You can also determine in Customizing which document types the system should use to determine delivery relationships between the distribution center and recipients. If you want to determine recipients using the ‘existing documents’ method, use these Customizing settings to create further restrictions for determining delivery relationships using document types. 

Features

Using the delivery relationship features for Post Distribution Forecasting, you can maintain delivery relationships as follows:

·        With transaction WDRD1, you determine the delivery relationships.

With these functions, it is possible to look at the individual processes involved in determining the delivery relationships using a flow trace. Use this function to help you recognize and deal with any problems that may occur when determining delivery relationships. Logs that are generated are not saved.

These functions also enable you to work in a test mode. In the test mode, you can simulate the determination of delivery relationships, without the data being posted to the database.

In order to achieve the best possible performance, you can process these functions in parallel. Use parallel processing when you want to process large amounts of data. 

·        With transaction WDRD2, you can display and change the delivery relationships that are determined. Use this function to check and, if necessary, alter delivery relationships.

·        With transaction WDRD3 you can just display the delivery relationships.

·        With transaction WDRD4 you can delete the delivery relationships determined. Use this function regularly to delete delivery relationships that are no longer required from the database table.

With these functions, it is possible to look at the individual processes involved in deleting the delivery relationships using a flow trace.Use this function to help you recognize and deal with any problems that may occur when deleting delivery relationships. Logs that are generated are not saved.

These functions also enable you to work in a test mode. In the test mode, you can simulate the deletion of delivery relationships, without the data being posted to the database.

In order to achieve the best possible performance, you can process these functions in parallel. Use parallel processing when you want to process large amounts of data.

You can carry out the functions for determining and deleting delivery relationships online as well as in the background. SAP recommends that you carry them out in the background. Online processing is only recommended when processing very small amounts of data or for testing and simulation purposes.

Constraints

Determining delivery relationships is a very runtime intensive process.

In order to avoid runtime bottlenecks, you should make sure whether, and especially to what extent, it is worth determining delivery relationships.

If a determination has been set at material level, the method of determination and the scope of the checks should be kept down to a minimum.

Delivery relationships should only be completely redetermined if really necessary (that is, for significant changes to the existing delivery relationships) and should not be carried out all at the same time for large amounts of data.