You have arranged with your vendor that that latter is to send you acknowledgments in respect of purchase orders or outline agreements received from your company. (Note: both kinds of acknowledgment are generally referred to as "order acknowledgments" in the system. The corresponding EDIFACT term is "order response" (ORDRSP).)

You have the option of working exclusively with acknowledgments. The acknowledgment is then purely informative in nature, since only the acknowledgment number is recorded in the system.

If you wish to receive different kinds of vendor confirmation, such as both order acknowledgments and shipping notifications (also known as advance shipping notices - ASNs), it is possible for quantities and dates to be entered in the system automatically).

To work with several categories of vendor confirmation, you must:

• Enter a confirmation control key on the item detail screen

• Set up the confirmation control facility in Customizing for Purchasing (Purchasing ® Confirmations ® Set up Confirmation Control). There you can specify the order in which you expect confirmations from your vendors, for example.

• Specify tolerances for date and price checks
• Allow vendor material changes (VMat indicator)
• Adopt vendor price changes (Price indicator)

When an acknowledgment is received in the form of an incoming EDI message, the system checks whether a confirmation control key has been entered in the relevant PO or outline purchase agreement.

• If there is no confirmation control key, only the acknowledgment number is entered on the item detail screen.

• If there is a confirmation control key, the system updates the confirmation overview. That is to say, the dates and quantities set out in the acknowledgment that has just been received are recorded and taken into account in the overview. To view acknowledgments that have been received, choose Item ® Confirmations ® Overview from the item overview. Column C (creation indicator) contains the value 3, meaning that the acknowledgment was received via EDI. The system also enters the IDoc number in the External document column.

When an acknowledgment is received via EDI, the system automatically checks quantities, prices, and dates. In checking quantities, it applies the over- and underdelivery tolerances set for the item. You can set tolerances for prices and delivery dates in Customizing for Purchasing under Set up Confirmation Control.

The tolerances you define apply to all vendors. Using the enhancement MM06E001 provided by SAP, you can specify that the tolerances do not apply to certain vendors.

If the acknowledged quantities, prices, and dates vary from those set out in the PO or purchase agreement, the system issues a warning message. In this case, the purchasing document is not updated.