Scheduling for Items with Individual Procurement

If you create a sales order for which the determined delivery date differs from the requested delivery date, the Purchase Order Scheduling dialog box appears. In this window the determined delivery date is displayed as the proposed delivery date.

If the customer accepts this delivery date, select the Fix qty/date field to fix the date and the confirmed quantity. The provision date determined by the scheduling of the confirmed quantity is copied into the corresponding purchase requisition as the delivery date. If the customer requests that you deliver the goods earlier than the system can confirm, leave the field empty. In this case the provision date for the requested delivery date is copied into the purchase requisition. This is based on the assumption that it is still possible to deliver on the requested delivery date by shortening the procurement lead time, for example.

During the automatic scheduling of individual purchase order items, the lead times determined by Purchasing, such as the delivery processing time and the purchasing processing time, are also taken into account.

The material availability date, which is related to the material procurement settings, determines the scheduling for a sales order item with individual procurement. This date is the end point of procurement scheduling and the starting point for determination of a delivery directly to a customer.

The determination of the material availability date is based on the following Customizing and master data setting:

The starting point for procurement scheduling is the release date of a purchase requisition for a sales order item with individual procurement. The system adds the purchase requisition processing time (in working days) and the planned delivery time (in calendar days). If the resulting date is not a working day, the next working day is set as the vendor’s delivery date to the delivery plant. Finally, the goods receipt processing time is added (in working days) to determine the material availability date.

To avoid early confirmation, when the BAdI calculates a delivery date that is earlier than the requested delivery date for a given sales order item, this date is ignored. Instead, the material availability date calculated by the system is set as the delivery date.

The starting point for complete scheduling is a customer’s requested delivery date. Firstly, the system determines the material availability date based on the requested delivery date by performing backward scheduling of the shipment. It then does backward scheduling of the procurement to determine the purchase requisition's release date.

If the purchase requisition's release date is the same as the current date or is in the future, there is a sufficient time frame between the current and requested delivery date. Therefore, the sales order item can be confirmed for the requested delivery date. However, if the release date or material availability date are in the past, the time frame is too short to meet the requested delivery date. The system will then assumes the current date as the release date as well as determine new material availability and delivery dates to the customer using forward scheduling.

When you create a purchase order from a purchase requisition, the system updates the schedule data of a sales order (SO) item according to a change in the delivery date of the related purchase order (PO) item. Subsequent changes to the PO item's delivery date will also lead to an update.

If you have specified a confirmation control key for the PO item with the confirmation category order acknowledgement, the system will update schedule data of the sales order item based on the delivery date of the order acknowledgement item. When updating schedule data, the system takes into account additional order acknowledgement items for partial quantities with different delivery dates. It then creates several schedule lines for sales order item accordingly.

If the confirmed quantity of the order acknowledgement or sum of partial quantities for several order acknowledgement items is lower than the order quantity, the system will update schedule data accordingly. It will not consider the delivery date for remaining PO items. Once you have entered an order acknowledgement, the system will no longer consider the change in delivery date of the PO item.

You can define Customizing settings for SO items with individual procurement so that the system updates schedule data of a SO item only when the corresponding PO item has been confirmed.

In addition, you can specify the relevant schedule line categories for SO items with individual procurement so that the system updates schedule line data from the goods receipt posting dates or delivery dates of shipping notifications. Shipping notifications received after a goods receipt posting will not lead to an update. Also, the system only considers the quantity of the event with the highest priority.