Working with Material Determination in Deliveries 

Material determination can be carried out in deliveries for newly entered items. This functions in the same way as material determination in sales documents and enables manually entered materials to be replaced automatically by other materials already specified in the system.

Material determination cannot be carried out for delivery items that have been copied from sales documents.

Dependence on Sales Document Type

Material determination in deliveries is dependent upon the document type of the underlying sales document. If material determination is activated for the respective sales document type in Customizing for Sales, it is also carried out for new items in deliveries that have been generated from sales documents.

For deliveries not created with reference to an order, material determination is activated in Customizing for Sales using sales document type DL (delivery w/o order).

Use

You can, for example, use material determination in deliveries in the following situations:

Maintaining Master Data

You control material determination by creating specific types of condition records. In the condition records you define which materials may be substituted by other materials and at what point in time this should occur.

For more information on material determination, refer to the section Material Determination.

Product Selection

In several industry sectors (especially in retail), the same product is often sold in different packaging, for example in standard and promotional packaging. When creating a sales order using product selection, you can either manually choose from several alternatives for packaging a product or have the system automatically propose an alternative depending on product availability or the priority of the individual alternatives.

You must first provide the necessary information for product selection in the system in the form of condition records.

If a delivery is created from a sales order with products relevant to product selection, the system carries out product selection again. Because of changes in availability, products or quantities that differ from those in the sales order may be proposed. This only applies, however, for automatic product selection.

For more detailed information on product selection, refer to the section Working with Product Selection