In Purchasing, you can maintain confirmations for purchase orders or scheduling agreements. The confirmations include, among other things, order acknowledgments, loading and transport confirmation and the actual shipping notification. These confirmations can serve purely for information purposes or the dates and quantities can be taken into account in material requirements planning.

Working with shipping notifications provides the planning department with a more exact planning procedure as more reliable information about the delivery to be received is available from the vendor between the order date and the desired delivery date.

In Customizing for Purchasing in the IMG activity Set up confirmation control, you have defined the confirmation control key and determined whether the individual confirmations in the material requirements planning should be taken into account or not.

In the MRP list or in the stock/requirements list, you can see which purchase order quantities have been either partially or completely reduced by more current shipping notification. The delivery quantity of the corresponding purchase order is reduced in the net requirements calculation by the notified quantity. If the total order quantity has been confirmed, only the shipping notification is displayed in the MRP list or in the stock/requirements list.

In the availability check, the shipping notification is considered as an available quantity, if the shipping notification was added to the scope of the check of the checking rule.

You must distinguish between the following cases:

• If you only select the purchase order when determining the scope of the check, shipping notifications are automatically taken into account.
• If you only select the shipping notification, only notified quantities are taken into account in the availability check, whereas the purchase orders are not.

You can thus check the shipping notifications in the material requirements planning: