In the apparel and footwear industry, you often work with vendors of varying size from all over the world. The ability to process order confirmations via the Internet is therefore of great benefit in this business scenario. You will receive confirmations from your vendor without delay, even if they do not work with an SAP system.

Before your vendor can enter order confirmations via the Internet, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled:

• Definition of external confirmation categories and confirmation keys in Customizing
  You can have your vendor confirm various steps of a complex process via the Internet. You specify in the confirmation control in Customizing how detailed the confirmation should be. To do this choose Materials Management ® Purchasing ® Confirmations ® Set Up Confirmation Control.

• Define external confirmation categories such as order acknowledgement, tailor-making, ironing, sewing, and so on.
• Define a confirmation control key, which you store in the purchasing data of the purchasing info record or directly enter in the item detail of the corresponding purchasing document.
• For each confirmation control key specify which process steps should be confirmed in which sequence.

You evaluate the order confirmations your vendor enters via the Internet:

• How your vendor enters the confirmations
  After your vendor has logged on with their customer number and password, they confirm the purchase orders you have placed by doing the following:

• Your vendor first selects the purchase order and then the purchase order item for which they want to enter a confirmation.
• Your vendor enters which step of the process they would like to confirm. They will then be able to select from the external confirmation categories that you defined, which are displayed in a list field.
• The stockkeeping units, which belong to the selected purchase order items as schedule lines, are then listed in a table. In addition to the delivery date and the purchase order quantity at SKU level, the already confirmed quantities, confirmed delivery date, open quantities, and the confirmation date are also displayed in this table.

• The vendor enters the quantity they want to confirm in the table column Open quantity.
• The vendor enters the date on which the confirmed process step will be completed in the table column Confirmation date.
• By saving the confirmation, the quantity entered will be transferred to the table field Confirmed quantity and the confirmation date entered will be transferred to the table column Confirmed delivery date.

• Overview in the purchase order of the received confirmations
  You can immediately see the confirmations that your vendor entered and saved via the Internet in your purchase orders (Item ® Confirmations ® Overview). If the external confirmation category is flagged as MRP-relevant in Customizing, incoming confirmations of this process step will also be considered in the MRP.