Value-Added Service Materials (SAP Library

Value-Added Service Materials

Use

A customer not only wants you to generally label, package, or otherwise service their goods, but also has very specific instructions that require special materials.

Example

Your customer may want to have a very special label that you find easier to create to their exact specifications and carry it as a material which you enter in this customer's orders manually or as a VAS condition. This avoids having to use ticketing/labeling text types to send long, complicated instructions to your warehouse.

Especially when goods are delivered directly to a department store to be offered for sale there, your customer may provide you all necessary materials for labeling, packing or other services. You are then requested to prepare the order for sale by using those materials.

In this case it may be important for you to know at any time how much of the customer’s stock is still available at your site so that you can ask for replenishment when needed. You can do this when you carry such materials as VAS materials in stock. With the proper settings for the availability check, the system not only controls the stock of the ordered goods, but also that of the VAS materials.

Features

Note

For more complicated customer requirements, for example a combination of materials such as the insertion of belts (as additional material) in slacks or skirts, you may consider creating prepacks and assortments or using bills of materials:

Value-added service materials are normally order items that are free of charge. You charge for applying them, as for other value-added services, via charge codes. There is no pricing for value-added service materials in the sales order. Remember this if you want to use an AFS or standard material as a VAS material, for which you have defined fixed prices.
It is not possible to use a material with a grid as a value-added service material. If you were to assign one as a value-added material to an AFS material you would not be able to influence whether the proper grid values of both materials would be combined in the warehouse later.
It also means that you cannot use a value-added service material, such as a belt, as a normal AFS material in other orders, since you have no grid values for this material.
If you use multiple value-added service materials in large orders at schedule line level and you utilize the availability check for those also, this may negatively affect the performance when processing the document.

Characteristics of a value-added material

Creating a value-added material is similar to creating a normal AFS material, except for the points described below:

The general and sales-related item category group of value-added materials must be J3AV. If you do not change the default settings, then the system always finds the item category TANN for an item that is free of charge for your value-added materials.
Do not assign a grid to your value-added services, because you have no possibility to specify a VAS material via grid or line entry in the application. If you were to use a grid material, your sales document would never be complete.
Do not assign a coverage strategy to a value-added service material.

Value-added service materials in the application

When maintaining value-added services via conditions or proposals or directly in an order item, you always have the option of adding a VAS material to a value-added service category which you must enter in any case. This is basically just an enhancement or closer specification of the value-added service for this material.

Example

Customer XYZ buys a certain type of shoes from you for which their marketing department has designed an especially striking shoe box with a closing strap. The customer provides you the boxes and wants your warehouse to pack each pair of shoes in one of those boxes and affix a label with customer material number, EAN/UPC code, and customer sales price to each.

You can define this in the system by creating a value-added service material for the customer’s shoe boxes and by using a VAS condition for the material „Shoes" which is to be boxed to assign two value-added services to the customer: one for the labeling, the other for packing a pair of shoes in a shoe box. To let your warehouse know to only use the customer’s shoe boxes, you specify your new value-added service material Shoe box/Customer XYZ here.

SD Indicator for specifying the relevance of a value-added material item

If you activate the SD indicator when specifying a value-added service material, you have the option to display the value-added services material as additional item. If you do not activate it, then the system treats a VAS item with VAS material like one without; in other words, the system updates the data in the background. You can still display the data, for example by calling up the overview of VAS data in the document or by displaying the value-added services of an item.

Note

You cannot have the system create items for VAS materials in multi-store orders. However, with the activated SD indicator the VAS materials are carried along in the background. For an MSO II you can create items for the individual sales orders after the explosion.

If you have activated the SD indicator, but have not defined the automatic creation of items for your customer or in Customizing for the sales document or item category, then you must manually initiate the generation of items in the document via Overview ® Value Added Service ® Create VAS items. Preventing the automatic generation of VAS items is especially important for large documents because this process could negatively impact the system performance.