Committing Business Transaction Items for
Delivery 
Use
It may be necessary for a vendor to commit to the customer that the goods are delivered by a certain date.
For example, the customer orders some technical equipment that takes a long time to manufacture, and relies on the fact that the equipment is delivered by a certain date. Perhaps the customer plans the production based on this date, or has in turn, promised the customer to deliver by a certain date. Every day that the customer does not receive this equipment, the customer is losing money. In some cases, the vendor has to pay penalties to the customer, if the goods have not arrived by this date.
To work out the commitment date, you agree with the customer on a maximum time period starting from the posting date of the business transaction. This is called the agreed delivery time. The system calculates the commitment date using the agreed delivery time together with a setting in Customizing, and records the result in the commitment schedule line for the business transaction item. Of course, you can change the commitment date manually.
Integration
Availability Check
When the system carries out availability check for an item, goods can be confirmed for a certain date. This confirmation date is displayed in the confirmation schedule line for the item. In the schedule lines you can compare the confirmation date with the commitment date to see whether the goods can still be delivered on time without jeopardizing the commitment to the customer. This is especially important if a subsequent availability check is carried out – either because someone changes the business transaction manually, or because it has been changed by backorder processing. In such cases the confirmation date could change.
Status
If the confirmation date of the item is changed so that this date comes after the commitment date (for example, during backorder processing), then this item is overdue. The Item is overdue status is displayed in the item on the Status tab under System Status.
You can display business transaction items that are overdue. You can then inform the customer accordingly or change the confirmation date manually, if necessary. To display the overdue items:
...
1. Choose Sales ® Maintain Sales Transactions or Maintain Sales Contracts.
2. In the Search tab of the locator select Item is overdue in the Status field.
Prerequisites
The following settings are necessary in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management:
· You maintain the agreed delivery time in the Agreed Delivery Time field in both the header and the item of the business transaction.
To display this field for a particular transaction type and item category, the following settings are required in Customizing under Basic Functions ® Date Management:
¡ The technical name DLVTIME is defined in the standard system as a duration under Define Date Profile Types, Duration Types and Date Rules ® Duration.
¡ You assign the duration to a date profile under Define Date Profile. Select the relevant date profile and choose Durations.
You can specify a default value for the agreed delivery time by double-clicking on DLVTIME and entering the value in the Duration field in the Default Values section.
To see the screen area where the duration is to be displayed, select DLVTIME and choose Screen Areas: Duration.
¡ The date profile is assigned to
§ The business transaction type under Assign Date Profile to Transaction Type
§ The item category under Assign Date Profile to Item Category
¡ You control how the system should calculate the commitment date under Assign Date Profile to Transaction Type in the Commitment Date field.
For more
information on Date Management, see the SAP Library under mySAP Customer Relationship Management ® Enterprise
® Enterprise Sales
® Quotation and Order
Processing ® Order Processing
® Basic
Functions ® 
Date Management
(CRM-BF-DAT).
· If you need to carry out pricing based on the commitment date, you need to make this data available for the Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC). You do this in the IMG under Customer Relationship Management ® Basic Functions ® Pricing ® Pricing in the Business Transaction ® Date and Duration Types and then Assignment of Durations. The relevant entry is DLVTIME.
You also need
to customize the pricing in the IPC to take the agreed delivery time into
consideration. For more information, see the SAP Library under mySAP Customer Relationship Management ® CRM Enterprise ® Enterprise Sales ® Quotation and Order
Management ® Billing
® Basic
Functions ® Pricing ® The Pricing
Process.
Features
The system calculates the commitment date and creates a commitment schedule line with the commitment date for the relevant item.
Figure 1 shows an example of a quotation with a commitment schedule line.
The posting date of the quotation is June 1. The system adds the agreed delivery time of 2 weeks to calculate the commitment date of June 15. It creates a commitment schedule line for item 10 with the commitment date of June 15.
The date of the commitment schedule line depends on settings in Customizing This is explained under Activities below.
Restrictions
The agreed delivery time and the commitment schedule lines are not transferred to the SAP R/3 System.
If a business transaction is created in the SAP R/3 System and transferred to CRM Online, the agreed delivery time and the commitment schedule line are not transferred to CRM Online.
Activities
You Specify an Agreed Delivery Time
You specify an agreed delivery time, that is, the time period that the customer grants the vendor from the date the business transaction is posted (posting date). The system calculates the commitment date by adding the agreed delivery time to the posting date of the business transaction.
You can enter the agreed delivery time for the business transaction
· In the header in the General tab in the Agreed Delivery Time field
In this case the agreed delivery time is the same for all items.
· In an item
In this case the agreed delivery time is valid for the specific item.
The System Calculates the Commitment Date
The system calculates the commitment date for each item based on
· The posting date of the business transaction item
· The setting in the Commitment date field for the business transaction type in Customizing under Customer Relationship Management ® Transactions ® Basic Settings ® Define Transaction Types
Example
For examples on how the system uses the settings to calculate the commitment date, see:
· Example 1: Calculation of the Commitment Date