Grouping Sales Order Items for Delivery 

Use

At times you may need to ensure that certain items in a sales order are delivered at the same time.

For more information on the sales order, see the SAP Library for mySAP Customer Relationship Management under CRM Enterprise ® Sales ® Quotation and Order Processing ® Sales Order Processing.

 

Delivering Certain Items at the Same Time

Availability check and scheduling can be carried out for sales order items. The results of the availability check and scheduling are entered in the sales order as confirmation schedule lines.

Since these functions are carried out individually for each item, the confirmed delivery dates which are determined for each schedule line can (and usually do) vary. This means that

·        A different delivery date could be confirmed for each item

·        Several delivery dates could be confirmed for one item (these are called partial deliveries: that is, an item could have several confirmation schedule lines, each with its own confirmation date)

Therefore, it may be necessary to ensure that certain or all items are delivered together.

Delivering Certain Subitems at the Same Time

A sales order item could include one or more subitems. For example:

 

Higher-Level Item	Subitem(s)
bill of material	components
product	free goods

It may be necessary to ensure that the higher-level item and its subitems are delivered together, for example, a bill of material is delivered as a complete entity, or a product and the corresponding free goods are delivered together.

Use of Delivery Groups

You can ensure that certain items and/or subitems arrive at the customer at the same time by assigning them to a delivery group. You can also specify in the sales order header that all the sales order items and subitems should be assigned to the same delivery group (complete delivery).

This example shows a sales order with several items with different confirmed delivery dates. These items are not assigned to a delivery group, which means that these items will be delivered with several deliveries.

As in the first example, this second example shows a sales order with several items with different confirmed delivery dates. However, in this case these items are assigned to a delivery group which means that they will be delivered with one delivery.

Integration

The necessary information regarding delivery groups and complete delivery is transferred to the SAP R/3 System where delivery of the sales orders is carried out.

Prerequisites

To use delivery groups, it is not necessary for availability check and scheduling to be carried out for the sales order items or subitems. However, if these functions do take place, availability check and planning must both take place in the SAP APO System. For more information, see Availability Check and Planning in SAP APO.

You need to use an SAP APO 3.0A or a higher release.

Features

When you group sales order items or subitems using delivery groups you can ensure that

·        All items are delivered with one delivery (this is called complete delivery)

·        Several items are delivered with one delivery

·        One item is delivered with a single delivery (as opposed to with partial deliveries, if there are several schedule lines) 

For sales order items that belong to the same delivery group, the CRM Online Application will automatically determine a common delivery date and time. It does this by generating schedule lines called delivery group schedule lines which all contain a common delivery date (called the delivery group date). This date is taken from the confirmation schedule line with the latest confirmed delivery date.

If an item is not relevant for availability check, then the delivery group date for that item will be the same as the requested delivery date.

If all items or subitems belonging to the same delivery group are partially confirmed, then these confirmed quantities are delivered in the SAP R/3 System with one delivery. A subsequent delivery takes place for the remaining quantity when stock is available. If an item cannot be confirmed (that is, it has no confirmation schedule lines), it is not delivered until stock is available.

Automatic Grouping of Subitems

You may want to ensure that subitems belonging to a higher-level item are always delivered at the same time. For example, a bill of material should always be delivered as a complete entity (that is, a computer consists of a monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive, and these should always be delivered at the same time). Or you want to ensure that free goods are always delivered together with the product in the higher-level item.

You control this in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Transactions ® Basic Settings ® Define Item Categories (Delivery Group column).

If the sales transaction is marked in the header for complete delivery, then this will override any settings you make in Customizing.

Activities

You enter the delivery group in the sales order item in the Delivery group field, and the delivery group date in the Delivery group date field.

Depending on the settings of the SAP List Viewer (ALV grid control), it may be that these fields are not displayed on the screen. To display these fields:

·         Choose  to display more icons.

·         Click on the right part of  (Select layout).

·         Choose Change layout.

·         Under Column Set mark Delivery Group and move it to Columns by choosing Show selected fields.

·         Repeat this procedure for the Delivery Group Date field.

·         Choose Enter.

For more information, see the SAP R/3 Library under Getting Started ® Lists ® SAP List Viewer (ALV) Grid Control (BC-SRV-ALV) ® Layouts.