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 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.

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 can be confirmed for each item

  • Several delivery dates can be confirmed for one item (these are called partial deliveries: that is, an item can 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. It may be necessary to ensure that the higher-level itemand its subitems are delivered together, for example, a bill of materialis 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 or subitems get to 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).

Example Example

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.

End of the example.

Example Example

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.

End of the example.

Integration

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

Prerequisites

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

You need to use 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 multiple partial deliveries, if there are several schedule lines)

    For sales order items that belong to the same delivery group, SAP CRM 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.

    Note Note

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

    End of the note.

    If all items or subitems belonging to the same delivery group were partially confirmed, then these confirmed quantities are delivered together in SAP ECC 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 Start of the navigation path Transactions Next navigation step BasicSettings Next navigation step Define Item Categories(Delivery Groupcolumn) End of the navigation path .

Note Note

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

End of the note.

Activities

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