Procurement Using Vendor Confirmations
Purpose
Working with confirmations has the advantage that Materials Planning does not have to depend solely on the delivery dates and quantities set out in purchase orders or the delivery schedules of scheduling agreements.
Confirmations enable you to plan more exactly, since during the time-span between the order date and the desired delivery date you receive increasingly more reliable information from the vendor regarding the anticipated delivery.
Furthermore, you can monitor all confirmations and issue expediters in respect of outstanding order acknowledgments.
If you receive only order acknowledgments from your vendors, the receipt of which you wish to monitor, you just enter the acknowledgment number. In this case, no information on confirmed quantities and delivery dates is available to you in support of the procurement process.
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Confirmations from the Purchasing ViewpointIntegration
The information from incoming confirmations is available to the inventory management and goods receiving functions.
You can specify whether each confirmation category is relevant to materials planning in Customizing. If a confirmation is MRP-relevant, the data on quantities and delivery dates appears in the current
Stock/Requirements List. One or more confirmation categories can be MRP-relevant, but the last confirmation that is expected must be GR-relevant.When you post a goods receipt, the stock/requirements list is updated. That is to say, the quantities and delivery dates from MRP- and GR-relevant confirmations are deleted from the list at this time.
For more information, refer to the sections
Confirmations from the Materials Planning Viewpoint and Confirmations from the Inventory Management Viewpoint.
If you wish to post a goods receipt with reference to vendor confirmations, you should set the GR assignment indicator for the desired confirmation category in Customizing for Purchasing.
Assignment to previously received confirmations at the time of goods receipt (GR) means that the default GR quantity is taken from the associated confirmation and that the GR reduces or cancels out exactly the associated confirmation in the stock/requirements list.
Please note that you can only post a goods receipt if a confirmation (e.g. in the form of an inbound delivery) has previously been entered.
If the goods receipt occurs before the inbound delivery, you will not be able to post the GR. This is because in that case there is no inbound delivery to which the latter can be assigned.
For more information, refer to the section
Confirmation-Related Goods Receipt.Prerequisites
In order to be able to receive confirmations from your vendors, you must maintain the confirmation control facility in Customizing for Purchasing (Confirmations ® Confirmation control):
In the standard system, the relevant internal confirmation categories are already assigned to the external confirmation categories for order acknowledgment and shipping notification. (Customizing for Purchasing: Confirmations ® Confirmation Control ® Internal Confirmation Categories.)
If you do not assign any internal confirmation categories, you will not be able to receive vendor confirmations via EDI.
If you enter order acknowledgment numbers solely in order to gain a general overview of which vendor acknowledgments you need to chase up, you need not make any settings in Customizing.
Process Flow
The following process flow gives you a broad outline of the functions available to you if you work with vendor confirmations.
For each item, you can specify whether order acknowledgments can be expedited (i.e. whether messages can be sent urging the vendor to send an overdue acknowledgment). This cannot be done with respect to the other categories of confirmation.
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If you have set the Acknowledgment requirement indicator in the PO and your vendor has not sent an acknowledgment, you can expedite the latter (send the vendor a message urging its submission).
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You enter the data from the acknowledgment in the purchase order or scheduling agreement.
If you received the acknowledgment via EDI, the system processes the data automatically.
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Manual Maintenance of Confirmations and Receiving Confirmations via EDIThis applies to all confirmation categories (i.e. order acknowledgments, inbound deliveries, loading confirmations, etc.).
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If you have received your vendor’s shipping notification via EDI, the system processes the data automatically and creates a separate inbound-delivery document.
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Creating an Inbound Delivery Against a Shipping Notification.See also:
Example: Procurement Process Using Vendor Confirmations