Department and Receiving Point 
Department and Receiving Point
Definition
Departments are subdivisions of a ship-to party. These might be, for example, different departments in a store, bays in a distribution center, or areas in a manufacturing plant.
Departments are assigned to receiving points, which in turn are assigned to unloading points. One receiving point may have several departments assigned to it, but each department is assigned to only one receiving point. By knowing a department, you can therefore also determine the receiving point and the unloading point.
Using departments and receiving points enables you to more finely specify the final destination for a shipment or portions of a shipment, thus reducing the time it takes for the goods to become available for the receiver’s use or sale.
A pallet load of merchandise is delivered to Bay 1 at a department store (unloading point). The shipment is broken down and delivered to one or more floors (internal receiving points). From there the packages are delivered to one or more departments, such as Housewares, Consumer Electronics, Health & Beauty Aids, or Women’s Dresses.
Use
The receiving point and department are located on the Business Data Detail Shipment screen, either at the header or item level. If the header contains this information, this becomes the default for all items, but you can override it for individual items if you wish. Items in a sales order may have different receiving points and/or departments.
You can print the receiving point and department on picking lists and delivery notes. If this information was included in the sales order, then it will automatically be inserted in these other documents; otherwise, you can enter it manually. (However, picking lists and delivery notes are not split by receiving point or department.)
You can specify that the department and receiving point are to be printed on billing documents. You can also specify that invoices are to be split by receiving point and department.
In Customizing for Retail (Retail
® C entral coordination ® Sales ® Sales order processing ® Maintain promotion/receiving point determination per sales document type) you can specify for each type of document whether or not automatic department and receiving point determination is to be done.Structure
The department and receiving points are fields in sales orders and delivery notes.
Integration
The system can automatically determine the appropriate department and receiving point for an article. To enable this you must first of all carry out the following:
In either case, you then assign valid departments and receiving points to the customer or site, and a department to each merchandise category. A merchandise category can only have one department.
When you enter an article on a sales order, for example, the system checks the merchandise category to which the article belongs, then checks the merchandise category information for that site or customer. The system then locates the corresponding department and receiving point for this article.