Park and Hold 

Use

You can use this function to temporarily save purchase requisitions and purchase orders for materials and services, in order to complete the data at a later date, or have another user check whether the data is correct. There are two ways of saving temporarily. If your purchasing document contains incomplete or incorrect data, you can hold the document and process it again later. If you have completed your purchasing document and want to trigger a workflow for checking budget data, you can park the document.

Prerequisites

●      To work with this function, you must use the single-screen transactions (ME51N or ME52N for purchase requisitions and ME21N or ME22N for purchase orders).

●      Before you can use the park and hold function, you must activate it in Customizing. In Customizing for materials management, choose Purchasing → Environment Data → Activate 'Park and Hold' in Purchasing Documents.

Note that you cannot reverse this setting.

 

Features

You can use the following two modes for saving temporarily:

●      Hold (completeness status: H)

If you have entered incomplete header data and at least one item for a purchase requisition or purchase order, but want to complete the purchasing document at a later date, you can hold the document. You can also hold purchase requisitions that are either incomplete or incorrect when you save them.

By choosing Continue, you trigger the closing check of the document, and the system writes all errors that occur to a message log. The held document gets a document number and is displayed in the document overview, but no data or statistics in logistics, controlling (CO), or funds management are updated. Held purchase requisitions are not MRP relevant. Held purchase orders are MRP relevant. If you create a purchase order with reference to a purchase requisition and hold it, the data of the associated purchase requisition is updated. If you hold a release order, the data of the associated outline agreement is updated.

●      Park (completeness status: P)

If you want to have the budget data of a purchase requisition or purchase order checked, you can park the document. You can only park a purchasing document if the closing check finds no errors other than incorrect budget data. By means of a workflow that you can define yourself, an accounting clerk in CO receives a message that budgeting data in a parked document needs to be checked. To ensure a smooth process flow, users in materials management and controlling should have the authorization to change, delete, and post documents. Another instance can be responsible for releasing the documents.

Parked documents are displayed with their document number in the document overview, and errors are written to a message log. Unlike held documents, parked documents lead to updates in material management data and are used for evaluations in the system. Furthermore, parked purchase requisitions and purchase orders are MRP relevant.

 

Hold ‑ Park ‑ Post

You can save changes to incomplete or incorrect documents either with the last selected status or with a status denoting greater completeness. The completeness status of the document (held or parked) is displayed in the header line during processing.

●      When you process held documents again, you can either hold them again, park them, or post them.

●      When you process parked documents again, you can park them again but cannot hold them.

●      Once documents have been posted, you can no longer park or hold them.

Independently of the park and hold functionality for incomplete documents, you can use a release procedure to determine that follow-on documents can only be created for released purchase requisitions and purchase orders. However, you cannot release parked or held documents.

 

Follow-On Activities for Parked and Held Documents

You cannot trigger follow-on processes for held and parked purchasing documents. For example, you cannot create purchase orders or outline agreements with reference to a held or parked purchase requisition. You cannot create goods receipts or invoices with reference to an incomplete purchase order, either.

 

Converting Requisitions into Purchase Orders

Purchase orders that you create with reference to a completely saved purchase requisition, and then park or hold, lead to an update of the purchase requisition data. To ensure that you cannot create held or parked purchase orders that exceed the requirements of the related purchase requisition, the system adjusts the open quantity and ordered quantity in the item details of the purchase requisition accordingly. You can then only create further purchase orders for the purchase requisition if the open quantity is not exceeded.

 

List Display for Purchase Requisitions and Purchase Orders

You can choose to display held or parked purchase requisitions and purchase orders in the list display. To do this, in the Document Incomplete field, enter the completeness status you require (H – Held or P – Parked). If you leave this field blank, all documents are displayed, regardless of their completeness status. If you only want to display completely saved documents, exclude documents with the statuses Held (H) and Parked (P).

 

Mass Maintenance

You can also change data in held or parked documents with mass maintenance. However, you cannot change the completeness status that is displayed in transactions MEMASSPO and MEMASSRQ (H – Held, P – Parked, or Blank – Saved completely) with mass maintenance.

 

Contract Release Order

You can also park or hold contract release orders. In the release documentation, you see the completeness status of the document (H, P, or Blank) when you display and change the contract.