OTB-Relevant Contacts 

Use

Contracts often have a longer validity period than the periods in budget planning and are generally created before purchase orders are created. Nevertheless, you can integrate contracts and release orders into the OTB check. To do so, you distribute the contract value amongst the planning periods using the internal contract apportionment. There is no strict budget reservation, but when you do this an OTB reservation made.

You can configure the system so that a purchase order with reference to the contract (release order) can be created, even if the reserved contract budget is not sufficient. This enables you to give the release order priority treatment.

Seasonal procurement differentiates between OTB-relevant and non-OTB-relevant contracts. The system performs an OTB reservation for OTB-relevant contracts.

Integration

When creating and changing contracts using transactions ME31K and ME32K, the system also creates an internal contract apportionment if required. For more information, see Internal Contract Apportionment Processing.

For more information about using contracts, see Contract Use and Contract Budget.

You can monitor contract data in the Contract Monitor. For more information, see Contract Monitoring.

Prerequisites

You need to make the following settings for processing contracts in Customizing for Seasonal Procurement under OTB Check → OTB Check: Maintain Document Type-Dependent Settings in the Contract Customizing group box.

The settings each relate to one contract type.

OTB Relevance

You have flagged whether the contract is OTB-relevant.

Contract Reservation Level

You have set the header or item level for OTB reservation.

·        Quantity contract

Header- and item-related reservation are possible. Here you process quantities (in base unit of measure) that the system converts into values.

·        value contract

Only header-related reservation is possible. Here you distribute the target value directly amongst the delivery periods. The value entries at item level are of secondary importance and are not relevant from a business point of view.

With header-related OTB reservation, all items in the contract must be assigned to a single budget for each planning period.

With header-related quantity contracts, all items must have the same base unit of measure.

Distribution using target value or item quantities

You have defined whether the contract budget is to be distributed using the contract target value or the item quantities.

Error handling

You have defined how the system is to react to the following situations:

·        OTB reservation for the contract ends with a negative check result

·        A problem occurs in the OTB check when processing a purchase order with reference to a contract

You can choose whether the system issues a message and creates the document anyway, or cancels processing with an error, and does not create a document.

This means that provided you have made the appropriate system settings, you can still create a contract even if the result of the reservation check was negative.

Using offsets

If you want budget reservation to take effect in the case of release orders whose delivery date is after the end of the contract, you have configured an offset value. This states the number of delivery periods after the end of the contract validity to be taken into consideration for the OTB check.

Contract determination determines contracts for the order date, while the OTB reservation and check are delivery-date-related.

For more information about using contracts in Seasonal Procurement, see Contract Use and Contract Budget.