Receiving Confirmations via EDI in SAP MM

Use

If you have an EDI arrangement with your vendor, incoming order acknowledgments and shipping notifications can be received via EDI and entered in your system automatically.

• If you work exclusively with order acknowledgments, the confirmation has informative character. Only the acknowledgment number is recorded in the system.
• If you work with the confirmation categories order acknowledgment and inbound delivery, quantities and dates are recorded in the system. When a shipping notification is received via EDI, an inbound delivery is created, with a separate inbound-delivery document.

Prerequisites

If you wish to receive confirmations via EDI, the IDoc interface must have been installed. (For more on this topic, refer to the documentation CA - IDoc Interface/Electronic Data Interchange.)

If you wish to work with several confirmation categories, you must set up the confirmation control facility in Customizing for Purchasing and enter a confirmation control key on the item detail screen of a purchase order or outline purchase agreement.

Features

The processing of order acknowledgments received from your vendors via EDI differs from that of incoming shipping notifications received through the same medium.

Acknowledgment

When an order acknowledgment is received via EDI, the system checks whether just the acknowledgment number is to be recorded, or also quantities and dates.

• If you work exclusively with order acknowledgments, only the acknowledgment number is recorded on the item detail screen. (In this case, no confirmation control key exists.)
• If you work with several confirmation categories and therefore a confirmation control key exists in the PO or scheduling agreement item, the quantities and dates shown in the order acknowledgment are recorded by the system.

If you want to take a look at acknowledgments that have been received, choose Item ® Confirmations ® Overview from the item overview. Column C (creation indicator) contains the value 3, meaning that the acknowledgment was received via EDI.

Updating of PO When Several Partial Acknowledgments are Received

An order acknowledgment always relates to a PO item and not to individual schedule lines.

If a vendor initially sends a partial acknowledgment relating to only two schedule lines of an item with three schedule lines, you will expect further acknowledgments.
As soon as a further partial acknowledgment is received via EDI, all old acknowledgments recorded manually or via EDI are deleted. All old data is replaced by the data of the current acknowledgment.

You have ordered 50 tons of Steel 1 to be delivered on each of 10.15, 10.18, and 10.20. Your vendor sends you a partial acknowledgment for 50 tons of Steel 1 for 10.15 and 30 tons of Steel 1 for 10.18.

In a second acknowledgment, the vendor confirms delivery of the remaining 20 tons of Steel 1 on 10.18 and 50 tons of Steel 1 on 10.20.

Since a new acknowledgment received via EDI causes all existing acknowledgments to be overwritten, only 70 tons of Steel 1 are now shown as confirmed in the system, despite the fact that the vendor has actually confirmed a total of 150 tons of Steel 1.

In each new partial acknowledgment, your vendor should therefore list both the already confirmed quantities and the quantities confirmed via the current acknowledgment.

Quantity, Date, and Price Checks

When order acknowledgments are received via EDI, the following checks are carried out:

Quantity Check

• The system compares the quantity ordered of a PO item with the total quantity confirmed by the vendor (the vendor may not have confirmed the complete quantity as at the delivery date shown in the PO but spread over several delivery dates).
• The system checks whether the overdelivery and underdelivery tolerances stipulated in the PO item have been adhered to.

Date Check

• The system checks dates at schedule line level. The confirmed dates are compared with any existing delivery dates from delivery schedule lines in the PO. The tolerance limits are determined from the confirmation control key. (You can define the confirmation control key in Customizing for Purchasing under Confirmations ® Set up Confirmation Control.)
• The system apportions the confirmed quantity among existing schedule lines one after the other.
• Adherence to the delivery date is then checked for each individual schedule line.

Price Check

• If you wish to adopt the prices transmitted to you by the vendor via EDI, you must select the Price indicator in Customizing for Purchasing and define tolerances for the price check (Confirmations ® Set up Confirmation Control under Confirmation Sequence).
• The system then checks whether the prices transmitted to you via EDI lie within the specified tolerances.

If they do, the confirmed quantities and dates are updated in the PO. If not, an error message is issued.

An example of the quantity and date check for order acknowledgments received via EDI is given in the section Example: Checking Order Acknowledgments Received via EDI.

For further information on the correction of errors, refer to the section Error Correction: Receipt of Confirmations via EDI.

In Customizing, you can specify that the material number transmitted to you in an order acknowledgment via EDI is to be adopted in the purchase order. Any existing vendor material number will be overwritten. (Purchasing ® Confirmations ® Set up Confirmation Control under Confirmation Sequence.)

At this point, SAP provides the enhancement MM06E001, enabling you to adapt quantity/price tolerances and the process of adopting the vendor material number to suit your own specific requirements.

Inbound Delivery

The system always generates separate inbound-delivery documents from shipping notifications sent to you by your vendors via EDI. If a confirmation control key with the confirmation category "inbound delivery" exists in the relevant PO or outline agreement item, the notified quantities and dates are recorded in the PO item.

During the processing of the IDoc, data variances may arise, which result in the purchasing document not being automatically updated. The system then issues an internal message, on the basis of which you can rectify the error. (See Error Correction: Receipt of Confirmations Via EDI.)

Such automatically generated inbound deliveries cannot be changed manually via the PO (or outline purchase agreement) but only using the Change Inbound Delivery function.

For more information on receiving confirmations via EDI, refer to the documentation CA The IDoc Interface under EDI Application Scenarios.