Third-Party Order Processing

Purpose

In third-party order processing, your company does not deliver the items requested by a customer. Instead, you pass the order along to a third-party vendor who then ships the goods directly to the customer and bills you. A sales order may consist partly or wholly of third-party items. Occasionally, you may need to let a vendor deliver items you would normally deliver yourself. The following graphic shows how a third party business transaction is processed.

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If you order products from a third-party vendor, who delivers the goods directly to you so that you can then deliver them to the customer yourself, you can use individual purchase order processing. For more information, see Individual Purchase Orders .

Process Flow

The processing of third-party orders is controlled via material types. Material types define whether a material is produced only internally, can be ordered only from third-party vendors, or whether both are possible. For example, a material that is defined as a trading good can only be ordered from a third-party vendor. However, if you manufacture your own finished products, you may also want, from time to time, to be able to order the same type of product from other vendors.

Processing Third-Party Orders in Sales

Third-party items can be created automatically by the system, depending on how your system is set. However, you can also change a standard item to a third-party item during sales processing manually.

If a material is always delivered from one or more third-party vendors, you can specify in the material master that the material is a third-party item. During subsequent sales order processing, the system automatically determines the appropriate item category for a third-party item: TAS. To specify a material as a third-party item, enter BANS in the Item category group field in the Sales 2 screen of the material master record.

In the case of a material that you normally deliver yourself but occasionally need to order from a third-party vendor, you can overwrite the item category during sales order processing. For a material that you normally deliver yourself, you specify the item category group NORM in the material master.

If, as an exception, you use a third-party material, change the entry TAN to TAS in the ItCa field when processing the sales document. The item is then processed as third-party item.

Processing Third-Party Orders in Purchasing

When you save a sales order that contains one or more third-party items, the system automatically creates a purchase requisition in Purchasing. Each third-party item in a sales order automatically generates a corresponding purchase requisition item. During creation of the requisition, the system automatically determines a vendor for each requisition item. If a sales order item has more than one schedule line, the system creates a purchase requisition item for each schedule line.

Purchase orders are created from purchase requisitions in the usual way. For more information about creating purchase orders, see the Purchasing documentation. During creation of the purchase order, the system automatically copies the delivery address of your customer from the corresponding sales order. In a sales order, you can enter purchase order texts for each third-party item. When you create the corresponding purchase order, the texts are automatically copied into the purchase order. The number of the purchase order appears in the document flow information of the sales order.

How Purchasing Data Affects Delivery Scheduling

During the automatic delivery scheduling of third-party items, the system takes into account lead times specified by the purchasing department. For example, the system allows for the time required by the vendor to deliver the goods to your customer and also the time required by the purchasing department to process third-party orders.

Comparing Purchasing Data with Sales Data

You can create a list of all sales orders with third party items for which there are discrepancies between the quantities ordered, invoiced, canceled, or credited in Sales and the quantities ordered, invoiced or credited in Purchasing. For more information, see Monitoring Quantity Differences in Sales and Purchasing .