Question:
Hi,
I am working for a Retail. In the normal process all our goods go through our warehouse, but we have to deal with direct deliveries from our suppliers to the store as well.
We have built the following process:
- The supplier delivers directly to the store.
- The next day the supplier send a file to head office with a consolidated invoice for all stores. In the file there is as well a part with the delivered quantities to the stores.
- The file is checked technically adn then uploaded to create a Purchase Order for an administrative DC.
- The admin department checks the PO and after confirmation the file is uploaded once more --> the gooods receipt is posted, the invoice verification is done and the stock transport orders to the individual stores are created as well.
the problems we have with this process is:
- the set up cost for the supplier are high
- there are too many files for the admin department --> too many FTE currently working on this
- the Appl Man Support is a major cost as well
- the stock in the stores is not accurate for these articles
- the application to upload and split the file to be able to upload goods receipt an dinvoice receipt is outdated.
Does anyone know what Standard SAP is using as best practice or do you know a smart work around?
Thanks,
Marco
Answer:
Hello Marco. I too work for a retailer and we have a lot of direct store deliveries. Since our major bussiness is supermarkets there are a lot of articles that requiere direct deliveries from vendors.
We have several aproachs depending on the article characteristics:
- There are articles that are directly replished in the shelves by the vendors. In these cases a purchase order is created in the store with the delivered items and quantities. The goods receipt is posted in the store. Every day all docs. (purchase orders and material docs) are sent to the central office for invoice verification.
- In other cases the purchase orders are created centrally and sent to the vendor. When the vendor arrives to the store the goods receipt is posted. Every day all docs. (purchase orders and material docs) are sent to the central office for invoice verification.
In some cases vendor invoices are consolidated, in other not. This is no problem since SAP manages both cases.
The main problem i see with your process is the the goods receipt are not being posted in the system at the same time as the phisical goods receipt.
Luck,
Juan Carlos
Answer:
Hi Marco,
Juan Carlos is correct. There are several options to deal with Direct deliveries to stores. In addition to the process suggested by JC, here are some more tips:
1. SAP can automatically create PO on posting Goods Receipt, this will greatly reduce the effort to create a PO.
2. It is possible to post invoice at header level and SAP can do the matching and posting against a Invoice/Delivery number either for a PO or collectively for several POs.
3. The PO/GR/Invoice should be captured directly for the store and not to an Admin DC. This should eliminate the STO process as well and also will reflect the actual status more accurately.
4. SAP provides IDocs for all the above processes and they are relatively simple to use. Since, you are already receiving files from your vendor, mapping them to SAP IDoc should be easy.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Narayanan