As mentioned earlier, a process order goes through many different steps in its life cycle: After order creation, various activities such as batch number assignment, capacity planning, batch determination, and availability checks can already be carried out, but the order cannot yet be processed in production. It is only after the order has been released that the corresponding processing steps, such as printing of shop papers, goods issue postings, confirmations, in-process quality inspections, and goods receipt postings can be executed.
Order Release Options
The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, offers various approaches for order release: You can either release the order on header, on operation, or on phase level. If you release an order on header level, all operations and all phases of an order are automatically released. If you release an order on operation level, all phases of the operation are automatically released. If you release order phases, you can release them individually.
In most cases, multiple process orders are released at the same time. Based on your business requirements, you can release multiple process orders using collective release in the foreground (for example, using the Mange Process Orders or Mass Processing Process Orders app) or in the background (for example, using the Schedule Order Release Run app). To select process orders to be released, you can specify various selection criteria, for example, plant, production scheduler, release date, material, and so on. It is also possible to release operations or phases of different orders using collective release in the foreground (for example, using the Mass Processing Process Orders app). This can be useful, for example, if only the first operation of an order should be released in a first step and only after confirmation of the respective operation, the following operations of the order shall be released. If necessary, for example, for rework or express orders, a production scheduler can also manually release an individual order or individual operations or phases of an order.
Based on a production scheduling profile assigned to the product, an order can be released automatically when it is created. This may be necessary, for example, if an order is to be downloaded to a process control system immediately after creation.