Maintaining the Organizational Units for Delivery Processing

You can model the inventory management structure of a corporate group by using clients, company codes, plants and storage locations.

A client represents a corporate group, while a company code represents a legally independent accounting unit.

The plant plays a central role in inventory management. A plant is an organizational unit that represents a physical location at which inventory is stored, for example, a manufacturing site or distribution center. Activities such as production, procurement, maintenance, and materials planning are managed at plant level. Assigned to each plant are one or many storage locations. Storage locations are sub-divisions of a plant which enable differentiation of the various stocks of a material in that plant. Stock is managed at storage location level.

A plant can only be assigned to one company code. In this way, you can manage stocks and stock values independently for individual companies.

A shipping point is an independent organizational unit at a fixed location that processes and monitors outbound deliveries and goods issues. Each outbound delivery is managed by a single shipping point. The responsible shipping point is determined in the sales order at the item level. A single shipping point can process the outbound deliveries of several different plants. However, this practice is only useful if the plants are located close to each other.

Several shipping points that support, for example, different loading equipment, different processing times or different modes of transport, can be assigned to one plant. The allowed combinations of shipping points and plants in the enterprise structure are defined in Customizing.

Another organizational unit in shipping is the loading point. The loading point is used to structure shipping. Loading points are defined in Customizing for Logistics Execution and are assigned manually in the delivery document header. If desired, the loading points can be included in the delivery output. Any number of loading points can be assigned to a shipping point, but only one shipping point can be assigned to each loading point.

A shipping point can also be set as a goods receiving point. This means that shipping points can additionally be used to manage inbound deliveries.

Storage bins, independent of their storage type, are logically grouped in activity areas. You define an activity area for each activity, as follows:

• Picking

• Putaway

• Physical inventory

Activity areas are used to define bin sorting when warehouse orders are created. According to the activity, the same storage bin can be assigned to multiple activity areas.

If stock is kept in a storage bin, the quantity of stock in that bin is represented as a "quant". A quant is a record that represents the content of a storage bin, and is used for management of a product in a storage bin.

Sample Warehouse Structure

The organizational and physical attributes of a warehouse building are entered under the warehouse number in Customizing. Examples of some attributes are as follows:

• Weight unit of measure

• Volume unit of measure

• Time unit of measure

There are also various determination procedures for palletization data and packaging specifications that are assigned at the warehouse number level.

We recommend that you use one warehouse number for each group of storage areas or buildings (warehousing complexes) in the same geographical area. If your warehousing facilities are located in different cities or are physically separated by a long distance, it is appropriate to assign a separate warehouse number to each warehousing complex.

In order to identify the owner of the stock, the warehouse number must be assigned to a supply chain unit (SCU). An SCU is a physical or organizational unit that models the supply chain of your organization.