Describing Sales Order Management

By capturing order information, Order Management enables sales representatives to deliver compelling offers and provide consistent and accurate pricing.

Select the process steps in the overview below, to learn more about the selected Scope Items.

Whether a sales order is created in SAP Sales Cloud, as described in this lesson, or created directly in SAP S/4HANA like we will see now, there are automatic checks that occur to help get products to our customers.

When a sales document is created, a lot of mandatory information must be maintained.

For example, each sales document must always be assigned to a sales area. Furthermore, most sales documents must contain a customer number and at least one item with a material number.

A sales order is always customer specific, and date driven. There is a required delivery date in the sales order that drives deliveries and billing. The system will always use that date as a basis for checking to see if there is enough stock to promise the customer. This is called a material availability check. If the check is successful, products will be confirmed for that sales order. If the check is unsuccessful, future dates can be proposed for later delivery than requested. The result of the availability check is Scheduled Lines: line items scheduled for delivery, based on the dates the system confirmed.

Sales orders are also meticulously priced. There are pricing calculations that automatically occur when products and quantities are added to orders. Only a salesclerk with the proper authorization can change the pricing conditions once assigned to the order.

If a relevant preceding document exists, data can be copied from it when the sales document is created. For example, one or more quotations can serve as reference documents for a sales order. In this case, the system copies the relevant data to the sales order and the user does not have to maintain everything manually.

When an order is saved, an order confirmation can be sent to the customer to show receipt of their purchase order.

When an order is processed, the system can run various functions to accelerate and assist the process.

Select the tabs below, to learn more about different functions:

A sales document is grouped into three levels: header, item, and scheduled line.

Start with the interaction below, to see how the different levels are distributed.