Sales Process Overview
If a customer like Rapid Riders decides to procure a product, for example a bike, and informs the Bike Company about their wish to purchase the product, the internal sales representative Otis creates a sales order in the SAP S/4HANA system.
Otis has prepared a crisp visualization of the relevant processes for Trent to get a clearer understanding.
Executing Sales Order Management
A sales order is a contractual agreement between a sales organization and the business partner ‘sold-to party’. It's a binding commitment about delivering products for defined prices, quantities, and times.
In SAP S/4HANA Sales, you can sell physical products you either have in stock or manufacture yourself upon request of the individual customer.
The sales order contains the relevant information to process the customer's request throughout the whole process cycle:
- customer data
- product information
- delivery date
- quantity
- information for the shipping process
- billing information
When Otis, the internal sales representative, creates a sales order, the first step is to assign it to a sales area.
The sales area is a combination of:
 | Sales Organization: Who sells? |
 | Distribution Channel: How is a product sold? |
 | Division: What is sold? |
Let’s investigate how a sales document is usually structured:
- Header Level
The data for the document header is valid for the entire document. This includes the document number and customer-related data, such as the business partner ‘sold-to party’.
- Item Level
Each item in the sales document contains its own data. This includes data about the ordered materials and corresponding quantities. Each sales document can contain several items, for example different materials ordered by the customer.
- Schedule Line Level
Schedule lines contain confirmed quantities and dates of delivery. The item can have several schedule lines - for example if the ordered quantity is to be delivered in several partial deliveries at different times due to limited availability of the ordered product.
Sales Order Sourcing
Before the material that is ordered via a sales order can be delivered, it must be sourced. The actual sourcing process is organized and monitored in SAP Material Management (MM). Depending on the material, it can be sourced as follows:
Directly from stock (in the case of existing stock)
Through in-house production (if there is no or not enough stock)