Introducing the Release for Delivery App

The advanced ATP functionality in SAP S/4HANA comes with a very simple, intuitive mechanism for maintenance of allocations to protect key customers or regions based on defined logic. These allocations ensure that the interests of top-priority customers are protected even when the company has limited supply and employs an FCFS scenario.

Companies also need flexibility for last-minute changes. After running back order processing overnight, companies often get a last-minute request to change an order in the morning before deliveries are to be created. Let’s say they were planning to fulfill 20 items, but the customer now needs 30. Doing back order processing again is not possible, but a quick manipulation is needed — with the SAP Fiori app Release for Delivery, the company can find where they can pull the additional items from.

While these features have clear benefits for the entire ATP process more from a supply chain perspective, they also help customer service. Consider a call center employee who receives a call from a customer looking for many products. The call center employee must check the inventory, check for the right allocations, and provide the accurate date. And this has to be done quickly, while the customer is still on the phone.

With this app, you can prioritize due sales orders containing materials with limited availability in the order fulfillment responsibility to which you are assigned. The app allows you to view the material availability situation of materials for which you are responsible as well as assess the potential financial impact of being unable to fulfill sales orders.

This, in combination with other factors, helps you decide how to distribute material quantities between sales orders, before you release the sales orders for subsequent logistics processes.

The main features of this app are the following:

• Display sales orders containing materials for which you are responsible during a specific time period, including sales order items for materials with limited availability.

• Display the potential financial impact for your organization if materials are not available and material redistribution is not optimized.

• Manually redistribute material quantities between sales order items, as required, to fulfill a sales order partially or completely.

• Apply confirmation strategies such as Confirm from Top to enable efficient, semi-automatic processing of mass data.

• Protect quantities of sales order items from further processing.

• Postpone further processing of sales order items.

• Release materials for delivery, thus triggering subsequent logistics processes (for example, picking).

As a prerequisite for using this app, you have to configure order fulfillment responsibilities.

Configuring the order fulfillment responsibilities enables your order fulfillment specialists to process all the materials for which they are responsible in the Release for Delivery app.

This Order Fulfillment Responsibility app also enables you to scope and personalize the work of your order fulfillment specialists and ensures that they only see sales documents and materials for which they are responsible within a specific time period. Furthermore, the app helps you to react flexibly to changing situations by offering methods with which to reassign responsibilities from one order fulfillment specialist to another.

Using the second app Release for Delivery, you can prioritize due sales orders containing materials with limited availability in the order fulfillment responsibility to which you are assigned. You are also able to view the material availability situation of materials for which you are responsible as well as assess the potential financial impact of being unable to fulfill sales orders.

This app also provides necessary information about delivery groups as well as useful support about storage location and batch, if required.