Posting Goods Issues for Production Orders

When an order is created, the system automatically creates a reservation for the required material components. Each material component of the order receives a separate item number within the reservation. You can only withdraw the reserved materials from the warehouse if the operation to which the materials are assigned in the order has already been released. For each reservation item, the following information is available:

• Material number
• Quantity
• Storage location

The system automatically tries to determine the storage location. Also, it might be necessary to organize material staging from a central storage location to your production storage location before you can post the goods issue in the system, for example, if purchased components are delivered to a central warehouse, but your shop floor is assigned to a different storage location. We will discuss both at a later point in this chapter.

In the figure, the goods issue process to a production order is displayed. Assuming that the materials are already available at the production storage location, 101B in our example, you can post a goods issue to a production order using one of the following options:

• Manual goods issue posting, for example, using the Post Goods Movement or Pick Components for Production Orders apps.
• Automatic goods issue posting together with the order confirmation, for example, using the Confirm Production Order app.
• Automatic goods issue posting together with the operation confirmation, for example, using the Confirm Production Order Operation app.

In case of manual goods issue posting, the system proposes the component quantity and the issue storage location as both are maintained in the reservation. You can either accept the proposed values or change the quantities and/or storage locations as required. You can withdraw a lower quantity if, for example, you only manufacture a fraction of the ordered quantity, or a higher quantity if, for example, some components were destroyed during the assembly process.

In case of automatic goods issue posting (→ materials with a 'backflush' indicator) together with a confirmation posting, the system automatically posts a goods issue at the storage location maintained in the reservation. The withdrawn quantity scales linearly with the confirmation quantity. For our bike example, confirming five bikes would result in a goods issue posting of five frames and ten wheels, respectively.

In SAP standard, the goods issue is posted using the movement type 261 (goods issue to a production order).