Posting Goods Receipts for Process Orders

Let's continue with the last step in the production process: Posting the goods receipt after all production steps have been executed. The Bike Company has completed a process order for 100 cans of red bike paint. Now, the final step in the production process is to transport the paint filled in cans to the designated storage area in your warehouse and officially record their arrival at the warehouse through a goods receipt.

When the shop floor worker or the warehouse personnel posts the goods receipt in the warehouse, the on-stock quantity increases and the process order becomes irrelevant to production. From a system perspective, the system does not display the order any more in the Monitor Material Coverage app.

The next image illustrates the options for goods receipt postings:

As shown in the figure, you have the following options to post a goods receipt:

• Manual goods receipt posting, for example, using the Post Goods Movement app.
• Automatic goods receipt posting together with the order confirmation, for example, using the Confirm Process Order app.
• Automatic goods receipt posting together with the phase confirmation, for example, using the Confirm Process Order Phase app.

From a process perspective, the shop floor personnel manually posts the goods receipt as the final step of the production process. Alternatively, the warehouse clerk manually posts the goods receipt after the manufactured goods arrive in the goods receipt area of the warehouse. You use automatic goods receipt when, for example, storage systems automatically transfer the manufactured goods from the shop floor to the warehouse.

As illustrated in the figure, you receive the goods at a storage location (101A in our example). This storage location, available in the order header, is proposed by the system proposes when you manually post the goods receipt. For automated goods receipts, the system automatically increases the stock at this storage location.

Whether using automated or manual goods receipt, it's possible to post either one goods receipt for the entire manufactured quantity or multiple goods receipts (partial receipts). When you post a single goods receipt, the system proposes the yield quantity of the order or the last phase as the receipt quantity. For multiple goods receipt postings, the system reduces the proposed quantity by the quantity already posted to stock.

In process industries, it's common to manage manufactured materials in batches. In SAP S/4HANA, you can create a batch for the goods receipt when releasing a process order. Later, when you post the goods receipt, either automatically or manually, the system will use this batch for the receipt quantity. If you don't create a batch while releasing the order, the system will automatically create one when you post the goods receipt.

Regardless of whether you post the goods receipt in one go or in several stages, you have two options:

• If the quality of the manufactured material remains consistent throughout the order, you can post the entire goods receipt to a single batch.

• If the material's properties change during production, perhaps due to varying production conditions, you should post the goods receipt to multiple batches.

Note

The SAP S/4HANA system records the properties of the produced material, such as viscosity, pH value, and density, in the batch characteristics for each batch. When you post the goods receipt, you can enter these values directly in the goods receipt app. Additionally, some manufacturing processes require inspections by the Quality Management department. They conduct physical and/or chemical analyses of the manufactured product, and then provide the batch characteristic values.

After you posted the goods receipt, the SAP S/4HANA system executes several functions in the background.

Watch the following video to learn more.

In the following demonstration, you will learn how to post the goods receipt for a process order and analyze the effects of the confirmation on the order.

Note

If you have access to a practice system, you can now execute the exercise Post the Goods Receipt for a Process Order.

From the previous unit, you learned that you can confirm orders on header or on phase level. Here, we also discussed posting the goods receipt to complete order processing. To reduce user input, you can combine these processes. In the following demonstration, you will learn how to confirm a process order at the header level while also conducting an automated stock posting, and we will explore the effects of this confirmation.