General sales data

Before you can complete sales procedures, you must specify general sales data, such as data to track order changes and to determine the reason for the changes, the conditions and reasons for automatically blocking a sales order, and order priority simulations.

Specifying data to track order changes and to determine the reason for the changes

Sales orders can be dynamic documents, as a sold-to business partner’s requirements can change during the life cycle of the order process. In the sales master data, you can specify information to track these adjustments and the reasons why changes were made. Change codes and acknowledgement codes are used to track various changes in an order. Although this functionality was designed to work specifically with EDI, a company without EDI functionality can also use these codes for recording changes.

You can use change codes to maintain information regarding order changes that are tracked for historical purposes. You can use acknowledgement codes to manually add change information to the order document, after which these changes are communicated to the sold-to business partner by means of a sales order acknowledgement.

To be able to maintain and track changes, take the following steps:

  1. Use the Change Reasons (tdsls0197m000) session to maintain codes that represent the change reasons, which can be assigned to a changed order or an order acknowledgement to clarify why a change is made. This information can be tracked for historical reporting.
  2. Use the Change Types (tdsls0198m000) session to define change types that indicate the kind of change of a changed sales order or order acknowledgement. Possible types of change are, for instance, change order line, add order line, change header data, and so on. The change types are assigned to the sales order after the change is made to the order.
  3. Use the Sales Order Parameters (tdsls0100s400) session to define various default change codes and change types, which are defaulted to the sales order line in case of changes.
  4. Use the Sales Order - Change Order Sequence Numbers (tdsls0153m000) session to define optional numbers that are used to assign the occurrence of changes to an order or order acknowledgment. The sequence numbers defined here are used to group an occurrence of changes to an order. This session is usually accessed from the sales order screen, as the actual order number must be specified.
  5. Use the Sales Acknowledgments (tdsls0154m000) session to define sales order acknowledgements and the destination of the codes, which can be Header, Line, or Any. The acknowledgement code contains a group of information, which appears on the sales acknowledgment document. This code can represent the reasons for a change of a sales order.
  6. Use the Sales Acknowledgment Assignments (tdsls0155m000) session to define the information to be included in the sales order acknowledgment document as indicated by the acknowledgment code. You can assign acknowledgment codes to specific fields on a sales order line, which are the default codes when a change occurs to a specific field. You must also define the action (Add line, Change line) and the source (EDI, Manual, or Any) that result in the acknowledgment code assignment. For example, if you manually add an order line to an existing sales order and the order quantity is changed, LN assigns the specified acknowledgment code to the sales order line.
Specifying reasons for order blocking

On occasion, it may become necessary to block sales order entry for a business partner, or to stop the processing of a business partner’s sales order. You can define the conditions for automatically blocking a sales order and define hold reasons stating why the order was blocked. This gives you time to review the order and to take appropriate action. Many reasons can exist for placing a hold on a sold-to business partner’s order. For instance, sold-to business partners can have exceeded their credit limit, have overdue invoices, or can be disputing an invoice, and so on.

If you want to use the order blocking functionality, you must specify the following master data:

  1. To enable blocking review and to take appropriate action, use the Hold Reasons (tdsls0190m000) session to define and track this information.
  2. In the Hold Reasons by Business Partner Type (tdsls0593m000) session, specify the action to take when a sales order line is blocked for a particular reason, which depends on the business partner type and hold reason.
  3. In the Sales Order Parameters (tdsls0100s400) session, specify when orders must be automatically blocked. On the Blocking tab, define standard blocking situations. On the Reasons tab, attach a reason for a blocking situation.
  4. Define the step at which the sales order procedure is interrupted automatically in the Block As of Activity field of the Sales Order Type - Activities (tdsls0694m000) session. When an order (line) is blocked, the procedure for this order can only be partially carried out. If a blocking step is not defined in this session, the order procedure is not interrupted.
Specifying order priority simulations

If you want to use order priority simulations, you must specify the following master data:

  1. Set the method that is used to determine the order priority to Simulation in the Order Priority Method field of the Sales Order Parameters (tdsls0100s400) session. As a result, the order priority is calculated based on the values of the fields defined in the simulation code.
  2. Use the Priority Simulations (tdsls4524m000) session to define the codes that are used to create priority simulations. A priority simulation consists of an identifying code and description, a sort sequence and a sort mode. The sort sequence and the sort mode are criteria by which sales orders are sorted. The way the orders are sorted determines the priority. To create a simulation, the sorting criteria defined in the simulation code are applied for a group of sales orders selected by the user. You can select six fields for each simulation code to sort sales orders. LN takes the default fields from the sales order lines table, but you can also use fields from sales orders and business partners.