Purchase Schedules

A purchase schedule is a timetable of planned supply of materials. Purchase schedules support long-term purchasing with frequent deliveries and are usually backed by a purchase contract. All requirements for the same item, buy-from business partner, ship-from business partner, purchase office, and warehouse are stored in one schedule. Purchase schedules are used instead of standard purchase orders in cases where full visibility and time phasing of material requirement information is required. Therefore, purchase schedules provide a more detailed way to specify the delivery dates/times per item.

The following types of purchase schedules exist:

  • Push schedule
    A list of time-phased requirements, generated by a central planning system, such as Enterprise Planning or Project that is sent to the purchase business partner. Push schedules contain both a forecast for the longer term and actual orders for the short term. A push schedule is a nonreferenced schedule.
  • Pull forecast schedule
    A list of time-phased planned requirements, generated by Enterprise Planning, that is sent to the purchase business partner. Pull forecast schedules are only used for forecasting purposes. To order the items, a pull call-off schedule must be generated with the same schedule number as the pull forecast schedule. Similar to a push schedule, a pull forecast schedule is also a nonreferenced schedule.
  • Pull call-off schedule
    A list of time-phased specific requirements of purchased items, triggered from Assembly Control, or Warehousing (KANBAN, Time-phased order point). A pull call-off schedule is a referenced schedule.