Manage Sub Locations for a Ship to Customer

[Rohit_Zalani]

Hi

There are customers like Hospitals and Educational institutions where a Ship to Customer can have different sub-locations - e.g. Floor of a Hospital. In such cases, the BP master data for the Ship to Customer can be maintained with different unloading points which can be selected in the sales order. However, if the same customer also does consignment stock and if the need is to track stocks at the sub-location level, the Stock partner SB needs to be maintained for the customer in the consignment fill / consignment issue orders.

This presents the following challenges:

a. Unloading points would give a pop-up to the user during order entry. However, for consignment fill / issue, the system will prompt for the unloading point, but the same unloading point needs to be captured as a stock partner ( partner function SB ) so that consignment can be tracked as sub-location level. This is duplication of data in sales order and can lead to inconsistencies.

b. If sub-locations are captured only as partner function instead of unloading point(s), SAP seemingly supports only use of "SB" for consignment process. Hence, SB will also need to be used as partner function for direct shipment, but this may cause confusion on the role of "SB" partner function ( since it is for consignment ).

Would appreciate feedback and inputs from esteemed members on the following:

- Is there a way to use unloading points for tracking consignment stocks without using SB partner function ?

- Is there a way to suppress the prompt for unloading point based so that this is prompted only for specific document types ?

- How do we maintain the sub-locations in the BP master data and use it for both direct shipments as well as consignment ?

Would appreciate feedback from members

Regards

Rohit Zalani