No Tie Generation Consultancy

When to execute subsequent delivery split?

Before discussing the subsequent delivery split, it is important to understand the difference between deliveries and shipments in the SAP R/3 system. Where deliveries are linked directly to customer sales orders, shipments are derived from deliveries. A shipment represents a single physical transport of goods and therefore must companies define shipments on container or truck level. One full container may consist of goods collected from several deliveries. But what if one delivery consists of so many products that it won’t fit into one single container? That is when subsequent delivery split is useful.

Imagine your customer is placing a large sales order and shipment has to be done using multiple containers. The delivery takes the information from the customer sales order. It would make sense to split this single delivery into multiple deliveries to achieve a one-to-one relationship between the delivery and shipment. So one customer sales order has many deliveries and each delivery is assigned to an unique shipment. Customer billing is based on the deliveries, so one customer sales order has only one invoice.

The initial delivery split is based on details found in the sales order schedule lines. So at that time the system does not take into account what can be loaded into containers. Therefore you need to maintain handling unit information in order to allow the system to perform subsequent delivery splits based on container capacity. Handling units are maintained on several levels. You can define single items to be packed into a box, pack boxes on a pallet and pack pallets into a container. So you can have a packing hierarchy, having the container on the highest level. When the delivery is packed (which can be done automatically when you maintain the appropriate master data), then you can execute a specific transaction to split the delivery based on the maintained packing information.

After splitting the deliveries, you can create one shipment for each delivery. Further packing is then not necessary in the shipment as it has been defined in the delivery already.

So, to summarise:
When delivery quantities are less than a container load, then the shipment is based on multiple deliveries. The shipment could contain goods collected from multiple customers. By default the packing up to pallet level is done in the delivery, whereas the packing up to container level is done in the shipment.
When delivery quantities exceed single container load capacity, then the deliveries are split prior to creating a shipment. The shipment contains a subset of the goods ordered by a single customer. Packing up to container level is done in the delivery. No further packing is necessary in the shipment.