SAP SD Authorized Partners for Release Orders Partner Determination in Sales and Distribution

Use

When you create a release order for a contract, you enter the number of the contract and the name of the partner who is requesting the goods. The system then checks if the business partner is authorized to release against the contract.

Depending on the settings in Customizing, the system determines whether a partner is authorized to release against the contract by checking against one of the following:

• Partners in the contract (Rule A)

If the partner has the partner function AG (sold-to party) or AA (sold-to party for release order) in the contract, the system accepts the partner as the sold-to party for the release order.

• Partners in the hierarchy (Rule B)

If the partner who wants to release against the contract is the sold-to party of the contract or at a lower level in customer hierarchy to the sold-to party in the contract, the system accepts the partner as the sold-to party for the release order.

After the authorization check, the system also checks if more than one ship-to party is defined in the contract. If the contract contains a WE (ship-to party) and several AWs (ship-to party for release order), the system lists the possible ship-to parties in a dialog box. You select the appropriate ship-to party for the release order.

You can define authorized sold-to parties (AA) and additional ship-to parties (AW) in the customer master record. When you create a contract for the customer, these partners are proposed for selection.

Prerequisites

You activate the partner authorization check in the Customizing activity ‘Define Sales Document Types’.

Partner determination procedure KAB (partners in contract) contains the partner functions AA and AW. You must assign this procedure to the sales document types for which the partner authorization check is relevant. You make this assignment in the Customizing activity ‘Define and assign partner determination procedures’.

In the standard R/3 System, the partner releasing against the contract and the ship-to party which you select are copied into the release order. If you want to control which partners are copied into the release order, you can define a copying routine for the relevant document types in the Customizing activity ‘Maintain Copying Control for Sales Documents’. For example, you can specify that only the sold-to party releasing against the contract is copied into the release order and the other partners are determined from the customer master record of the sold-to party.

Features

If rule B is defined for the contract type, you can search for authorized partners for a release order using the contract number. Equally, you can search for the relevant contract for a release order using the partner number. In this case, the partner authorization rule is irrelevant.