Third Party Order Processing

The SAP Academy documentation has really explained the third party order processing very well. During my study I learnt a lot from it other than practice on the SAP system. Here is a gist of the third party processing for those who are interested.

In the third-party order processing, the goods ordered by the customer are not delivered by your company. Instead, you pass on the order to an external vendor, who then sends the goods directly to the customer and sends the invoice to you. The purchase order of your customer is entered in a sales organization of your company as a sales order. Afterwards, a purchase order for the external vendor is created in your company.  

Third-party order processing is initiated when you enter a sales order with a third-party item. Either the order consists partially of third-party items or all the items in the order are third-party items. Depending on how your system is configured in Customizing, third-party item categories can be determined automatically by the system for the respective materials. However, so that you can process materials that you normally deliver yourself as third-party items, you can manually change a standard item into a third-party item by entering the respective item category. 

During automatic scheduling of third-party order items, the system takes into consideration :

1- Planned delivery time from the material master, that is, the time the vendor requires to deliver the goods.

2- Purchasing department processing time, that is, the time the purchasing department requires to process the third-party orders, is also included.

Note: The purchasing department processing time is assigned to the plant in Customizing.

In standard Customizing for sales (IMG), the system is configured so that a purchase requisition is automatically created in purchasing when you save the sales order to the database. Here, a separate purchase requisition item is automatically created for each third-party item.
While creating the purchase requisition, the system automatically determines a vendor for each requisition item. .

In the sales order, you can make subsequent changes to the quantity and delivery date for a third-party order item. The changes you make are automatically copied into the respective purchase requisition, provided the release status of the purchase requisition still allows this.

The purchase requisition has the account assignment for the sales order. This account assignment cannot be changed in the purchase requisition. The sales documents control include the sales document type, the item category, and the schedule line category.

You create third-party order items by creating a standard sales order (for example, sales document type OR for a standard order) and Item category TAS for third-party order items. The sales order can consist of further third-party order items or items with other item categories.
The system is configured so that Schedule line category CS is determined for third-party order items.

For the most part, the item category depends on the sales document type and the item category group of the material.The two other factors, that is, item usage and the item category of the superior item, are of minor importance in third-party order processing. A
ssign the item category group BANS (“third-party item”) to materials whose sales are processed solely as third-party orders. The item category determined by the system can be changed if you have defined allowed alternatives in Customizing.

In the standard system, schedule line category CS (“third-party”) is used to process third-party order items. Since third-party order items are not supplied by your company, you do not have to post the goods issue in your system. Therefore, the schedule line category CS in Customizing does not contain a movement type and is not set as being relevant for delivery. T
he Customizing settings for schedule line category CS needs 

1- document type for the purchase requisition,
2- item category (with internal character representation) and
3-account assignment category.

When a purchase order is created, the created purchase order appears in the document flow for the sales order. Third-party order items in purchase orders are marked with item category S. Third-party items must have an account assignment. In standard SAP, account assignment category X is used.

Map the business process such that the entry of the vendor invoice receipt is only possible if a GR for the PO was entered in the system beforehand. You post the GR only when the vendor reports to you that they have performed the delivery.
If GR is provided for in your business process for third-party order processing, you can only post the invoice receipt after you have entered the goods receipt into the system. As soon as the invoice receipt is recorded in the system, the customer is billed. Since no outbound delivery exists in the system for third-party order items, you set the indicator for Order-related Billing during selection of the documents to be billed.

In the copying control for sales document to billing document, the standard setting for the third-party order item category defines that the quantity from the invoice receipt document, not the order quantity, for example, is copied into the billing document (Billing quantity field).