SAP SD

What Are Sales and Distribution (SD)

Sales and distribution refer to the supply chain processes involved in selling and distributing products to customers. Those processes include order processing, warehousing, shipping, invoicing, customer service, handling of returns, and the like.

SAP Core Functional Module

SAP offers its SAP Sales and Distribution (SAP SD) core functional module as part of SAP ERP Central Component (ECC). The module is part of SAP ECC’s logistics function and integrates with other modules, including materials management (MM), plant maintenance (PM), production planning (PP), quality management (QM), financial accounting (FI), controlling (CO), and human resources (HR).

Key components of the SAP SD module:

What Are Sales and Distribution (SD)

SAP Core Functional Module

Key components of the SAP SD module:

Master data
Sales
Shipping of material
Billing
Sales support
Transportation of products
Foreign trade

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

Improve Your Company’s Revenues with ATP in Sales Using SAP SD. Are you familiar with how to calculate available-to-promise (ATP) quantity? ATP is calculated from the warehouse stock, the planned inward movements of stock, and the planned outward movements of stock. This article explores the processes involved in sales using ATP functionality. “An Available-to-Promise (ATP) check is performed dynamically for each transaction (i.e., warehouse stock, inward and outward movement of stocks), taking into account the relevant stock and planned goods movements with or without replenishment lead time,” writes author Dr. Gaetano Altavilla, Senior SAP Practice Manager.
Streamline Invoice Processes and Improve Customer Relationships by Implementing SAP SD Retroactive Billing. This article explores the implementation of retroactive billing using SAP SD and SAP logistics execution shipping within SAP ECC 6.0. If your customer pricing needs updating at the end of the fiscal year, configure retro-billing across modules in your ERP using the steps highlighted within this piece. Adjust posted invoices to reflect new prices while also monitoring the process. “The retro-billing process also produces a history of sales orders and the effects that the changes have on your customer accounts. This information can be invaluable to your organization,” writes Altavilla.

Vendors in the sales and distribution space include: Kern AG, Liquid Analytics, and Long Business Systems, Inc. (LBSI).

- Premium
18 Techniques for Locating the Underlying Data of a Screen Field

Reading time: 2 mins

SAP’s three-tiered architecture is the backbone of an R/3 infrastructure. It’s what makes an R/3 system flexible, reliable, and open, all at the same time. It’s also what makes locating underlying data, at times, so inherently difficult. For example, when you need several fields from a transaction for a report or an enhancement, you will…...…
- Premium
Enabling Point-and-Click Data Entry Assistance for Your BAPI Applications

Reading time: 2 mins

Within SAPGUI, facilities that help users enter data are known as Input Help. In simple cases, SAPGUI’s Input Help presents the user with a list of codes and descriptions. For more complex object types, Match Codes are used to enable the user to search on more expansive sets of criteria. You can provide a similar…...…
- Premium
Is It Time to Revisit Your SAP Security Infrastructure?

Reading time: 2 mins

All too often SAP implementation projects don’t take security beyond the application level, where security and authorization are often regarded as one and the same. To ensure adequate protection, security measures must be factored into all layers of the SAP infrastructure. With their client/server architecture, SAP systems include many components that exchange information, each of…...…
- Premium
A Developer’s Guide to the New ALV Grid Control

Reading time: 2 mins

Within an SAP system there is a lot of data that needs to be reviewed, maintained, and interpreted. Granted, the effort to create a classical list for just simple output of data is minimal, but amass a few lists across a few applications, each created by a different developer, and users may find they have…...…
- Premium
Defining SAP Service Level Agreements: An IT Manager’s Survival Guide

Reading time: 2 mins

Given the complexity and investment inherent in large SAP environments, it is quite likely that you and your IT colleagues are being asked to measure and ensure a certain level of service for users of your SAP systems. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be of enormous benefit, because it directly addresses a core frustration…...…
- Premium
Need to Understand a BAPI’s Parameters? Test-Drive the BAPI Inside SAP!

Reading time: 2 mins

To write a BAPI-enabled application, you must understand all the relevant parameters of every BAPI you want to use in your application. This article shows you how to test-drive a BAPI inside R/3’s test environment in order to accelerate the learning process. Without writing source code, you can find out which parameters, in which combination,…...…
- Premium
Everything a BAPI Programmer Needs to Know About the Business Object Repository

Reading time: 2 mins

Trying to develop or use SAP’s Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) without a solid understanding of what they are, how they are defined in the Business Object Repository (BOR), and what the difference between a BAPI and the ABAP Function Module underneath is, leads to errors and frustration. Beginners are often confounded as to how…...…
- Premium
Dynamic Documents: Completing the New Face of Reporting

Reading time: 2 mins

Screen programming and list programming used to occupy two different worlds. Controls programming changed that. The ALV Grid Control allows you to replace tabular lists with control-based tables on screens, and the SAP Tree Control provides a new way of displaying hierarchical lists. But how can you display unstructured output in a control-based environment? Starting…...…
- Premium
Write Costing-Based CO-PA Reports Your Readers Will Trust — Five Secret Tricks to Building General Ledger Reconciliation into Your ‘Profitability Analysis’ Data

Reading time: 2 mins

Section 1 of this article is especially for people who consider themselves CBR (Confused Beyond Recognition) by R/3’s “distributed” approach to accounting.1 Section 2 expands on this topic while specifically identifying some needed background information for examining CO-PA report challenges. Section 3 puts a finger on both some well-known and some not-so-well-known integration trouble spots…...…
- Premium
COM4ABAP: A Simpler, Cleaner, Universal Approach to Harnessing COM Objects in ABAP

Reading time: 2 mins

The SAP DCOM Connector allows communication between an R/3 system and an external application via the “outside-in” approach, but there are times when you will actually need the process to work in the opposite direction. While this was possible in the past, it was by no means easy! Now, with Release 4.6D of the RFC…...…