Multiple plants per Vendor

Question

Hi
I am an ABAPer trying to solve an MM problem, so please bear with me
We have a situation where we do inter company transactions between some of the companies in our system. This is automated, and worked well from Purchase order through to invoicing (via EDI).
However, we have two plants in company A supplying products to two other companies, let's call them companies B and C. Initially we had two vendors set up - one for each plant in company A. This is obviously not correct, but it worked For each of these vendors we could set up a delivering plant in the Vendor master data. This is then stored in table T001W, and pulled though onto the EKKO record (field RESWK - delivering plant) when a PO was created.
When we created PO's from companies B and C we would simply choose the Vendor (i.e. effectively the plant), according to the material to be supplied (some materials are available at one plant and not the other).
As I said, this worked well.
The financial guys however decided to stop this by saying that since the two plants in company A belong to the same company, they should both belong to one vendor - they are not separate business entities. They therefore closed the two vendor accounts initially assigned to the two plants, and opened a new 'joint' one, under which the two plants should therefore be.
The problem with that is then that we cannot assign just one plant to the Vendor on the master data, since there are two plants in this company at this point, and possibly more in future. And if we do assign one of the two to that new Vendor, when we create a PO and do inter company transactions with that PO, then the transactions can only come from one plant, and never the other. As I said, this is a problem, since certain materials are only available in one of the plants, and others in the other.
I have tried (with a BADI) to change the delivering plant on PO creation (SAP does not allow you to do this) and also to change the delivering plant on creation of the delivery that refers to the PO, but neither option works. I also looked at the definition of the PO fields in SPRO, to see whether I can show the delivering plant on the PO for the user to fill in, but again - no joy.
At this stage I figured that there might be some config that needs to be done. Does anyone know of a solution for the above?
Thanks in advance,
Best regards

Answer 1

hi
if i am understanding you correctly then this is my solution to your problem.
you want the two plants in the vendor to be included. there is one question for you. are the materials common in the both plants?
if not then you can treat these plants as vendor subranges and then assign one plant to each subrange. the only thing is that the subrange is defined for exclusivity. i will elaborate it with my skills. see one vendor has two plants and each manufactures its own set of products but both are under same company code. in this case you take these plants as vendor subrange. the advantage of using this is that each plant is treated as different vendor but the same accounting is followed for the vendor since same company code for the plants and we got only one vendor account in our records.
if yes then i don't know what to do. i am watching this thread and would appreciate if anyone gives more knowledge  about this issue.
if this solves your problem revert it back.