POS DM: Stock updates in SAP Retail

Question

Hi!
We are implementing SAP Retail (ERP 6.0 EHP4 stack 3), SAP PI (Netweaver PI 7.1 SP 8) and SAP BW (NetWeaver 7.0 ehp1 stack 4, incl BI content 704, SP 3 ) for a client. Their POS system is a 3rd party system, i.e. not SAP POS, and it does not contain any stock information.
This issue concerns stock updates in SAP Retail using POS DM:
On the busiest day of year, my client has 347 000 POS transactions in total from all stores, and in one year they have 30 mill POS transactions. My client requires that SAP will provide them with near-realtime information on stock availability, as this is an important way of providing good customer service. The stock information should be available in SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Retail Store, as well as standard SAP gui transaction. In addition, the webshop (external system) should have as accurate information about stock as possible, at least it should be updated once every 30 minutes.
My client also has a requirement to be able to create purchase orders during office hours (store opening hours), based on MRP runs. This means they must have as accurate stock levels as possible for running MRP. Stock levels are also used in ATP checks, when deciding whether to pick customer orders from store inventory/stock or to create purchase requisitions.
All these requirements have led us to believe that the best way to solve this, is alternative A:
- to update stock continuously during office hours, using WPUBON to create material documents, one for each POS transaction. Sales and tenders will be updated in SAP Retail using WPUUMS and WPUTAB.
Some challenges this will create:
a)     It will create 347 000 WPUBONs on the busiest day of year, all within 10-12 open hours.
b)     If we have same amount of material docs and FI docs, they will use 30% of the available 8 digits within their number ranges per year.
c)     The idocs will fail if there are article locks simultaneously. (However, this can be handled by updating products only at night time (using batch jobs) and using batch job to handle failed idocs)
Edited by: Øystein Emhjellen on Jan 4, 2010 2:15 PM

Answer 1

Alternative B:
- we have considered to use WPUUMS and WPUTAB, updating stock levels only once a day. The solution we then must use for taking into account actual sales data is described in SAP Note 1088886 - Using the interface for online stock queries. If we choose this, we need to check during the day for each article any sales, to reduce stock in reporting/screens, ATP checks and in MRP runs. We must also create a program to check for articles sold before sending stock data to webshop (external system). (As we do not know which articles have been sold, we must create our own version of RFC - /POSDW/SALES_QUERY_RFC, to enable that the article number does not have to be specified. Rather, the article numbers (and sold quantities) have to be returned to ERP based on what was actually sold.)
We consider this alternative more risky, due to the need for changing behaviour of standard programs for MRP and ATP check. It will also create a number of RFC calls between SAP ECC and SAP BW.
My questions on this issue are:
i)     Will alternative A be preferrable, if hardware requirements are handled?
ii)     Do you see any additional challenges related to alternative A?
iii)     Will alternative B be adviceable, concerning the program changes/enhancements involved?
iv)     Are there standard implementations of SAP ECC, that includes the use of RFC - /POSDW/SALES_QUERY_RFC. I.e. standard programs in SAP ECC that uses the information from this RFC call?
Thanks for any advice !
Best regards,
Oeystein Emhjellen