Workflow notification when idoc fails

Question

Hi Gurus,
have little confusion over in understnaind the concept of order acknowledgement and shippining notification and the way they appear in MD04. Please ckindly clarify.
We create a PO and send it to the vneodr (this is called 850). we use a third part VAN provider who will trnasmit the PO to our vendor. Now if there vendor receives the PO sucessfully, then it is called a 997. This is received only by the van provider. we do not get this. the van provider will only contact us if the document is not sucessfully trasnmittted.
Now if the vendor agrees to the date and quantity on a single line that we have asked on PO, what is it called? Order acknowledgement or order confirmation or shipping notification? If it is order confirmation, then should it not appear as Ord conf or something like that in MD04. What do we need to do to make it look like ord conf. Becuase rright now we are still in the testing mode, once we get a confrimation about dates and quanitites on the confirmations tab on the P,O, i see that it shows up as SHPNTG ind MD04. is it right or am i missing anything. again this is setup in config. How we can deal a scenario where our users do not want to go the route of creating the inbound delivery automatically, and VL32N goods receipt, tehy dont want to do that. They still want to stick to MIGO and receive. <<Text removed>>
My understanding is as follows, let me know if i'm right or wrong and please correct
PO gets sent out - This is 850.
Van provider gets confirmatioon of the successful receiupt of the PO from vendor - This is 997 and only van proivder gets this.
Order confirmation - is this called order ackwnowledement or order confirmation? The vendor agress to the dates and quantities that we asked, Lets say the vendor changes the dates and/or quantities than what we asked. Is there a posssibility in system where we can put them in wait mode and not update our PO, then the buyer will go to some place in SAP and verify the changes dates and/or quantities that the vendor sent and then accept or reject the changes if we dont like etc.
once the material is put on truck by the vendor, then we can get loading confirmation if we need to. Then finally once when they do the PGI that is when we get the shipping notifdication. IF this is the shipping notification then what is it that we got when the vendor agreed to our dates and quantities or changed the quanittues and dates. Please help
Thanks
Anusha
Edited by: anusha vemulapati on Jun 23, 2011 7:30 PM
Edited by: Matt on Jun 24, 2011 9:51 AM

Answer 1

Hi Anusha,
Well a very long description of question, and too many questions, please mention if something is missed in reply
Firstly when you receive acknowledgement of the order from vendor, that means it is Order Acknowledgement, that vendor agrees to the terms and conditions of the PO sent in the PO, he may send you a date variance and may not, but not sending a date variance doesn't guarantee that there can be no change later.
You mentioned the uses are not ready for Inbound delivery creation, so don't enter the shipping notification confirmation category in your confirmation control set up at all, or if you want you can use it but make it unaffected for your GR posting manually, by not ticking the GR assignment field in the confirmation control against shipping notification. by doing this it doesn't matter whether an Inbound delivery exists or not, you can post a GR Manually using MIGO.
See basically order acknowledgement is just an acceptance by the vendor of the PO terms and condition whereas a shipping notification is more relevant from planning point of view, because it gives you exact dates of material reciept, also you can link use these documents for various other purposes.
Regards
Chandra Shekhar