You pay for what you ordered! That’s usually the simple rule. However, some companies place so many orders that it is difficult to keep track of all of them and the SAP system is there to help ensure that vendors do not deliver more than was actually ordered. In this blog post, you can find out whether your SAP system allows for overdeliveries and for which orders this is the case.
In principle, your SAP system can monitor whether an overdelivery can be made for an order or not. This means that the SAP system is able to issue a warning in the event of an overdelivery to the plant gate or even refuse an overdelivery of quantities on the system side. The only question is whether your SAP system is set up correctly and whether such control functions are “finely-tuned”.
A never-ending story
The extent to which an overdelivery is permitted is stored in each purchase order, or rather, in each purchase order item in SAP (table EKPO). The most extensive possibility for overdelivery is the possibility of open-ended overdelivery. Each order item indicates whether it can be overdelivered indefinitely. This is shown in the data by the flag in the UEBTK data field of the EKPO table.
The following SQL query determines all the order items in your system for which overdeliveries are or have been allowed indefinitely. Of course, this does not mean that such an overdelivery has actually taken place. If you want to test the query yourself on your own SAP system, use the “DBACOCKPIT” transaction and navigate to the “SQL Editor” (tested on a HANA database) via “Diagnostics”:
SELECT EBELN, EBELP, MATNR, TXZ01, MENGE AS AMOUNT , UEBTK FROM EKPO WHERE MATNR != '' AND MENGE>0 AND UEBTK='X' ORDER BY EBELN, EBELP
On my test data set, this gives the following results:
| EBELN | EBELP | MATNR | TXZ01 | AMOUNT | UEBTK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5500000032 | 10 | AM2-730 | on board computer | 90 | X |
| 5500000034 | 10 | AM2-600 | air condition | 1.121 | X |
On purchase order 550000000034, air conditioning units were ordered and it would have been possible to make overdeliveries for the quantity indefinitely.
Do not focus on the individual lines at first but start by checking how many document items are found at all to get an impression as to whether systematic overdelivery is allowed. If systematic overdelivery is possible, this is an indication of failings in your internal control system.
Possibility of overdeliveries on a massive scale
Open-ended overdeliveries have the potential to cause problems on a massive scale. However, you can also specify how much can be overdelivered as a percentage of the quantity ordered. This is stored in the “UEBTO” data field in each document item. First define an overdelivery limit as a percentage in excess of which you consider overdeliveries to be critical. If we take this to be a percentage of more than 50% overdelivery, then such cases can be identified using the following query:
SELECT EBELN, EBELP, MATNR, TXZ01, MENGE, UEBTO FROM EKPO WHERE MATNR IS NOT NULL AND MENGE > 0 AND UEBTO > 50.0 AND UEBTK='' ORDER BY EBELN, EBELP
The same applies to this query as we have already said above: The results do not indicate that an overdelivery was actually made, but only that it is or was possible.
Why not let zap Audit do the work for you?
If this all sounds too technical for you, then you’ll be pleased to hear that zap Audit already contains an indicator to identify the cases of overdelivery described above. So why not give it a try: zap Audit is free of charge for small company codes and we will be happy to give you some advance guidance to show you how to obtain the analysis results you are looking for.
