The shipping of an order occurs in two stages:
•Sales Order Preparation: The sales department fixes the shipping to be made; it produces the associated order shipping notes; the necessary inventory amounts are reserved for this shipping (i.e. the status of the necessary material amounts are transferred from DISP toward PREP).
•Sales Order Shipping: The logistics department proceeds to the inventory issues and to the physical shipping for the material (under PREP status).
It is possible to prepare only approved sales orders.
The preparation transaction performs an inventory reservation and an update of the material remaining to deliver.
The control of the availability of items in inventory depends on the option chosen as Shipping policy:
•Partial deliveries: it is prepared all the quantity available in inventory, even if inventory is lower than the remaining quantity to be delivered,
•Complete lines: one can prepare a line only if stock available (in the item inventory status) is sufficient to deliver entirely the line; the lines for which inventory is insufficient are not delivered at all,,
•Complete orders: one examines all the order lines to see whether all of them can be prepared; in the contrary, the order is not prepared at all.