Improve Your Delivery Process with Advanced Shipping Notification

by Dr. Gaetano Altavilla, Senior SAP Solutions Architect, Instructor, Project Manager and Team Leader (February 2010)

Learn about the Advanced Shipping Notification (ASN) functionality available in the materials management module. Discover how its integration with other modules helps you receive updated information from vendors, create a reliable production plan, and meet your customer’s delivery date. Find out details about the customizations you need to set in the system to activate ASN.

Key Concept

Advanced Shipping Notification (ASN), also known as vendor confirmation, refers to information that vendors (or other external business partners) provide about ordered goods. An ASN can be a loading or transport confirmation, an order acknowledgment, or a shipping notification. Use ASN to update transactional purchasing documents such as purchase orders, scheduling agreements, stock transfer orders, and intercompany stock transfer orders based on the latest information received from vendors or other business partners.

Order and shipping confirmations are important components in a company’s ability to ensure punctual delivery to its customers. A form of confirmation in purchasing is inbound delivery, which is created on the basis of an incoming shipping notification. The shipping notification represents a vendor’s confirmation (Advanced Shipping Notification [ASN]) to a purchasing organization of a delivery date for a certain quantity of ordered materials (or the date of performance of ordered services). Some of the benefits of using ASNs are:

Confirmations enable the customer to plan better. During the period between a transactional purchasing document date and the planned delivery date, the customer receives increasingly precise, reliable, and up-to-date information from the vendor pertaining to the expected delivery.
Inbound delivery can streamline the entire supply chain, especially in the case of a long vendor lead time. An inbound delivery can be created automatically based on ASN settings. This is reflected in more accurate production and purchasing planning. Inbound delivery is a must in the case of handling units (e.g., containers) because you can only use it via an inbound delivery in the receiving processes.
Inbound delivery is a must in the case of a decentralized warehouse, because inbound delivery manages the goods receipt (GR) processes between the decentralized warehouse management system and the central SAP ERP system

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