How to Understand The SAP Purchase Order Info Record

Executive Summary

• The purchase order info record is used to create transportation lanes in APO.
• The purchase order info record impacts subcontracting, scheduling agreements, and the overall setup of sources of supply.

Introduction to the Purchase Info Record

Purchase info records are essential master data elements. You will learn how they work to help setup APO.

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What is the Purpose of the Purchasing Info Record?

The purchase order info record is used for something vital in APO. It is where the information specific to a material and vendor is held. While it has many features, its main one is it is a combination of vendor and material. During the procurement processing, the available purchasing info records in the system are what SAP will select to fulfill the purchase order. However, in addition, the purchasing info record holds other data such as the purchasing group, net price, delivery tolerances, and many other fields, which can be viewed on the screenshots in this post. For categories of purchasing info, records can be created:

1. Standard
2. Pipeline
3. Consignment
4. Subcontracting

Subcontracting

Subcontracting does not really change much from a data setup perspective. The same purchase order info record is set up, but instead of being a supplier, the info record represents a subcontractor. This similarity in setup extends to SNC, or Supplier Network Collaboration, where the subcontract purchase order info record is used for subcontract collaboration. See this article for more details.

Scheduling Agreements

A purchase order info record is like a scheduling agreement. See this article for more details.

Source of Supply

Both purchase order info records and scheduling agreements transfer over to SCM as sources of supply. See this article for more details.

Functionality

What needs to be determined, and what we do not know, is what type of material selection criteria is enabled with purchasing info records. They are designed to create a correlation between the vendor master and the material master. However, SAP will offer very much more functionality than just this. To fully understand the options, it’s necessary to pull in an MM consultant.

Important Fields

Fields of significant importance on this screen include, of course, all the header information, but also the planned delivery time, tolerances as well as the procedure field.

The following tab has even more detail, most of which will not be filled in.

After these fields have been CIFed over, they can be checked through the transaction (/SAPAPO/PWBSRC1)

You can read more about the CIF in this article.

This is the test to see if the Purchasing Info Record has been brought over correctly.