The ERS function in SAP MM is not applicable to vendor consignment purchase mode

Recently, I received a question from an SAP peer who works in the retail industry. The customer asked her if she could enable the ERS function of SAP for the supplier consignment purchase process. I was very surprised and felt that the question of this SAP customer was not simple and shallow. At the same time, I also feel that this customer is very active in learning SAP, and actually knows something about ERS function that many SAP consultants have not used.

SAP consultants know that if the purchase process in SAP adopts the vendor consignment mode, the consignment stock will be formed after the goods receipt of purchase order is posted, and the GR/IR account will not be updated until the purchaser consumes or sells the consignment inventory. The purchaser reconciles with the supplier regularly according to the actual consumption or sales quantity, performs MRKO transaction code to settle, and generates invoice documents. The MRKO itself can be set as a job or manually executed.

The ERS function in SAP MM is a function that automatically triggers the purchase invoice according to the goods receipt information. It can automatically trigger the invoice (formal invoice or formula invoice) before receiving the supplier's invoice. This can reduce the workload of manually executing MIRO for invoice verification by the business personnel of the financial department.

If you want to use this ERS functionality, you must first activate it in the vendor master data, as shown in the following screenshot:

The transaction code of ERS executed by the foreground is MRRL,

It can be set as a job running in the background.

The advantage of this function is that it provides an automatic function. Some foreign customers may like this function, but few customers in China will use this function.

I have been engaged in SAP consulting for more than 15 years. In the SAP projects I participated in, only one SAP project customer used the ERS functionality for their import business, and I worked in this project more than 10 years ago. On the one hand, domestic(China) financial personnel are generally very careful. When business team conduct invoice verification, they pay attention to the matching of three documents. Naturally, they are cautious about invoices, which involve external payment. They certainly need manual intervention and do not want to create invoices automatically by SAP system. On the other hand, it is said that this function does not match well with the Chinese financial management system.

I also checked the information on the Internet. Many SAP peers agreed with me that ERS function is only applicable to normal procurement mode, but not supplier consignment procurement mode.

So I did some testing in SAP system in order to confirm this.

1, BP 191 Vendor 100065, which active ERS functionality.