Preface – This post is part of the SAP SD series.
Introduction
In this section, we’re going to see how to create an inquiry in the system.
Steps to create an Inquiry:
- Go to transaction code VA11.
- Give Inquiry Type and Organization Data details
- Give Header details
- Give Item details
- Save
Go to transaction VA11.
This is the transaction code to create an inquiry. You can just hit, enter or click on this green checkmark.
If you don’t like to remember these funky codes, they can still do logistics, sales and distribution, sales, inquiry and create.
So you can do this transaction, either way, use the transaction Code VA11 or you go to logistics, sales and distribution sales inquiry, then create.
So you can use VA11 or use the menu path.
Give Inquiry Type and Organization Data details
Go inside by either double-clicking it, or typing in VA11 and hitting enter, you’ll be taken to the screen. This is the first screen.
When you create an inquiry, what do you have here? You have two main pieces of data.
- Inquiry type, and when you go create a quotation, it’s going to say a quotation type. I don’t want to fully get into the concept of actually creating an inquiry type or configuring an inquiry type yet. But for now, I just want to understand that there are two pieces to start with.
If you want to give me an example, you go to a subway and order some sandwiches, you’re going to start with some basic choices, like is it going to be a six-inches or a foot long? Right. You’re going to make some basic choices and then further move up from there.
So similarly, this is the first choice that you’ve got to make. What is the inquiry type that you’re going to create? There can be multiple inquiries, inquiries for a certain group of products from another group of products.
For example, a company like HP could be doing one inquiry type for all parts, any spare parts, another inquiry type for, say, capital goods? Another inquiry type for, say, routers. Because they might represent different lines of businesses and each inquiry is different for them, so they might want to do a different inquiry for each of them.
- Similarly, there is something called ORG Data. This is more or less the areas or the geographical areas in which they are to business. That’s a very gross misrepresentation. But for now, just think of our data as your different geographies.
Like, again, if you take the HP example, the ORG data for sales happening in the US is going to be US organization distribution channel, let’s say retail and division park sales. And if they are creating an inquiry into Singapore, it’s going to be sales of Singapore. It could be retail or wholesale distribution channel and say capital goods division. Now, I’m just taking too many examples here, but don’t worry, we’re going to talk about all these things in much greater detail at a later point.
I just want to give you an idea of what’s an inquiry type and what’s your data and more importantly, why you’re seeing them here, because this is going to set the precedent for what you’re going to enter going forward.
Let me give you one simple example. You don’t want to choose the ORG data for the US. And when you go inside this enter customer from the Singapore or Japanese region. Right. It’s just wrong.
So you’re making a choice here and you’ll stick to those choices going forward as you enter customer data and material data.
All right, so that’s a goal here, click on this dropdown and select an as your inquiry. As I said, you can create your own inquiry types, but we’re not there yet. For now, we’ll select a standard inquiry type provided by SAP and click OK, and over here, select your sales or distribution channel and division.
Now, what are these Sales Organization 1000 represents the German sales org, Distribution Channel 10 represents the retail distribution channel and 00 represents a cross-division. But why is 1000 representing Germany? We will come to that when we come to enterprise structure. But until then, just select this level of details and hit enter.
Enter Header data.
You need to fill in some data and the rest of the details are automatically be picked up by SAP based on the data that’s already available.
For example, you want to pick a customer, right? In this case, Wal-Mart is our customer. We might not have created Wal-Mart yet in the system because we don’t know how to create a customer yet, but let’s just pick some customers for now.
Say 1000, that’s a customer.
Now, again, why one thousand? I just picked up a number because I know it exists. If you don’t know a number, you can click on the button beside the Sold-To-Party field and it’ll pop up a search box where they can do a variety of searches by postal code by city.
Let’s see if there’s anything like Wal-Mart. So I do a start which is a wild character and then to Wal-Mart and then star. So anything that has Wal-Mart in its name will be displayed.
So this is where you do your search and you select what kind of customer you want and so on.
So now coming back to our step. We have entered our customer and now hit the green button. It’s giving me another pop up now.
It says this customer has multiple ship to parties.
That means there are many ship to address that the customer could potentially ask us to ship. Which one do you want to select? You can either select the default one, which has a checkmark in there, or you can select the other one.
Now you can just let it remain and click OK.
Right, in this case, it has already pulled up the customer name, customer address and other details for the customer corresponding to the number 1000. So, what’s the name of the customer? It’s Becker Berlin and he stays at Calvin Strasse, some address and then Berlin. That’s the address.
Enter Line item data.
So here you will enter the line item details like desktops, laptops etc. Now, in this case, we don’t have desktops or laptops yet in the system. I know some materials, so I’m going to enter them here.
I entered material, quantity and hit enter. It will populate the material details with a description. You can enter more line items.
Now, we will enter the PO number and hit enter. As soon as you hit enter the system validates things. If there is an error, for example, say if you enter some wrong data, raw material, some random number that doesn’t exist. The system is going to look at the database behind the scenes and say, hey, this material is not defined.
So now just click on the save button and look at the left bottom corner here, inquiry 10000006 have been saved.
This is called an inquiry number.
And this is the number that we were referring to in our picture as inquiry number 10000006.
Now this is what we’re going to give to Wal-Mart and say, you know what, this is the inquiry that we have created from SAP. Thank you very much for your inquiry.
So this is how we create an Inquiry and an inquiry number is generated.
