We have a business scenario where a document is received from a partner (Invoice in this case). This document cannot be posted into our accounting application (SAP R/3), till a goods’ receipt occurs in SAP R/3. However, the invoice is received a couple of days before the material reaching our factory. Hence, we need a scenario whereby we can hold the invoice document and then moment the goods receipt is carried out, we would post the invoice document to SAP.
Is there an elegant way to do it in TN ?
We are looking for an inbuilt functionality of TN rather than using filestore/db store ?
To me the way that makes sense is if you get SAP to notify webMethods when the goods’ receipt comes in (via the adapter or an HTTP post). So the invoice is just sitting in TN (you don’t invoke a processing rule that delivers it when it comes in).
If you can’t get SAP to notify webMethods, you might have to set up a scheduled event in webMethods that keeps polling SAP for the appropriate goods’ receipt.
Either way - the main point is that you can easily write a flow service to query TradingNetworks for the document you want - you don’t have to act on the doc as soon as it comes in.
Why not allow the invoices to post to R/3 and block for GR. Schedule a daily job (RMMR0200) to auto-release invoices for which the blocking reason is no longer valid… releasing the invoice once goods receipt has been posted. Further info; most of our partners have agreed to hold delivery of invoices for 48hours allowing time for materials to arrive.
Its a great suggestion. We will try it.
Somehow we got so involved with have a processing rule for each bizdoc that it never occurred to us that by not having a processing rule TN actually buffers the document automatically !!
We are trying to figure out the logic to query TN. IF we get stuck we will get back.
In fact, suggestion by Mardele is what we have forced our partners to do. We are doing that for some of our partners. SOme others do not agree to that (it is a matter of who dominates in the game !!!).