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Marketing Information Systems and the Sales Order Process
The best situation would be that the company could meet the customer’s request, but
when that is not possible, the integrated SAP ERP system can provide the clerk with
accurate information about the ability to meet the customer’s requirements. With Fitter’s
unintegrated systems, it could take days for the customer to find out that its requested
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delivery date could not be met.
When a sales order is saved, the SAP ERP system assigns a document number to the
sales order transaction. In the SAP ERP system, a document is an electronic record of a
business transaction, and a document number is created for each business transaction.
When the sales order is ready to be processed by the warehouse, a delivery document will
be created with its own unique document number, which the system will link to the sales
order document. Finally, when the bill (invoice) is prepared for the customer, the bill’s
unique number (called the invoice number) will be created and linked to all the other
numbers associated with the sales order.
The SAP ERP system has a mechanism for keeping track of the document numbers
associated with each sales order so employees can track the status of an order while it is
in process or research it after shipping. The linked set of document numbers related to
a sales order, also known as the audit trail, is called the document flow in SAP ERP.
Figure 3-9 shows the document flow for a completed order.

Accounting
document
90000002 is
linked to
sales order 5
Source Line: SAP AG.

FIGURE 3-9 The Document Flow tool, which links sales order documents

If an order includes partial shipments, partial payments, and returned material credits,
the document flow can become quite complex. Without an integrated information system,
the audit trail can be hard to establish, especially if many paper documents are involved.
With an integrated system such as SAP ERP, document numbers are all linked together
electronically. Not only does the document flow show all documents related to a sales order,
but the user can look at the details of each document simply by double-clicking a line in the
document flow. For example, if West Hills Athletic Club chose to take delivery of five cases
of NRG-A bars on its requested delivery date and five cases when they became available, a
sales order clerk can easily check on the status of the five delayed cases using document
flow. He or she can search the SAP system to find the original sales order by a number of
methods (open orders for West Hills, the PO number that West Hills used, the sales order

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