Reg commissionaire model in SAP - very urgent

[Former Member]

Could somebody throw some light on how one would go about incorporating the Commissionaire Model using SAP? How is the enterprise structure defined? How the inter company transactions take place? What is the Sales Org set up? Is PCA involved?

I have seen that a few organizations like Xerox, Texas Instruments, etc. have successfully implemented the Commissionaire Model using Oracle Applications. Lucent has similar set up and they use SAP.

Wonder if any of you guys in the group has any experience in this. If so, could you share it some documents or links regarding the same would be of much help.

Thanks and regards

Sunil

[Former Member]

We are interested in the same topic.

Currently, we support international (outside the U.S.). Customer fulfillment through a traditional buy/sell model where local affiliates (local to the end customer) either hold inventory and ship directly or drop ship inventory from a regional distribution center. In both cases, the local affiliate records the revenue, cost of sale, inventory (flash title in the case of a drop ship) and receivables on their books.

We are investigating moving toward a commissionaire system, where the local affiliate will no longer hold inventory nor recognize any revenue, cost of sale, or inventory/receivable accounting. The affiliate will be treated as a sales office, incurring expenses only (e.g. salaries, office lease, etc). A new, single international entity will be created and this entity will record the revenues, cost of sales, inventory and receivables for sale to the international customer regardless of the customers' locale. The local affiliate will receive, in the form of some type of allocation based partly on revenue generation and partly on treasury considerations a "commission" for that affiliate's efforts on behalf of the international org.

To support this model in SAP, we are thinking about a architecting a very flat organizational structure comprised of a single company code and single sales organization and a very limited number of plants supporting our international branch sales offices. This organization would transact with external business partners across multiple countries as well as with our existing internal organization supporting the United States operations.

The goals of the new structure are to limit financial processing, reconciliation, and master data maintenance by significantly limiting the number of company codes and sales organizations. Obviously this also limits flexibility when it comes to taxes, language, currency, and reporting.

We would appreciate it if other members who are either considering or have already implemented a similar business model post to this thread with thoughts and experiences regarding implementing this model in SAP.