SAP S4HANA /SD : What are Hard and Soft Blocks in Availability Check and its impact on Transactions

We have two types of Blocks in Availability Check at Material.  They are

HARD BLOCK  :-

      This block is set in the Configuration of Availability Check under below Navigation Path

SPRO---->SALES & DISTRIBUTION-->BASIC FUNCTIONS-->AVAILABILITY CHECK AND TOR-->AVAILABILITY CHECK-->DEFINE MATERIAL BLOCK FOR OTHER USERS

This is the block you set at the Availability Check level for Sales, Delivery separately. If this indicator is set, while processing a sales order for a particular material, the stock of the material is blocked  by User A and it will not be accessed by other User say B , until first user A carryout Availability

If this indicator is not set, the same Quantity of material is checked for all sales orders and Availability is carried out which may not be Real-time Calculation of Confirmed Quantities

Lets check the Impact of this configuration, I  have a stock of material in Plant as 35

Lets create a sales Order for 30 quantity and dont save it, Create another Sales order for more than 5 which is the stock available in the Plant and check

First Sales Order:

First sales order Created for Quantity 30 and will get confirmed, for second sales order created with more than a stock available ,

you will get below information

Impact is no Schedule Line confirmed for second order due to above setting

This line will be confirmed only when the first sales order is



SOFT BLOCK : 

        If this block is set, it will allow multiple users to  access the quantity simultaneously

Generally we set  Hard Block and Uncheck Soft Block if the quantity of the material is less and dont want multiple users to access the same material with different transactions