SAP ERP

Procurement -- Operational Sourcing

The following business goals and objectives can be achieved through the implementation of these processes:

Reducing Operating Costs & Increasing Efficiency

•   Reduce order processing costs

•   Reduce transaction costs

From Demand to Purchase Order

The following objects represent the basic data upon which the source determination process for requisitions and purchase orders depends: Outline Agreement, Info Record, Plant, Quota Arrangement and Source List. The source of supply of a requested material can be determined automatically, by searching for respective sources of supply in the background. If a unique source of supply can not be determined, the system does not assign a source at all. The source must then be assigned manually by a user in an online process.

Issuing a one-time purchase order or determining a new source through the more time-consuming process of requesting and processing quotations are functions that will often only take place after discovering that there is no suitable source for a certain material or service in the system. ERP offers eSOA based interfaces which allows to send a demand to an external sourcing platform (e.g. via SAP SRM Bidding Engine). Triggering an external sourcing process may happen automatically via customizable settings or manually by decision of a user. After the source of supply is determined externally, all follow on activieties (e.g. creation of outline agreements and purchase orders) will happen in SAP ERP.

Requisitions that have been assigned to sources can automatically convert into purchase orders. This function can be performed either online or in the background. During conversion, the system attempts to consolidate as many requisition items as possible to form one purchase order. Usually, one PO whose contents can be regarded as belonging together is created for each purchasing organization, vendor, and contract.
If the system is unable to complete the source determination and further processing functions for all items (e.g. due to missing data or the absence of unique sources), it generates a list of unprocessed items which needs to be processed manually.

Configuration Variants

In Purchasing Optimizing, the system combines the quantities in open purchase requisitions and purchase orders and rounds off the total quantity. This enables you to make best possible use of the transport capacity available.

• LoadBuildingis used to, minimize transport costs by making best possible use of the means of transport and achieve more favorable purchase price conditions by ordering whole truck loads. The system attempts to optimize quantities for procurement and converts existing purchase requisitions to purchase orders, if necessary generating new purchase orders. Several purchase orders are combined in a load under the one collective number.

• Investment Buying - helps you decide whether you could best cover future requirements by purchasing articles now that are due to increase in price. The purpose of investment buying is to buy efficient quantities of suitable articles just before the price goes up.

SAP Compliance Management helps manage regulatory compliance for imports and exports – incl. embargo checking, license management and sanctioned party list screening.

Sanctioned party list screeningis a process that checks to ensure trading partners are not designated as restricted by any particular agencies. It is fully integrated into the outbound and inbound business processes and allows for check against multiple lists.

Import Controlenables the tracking, management and assignment of import licenses required by law. It checks the availability of necessary import licenses and tracks classification of licensable materials. Licenses can be assigned to products and/or specific business partners. Depending on the defined type of license, the system performs a value and/or quantity depreciation.