How to integrate standardised orders (including automatically basic services and material positions) in SAP

[Former Member]

Good morning,

I am a master student and at the moment I am dealing with my master thesis in a company.

The goal of the thesis is to boost and smooth the whole procurement process, from the order creation in the plant to the final booking done by the purchase department.

The present situation is characterized by a low automation in the order creation process. Indeed, all the orders, (including also those delivered on a regular basis) are manually created, every single time. This of course generates many problems, errors and mistakes with many consequences on other departments (e.g. financial controlling).    

The order most of the time is sum of services positions and materials as well. My idea furthermore is to create a standardised catalogue where to include the most frequent orders. This catalogue should have then in memory the standardised services and materials positions, associated with the esecution and realization of the order.

Thus, my idea would be to include a drop down menu, as first step when selecting the process to book. Hence, during the order creation, rather than entering all the fields, simply selecting the desired order from the catalogue (if already inserted into it) would fill automatically all the  basic services and materials positions. Besides the reduction in mistakes and inconsistencies, every order can be easily and faster generated. Of course, the developemnt of this catalogue would head towards including always more and more orders.

Thanks to this new tool, controlling, analysis of internal trends, analysis of expenditure and turnover would become finally available. At the moment, due to different specifications and descriptions of every entry, none of the just mentioned options is possible.

The unique controlling that can be run is a general overview of the total turnover for some material goods.

A substitutive option might be the generation of "correct" orders, that can be then simply copied and reutilized in every occurrence. It may partially solve the problem but, from my understadning, this would not rerpesent a real solution to the problem.

My question furthermore is: how could I propose the realization of such a tool in SAP? How can this catalogue be generated and included in SAP? Must it be done out of business functions or how else?

A comparison can be the offer proposed by this website SAP Purchase Orders ME21/N | Simplify and Automate | Winshuttle

However, my goal is to keep SAP running, without any external add-on.

Thank you very much for any help.

Best regards

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Giacomo

It seems what you want to do, is set up an automatic or semi automatic solution for purchase order creation that is pretty much guaranteed to create a good, valid purchase order every time with a minimum amount of human intervention ?

So several questions:

What kind of Purchase Orders are these?

Purchase Orders of items to be inventoried as sales products

Purchase Orders of raw materials

Purchase Orders of services

Purchase Orders of miscellaneous items

Depending on what it is that you are buying it is possible to handle this automatically in many ways through standard functionality. For example:

Contracts with call off dates

MRP with Procurement proposals

Purchase Requisition conversion into PO's

The approach you make reference to : SAP Purchase Orders ME21/N | Simplify and Automate focuses primarily on the avoidance of manual entry because the data already exists in some form in an excel workbook or the like. This often occurs because SAP is not say running the warehouse or the factory or there are many disparate systems that are not fully integrated.

As such, the example cited is only one of many where the process is accelerated and improved using a SAP certified Add-On

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you very much for your reply.

Indeed, I would like to "set up an automatic or semi automatic solution for purchase order creation that is pretty much guaranteed to create a good, valid purchase order every time with a minimum amount of human intervention".

Moreover, the purchase orders always refer to complete requisitions with several positions, that might be services or material (to purchase or from stock).

The problem now is which add-on do I need? Which data and information do you need in order to be able to reply to this answer?

Thank you very much again.

Regards

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

This is typically achieved through correct and appropriate configuration, there is no particular add-on required.

As mentioned, you can convert a requisition to a PO and this can be done automatically

Automatic Generation of POs from Requisitions - Purchasing (MM-PUR) - SAP Library

MRP can generate proposals

Procurement Proposal (PP-MRP-PP) - Material Requirements Planning (PP-MRP) - SAP Library

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I think this is slightly different from what I do need.

We need to step back once. I need to standardise the requisition creation process. In the company many activities are often purchased on a more or less regular frequency.

Therefore, I would like to set a faster tool for the requisition creation. Simply adding to a database many services positions, with update offers, contact person, budget, conto and all the required details for each position. Hence, when a technical employee is creating a purchase requisition can either select a standardised service from this drop-down menu or fill in manually the whole requisition. When selecting the service from the drop-down menu, all the entries are then automatically filled in.

The only thing I found that sounds rather similar is from this link:

Service Specifications - External Services Management (MM-SRV) - SAP Library