SAP MM Optimized Purchasing

The user departments of your firm have requirements of materials and services that have to be satisfied by Purchasing. Departments may notify Purchasing of their requirements via the SAP document purchase requisition. In other cases Purchasing may record them as requisitions itself, or create either standard purchase orders or releases against outline agreements directly, without first creating a requisition.

In order to be able to cover the requirements of your user departments quickly and efficiently, you wish to optimize your work processes in Purchasing.

In addition to the Purchasing-specific options available to you that are treated here, you can also speed up procurement activities in the following ways:

• The materials planning system generates delivery schedule lines against existing scheduling agreements automatically, i.e. without any intervention by Purchasing.
• User departments create purchase orders directly (delegated Purchasing).

An example of this is the kanban procedure for controlling production and the flow of materials.

The following graphic illustrates how purchasing activities can be streamlined with regard to source determination for purchase requisitions and the creation of follow-on documents.

Assignment of Sources and Further Processing: Steps

You can choose the degree of automation to be employed in the creation of external purchasing documents from requisitions:

Workstep/Type of processing	Automatic	Manual
Determine possible sources for requisition	X
Assign one source.
When creating/changing the individual requisition item		X
Collectively from a list of requisitions to be assigned		X
In the background	X
Further processing of requisitions with assigned source
Create purchase orders	X	X
Create release orders against contracts	X	X
Create schedule lines/releases against scheduling agreements		X
Create RFQs		X

Recommendation

Automatic processing is recommended if you have a well-maintained system with a lot of possible sources of supply, allowing the majority of requisition items to be assigned to unique sources without intervention from the buyer and follow-on documents (such as contract release orders) to then be created.

Manual processing is recommended if few possible sources are available or if there are several possible sources for a certain requirement. In these cases, the buyer must choose a unique source.

In the case of manual processing, one person can perform both of the steps "assigning sources" and "further processing". However, you can also specify that one person is responsible for source assignment and another for further processing.