Creating Purchase Orders with Source Determination SAP MM Optimized Purchasing

Use

It may be that no purchase requisition was created in the system for a certain requirement and the procurement process is to begin directly with a purchase order. This could be the case, for example, if the requirement was notified to Purchasing by ‘phone and the buyer wishes to create a PO immediately, even though he does not yet know which vendor is to receive it.

You have the option of using the source determination facility for such cases too.

As in requisition processing, the system suggests possible sources of supply for the material on the basis of existing quota arrangements, source list records, outline agreements, and/or info records.

Prerequisites

Before using this procedure, you should know how to create requisitions and purchase orders manually.

Activities

To create a PO with source determination, proceed as follows:

1. Choose Purchase order
® Create ® Vendor unknown

The initial screen appears.

2. Enter the key of your purchasing group on this screen.

Select the Source determination field if the source is to be determined automatically and assigned to a PO item after entry of the latter.

Press ENTER to display the item overview screen.

3. Enter the item data for the requested materials.

You can also adopt items from an existing requisition by choosing Purchase order ® Copy requisition.

4. If you did
not select the field for automatic source determination on the initial screen, select the items to which a source is to be assigned. Then choose Edit ® Assign supply source.

The system lists the possible sources for the material. If only one vendor exists for an item, the vendor is assigned to the item automatically. You can determine which vendor has been assigned to an item by displaying the item details.

5. If more than one possible source exists for an item, a dialog box with a list of possible sources appears. You can either choose the desired source, or close the box if none of the sources is suitable.
6. Price simulation:
You can determine a certain source’s net or effective price by running a price simulation for one of the suggested sources.

Position the cursor on the desired source in the dialog box and choose Price simulation. A second box appears, in which you enter the simulation data. Press ENTER to display the conditions for the source.

7. Select the items for which you want to generate purchase orders. Then choose Edit
® Generate purchase order.

If no suitable source currently exists for an item, you can save the latter as a requisition item so that already entered data is not lost.
Select the items to be saved in this way, then choose Purchase order ® Save as requisition.

You can also save items that cannot be converted into PO items (because they are subject to a release procedure, for instance) as purchase requisition items.

If you have defined different document types for requisitions than those you defined for purchase orders, a dialog box appears. Use this box to change the document type.

8. If the selected items are to be procured from more than one vendor, an overview of the vendors is displayed for selection purposes. Position the cursor on a vendor and click on Choose to generate the purchase order.

The system consolidates the items for the selected vendor and generates a purchase order. The system then issues an appropriate message.