The game is getting interesting and we are sure that you are able to consume our blogs easily and are able to relate and use them in your areas. Am sure you would appreciate the new innovations from a consulting stand-point, for the first time, I feel that my business blue printing exercise will have lesser gaps with the customer requirement.
Let’s keep the theme MULTITASKING for today’s blog post.
1.0 Overview & Challenges
In today’s blog we would be discussing about the new RFx Creation before Shopping Cart Approval for Quick Quotes introduced with the EhP2. This feature becomes very interesting for folks that want to stay ahead of the game with multi-tasking whilst working inside the process.
Sometimes re-approvals become messy and hence it becomes important to give a feature that helps the shopper stay in the WIP mode, whilst the buyer can still start some of the sourcing processes parallely. Even if there is a change to the final price, there must be a way to handle it seamlessly.
The challenges that typically this innovation goes out addressing are around
- Enabling a quick 3 bid and buy approach
- Shopping carts would enter an approval process without the correct pricing. In many cases, pricing is discovered after approvals during the sourcing process.
2.0 Help me understand this feature / innovation?
- SAP SRM 7.0 EhP2 gives you the ability to create an RFx from a shopping cart with the status Awaiting Approval or Saved for quick quotes. This allows you to start the shopping cart approval process and the RFx creation process simultaneously.
- By triggering RFx directly from the shopping cart (prior to Sourcing), stakeholders will know the approximate value of a shopping cart before approving.
- When an employee orders a shopping cart, it appears in the purchaser's universal work list (UWL) provided completion workflow is setup. The purchaser can then create an RFx directly from the Item Overview tab of the shopping cart.
- Purchasers can receive RFx responses, but no RFx responses can be accepted until a shopping cart has been approved. Purchasers can update the value of a shopping cart based on the RFx responses before the shopping cart is approved.
- The purchaser is notified once a shopping cart has been approved. A work item is then available in the purchaser's work-list with a link to the RFx.
What is going to be the fun part is that, how many stake-holders from compliance are going to chip in and say, NO, this looks like breach of compliance.
But if you notice clearly, both the business objects are logically in a draft status before any financial commitment is made with any of the Purchasing documents within the framework, in fact it makes the system that much more compliant, as it helps determine the accurate price by getting the stake-holders that would actually deliver the committed price (Early vendor involvement) into the process.
Business Value
I personally see the following benefits & business value of switching this feature
- Enables quick ‘3-bid & buy’ process which many companies use
- Better control and compliance by engaging suppliers early to discover the true price before approval of shopping cart.
- Enable better decision making by the approvers by providing more accurate pricing data
- Accurate commitment values
- Overall cycle time reduction by parallel processing of RFx and shopping cart
3.0 Snippets of how this looks inside SAP SRM 7.0 ehP2
RFx Creation before Shopping Cart Approval Update requirement price
4.0 How do I achieve it?
- Switch SRM_702_RFX_FROM_SCis non-revertible , switch it on to use it
- Employee cannot create RFx during shopping cart creation. RFx can be created by purchaser during completion workflow step. You need to configure process controlled workflow which includes completion of SC by purchaser.
- If the purchaser creates the shopping cart, RFx creation can be triggered in ‘Saved’ status itself.
- If you want to restart the workflow when the shopping cart value is changed due to price updates from RFx response, use BADI
/SAPSRM/BD_WF_PROCESS_RESTART
- Relevant BADI: Filter Items to be sourced before Shopping Cart Approval (/SAPSRM/BD_SOURCING_FILTER).
Summary
- Thanks for tuning into these sequels, am sure that with SAP SRM 7.0 EhP2, you will have more power in your hands as an SAP Procurement consultant to help deliver those go-to customer implementations. In our next blog, we will discuss more about the Active Bidders Reports for Better Decision Making in Sourcing.
5.0) SAP Procurement social_media outreach channels
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6.0) SAP Procurement handles & Hash-tags to follow