Process transparency for all Stakeholders
When a product, service or vendor is not in the Buying Catalog, your Business can initiate a Purchasing Request. A Purchase Request is based on Case Management. Multiple roles can be invited to join a Purchase Request. Three main roles are Business Unit, Purchasing Department and of course the Vendor. Added roles can be Legal Departments, Contract Experts, third parties, Lawyers, Architects or Designers. Basically anybody who needs to be involved in the specific Purchasing Case.
By using Case Management as a basis for Purchasing, transparency and communication is ensured but always controlled by the Purchasing Department.
The Purchasing Department can also provide purchasing document templates that your business users can use creating Purchasing Requests. They can be automatically prefilled based on the vendor(s) selected. But what about preceding documents? Most companies start of with an NDA, how easy would it be if your NDA came prefilled but could still be adapted by you or your legal department? And how easy would it be if you could just invite your vendor to sign it through the Vendor Portal? That is what the Buying Portal is all about.
Both your business user, your Purchasing Department and your vendor, but also anybody you invited to your purchasing case will have one version of the truth.
Purchasing Processes are often divided in RFP (Request for Proposal), RFQ (Request for Quotation), RFI request for information and, in case of an auction, a RFB (Request for Bid). For all of these, or your specific process template documents, the documents template creation tool is embedded in the Buying Portal. Template fields can be tagged and connected to SAP Purchasing documents directly. Your SAP Purchasing Documents will be created directly in your SAP ECC or SAP SRM back-end.