This unit is designed to show you how you can simplify the procurement process by automating a few steps. In the first lesson, you learned about the first automation step; the determination of requirements by Material Requirements Planning (MRP). In material requirements planning, you can not only determine the requirements of a material, but in this step the system can also find a source of supply for the material. As a prerequisite for this automation step, you must have maintained the MRP data in the material master record and a valid source of supply for the material must exist in the system.
This lesson introduces the automatic generation of purchase orders.
You can convert a purchase requisition item to which a source of supply is assigned into a purchase order using the function for automatic purchase order generation. A purchase requisition item with an assigned source contains all the information (for example, supplier and price) required for the system to convert it into a purchase order.