Exploring the Requisitioning Process

The Self-Service Requisitioning solution capability gives employees self-service requisitions to create, manage, and track their orders efficiently. The solution process provides the following benefits.

• Simplify purchasing for casual users and employees using self-service requisitioning solutions.
• Purchase goods and services to follow purchasing policies and pricing agreements and use preferred suppliers.
• Automate, tightly control, and streamline purchasing processes using catalog-driven pricing, contract logic, and an approval workflow.

You can order products

• by selecting them from catalogs
• by entering a free-text item
• by selecting a product ID from the product master

The system automatically checks that the most recent price for any product you want to purchase is chosen when you place your order. By creating a purchase requisition limit item, you can also define a value limit for unplanned services or materials that cannot be specified in detail at the time of ordering. Based on the settings made in the system, the appropriate purchasing groups are automatically proposed.

After ordering the products you require, an item or header-based approval process is triggered.

If configured, approvers can also send back purchase requisitions to requestors for rework. You will be notified if your purchase requisition has been rejected or sent back to you for rework.

You can monitor the status of all your requisitions to see who is responsible for an approval step. The status of purchase requisitions initially created in an external system also reflects the external processing status.

Once your purchase requisition has been approved, a purchase order can be automatically or manually created.

After you receive the products you requested, you confirm the delivery. If you do not confirm the goods by the delivery date, you will receive a notification asking for a confirmation.

The return delivery process is available if you need to return products after you have confirmed the delivery, for example, because they are damaged or of poor quality.

Employees can also shop on behalf of other users; for example, a team assistant can procure an item on behalf of the manager or a team member.

The following video provides an overview of the requisitioning process with a user story:

A purchase requisition is a request to procure a material or a service. It authorizes the purchasing department to procure the material in the specified quantity for the specified date. A purchase requisition is used as the starting point in purchasing and can trigger an approval process.

For example, a demand from an MRP run can result in a purchase requisition.

Purchasers or other specialists can also create purchase requisitions manually. The items in the purchase requisitions can be maintained as a flat list or a hierarchy list. A hierarchy list contains item sets and functional items arranged in a structured order.

Purchasers can also modify self-service requisitions.

You can assign a source of supply to the items in a purchase requisition and process them. If no source of supply is available in the system or if several potential sources of supply exist, you can also create a request for quotation to find the most suitable supplier.

You can select purchase requisitions and trigger a mass change for specific fields. You can then monitor these mass changes.

You can create a list of purchase requisitions based on different attributes, such as the supplier, a material, or an account assignment.

You can optimize the purchasing process by bundling several purchase requisitions into one purchase order. Alternatively, you can also create a purchase contract if required. If the sources of supply are assigned, you can also plan the automatic creation of purchase orders from requisitions as a background job. Embedded analytics help suppliers find the best possible source of supply.

As an approver, you can partially edit specific purchase requisitions before approving or sending them back for rework. You can also add comments, notes, and attachments before approving or sending them back for rework.

You can read more about Requirements Processing from SAP Help.

The following picture shows the key process steps of the requisitioning solution process.

The employee requisitioning activities start with the process step that an employee creates a shopping cart. A purchase requisition is generated and converted to a purchase order. The flexible workflow can be defined so that, if the value falls into a specific criterion, the purchase order must be approved, or else it can be approved automatically. When the employee receives the goods, they perform a goods receipt confirmation. Invoice receiving can then be performed.

In the self-service requisitioning process, the purchase requisition is created by the employee. The employee also confirms the corresponding goods receipt. Although mostly catalogs are used for ordering products in self-service requisitioning, it is also possible to order products by entering free text or by selecting a product ID from the product master. The process differs from the professional requisitioning process, mainly in terms of the roles. In professional requisitioning, the purchase requisition is created by the purchaser, ideally using the Manage Purchase Requisitions - Professional app. And the goods receipt is posted by the warehouse clerk.

You can find the complete Solution Process Flow on Process Navigator - SAP for Me: