Analyzing situations in procurement

The figure Direct Procurement with Inbound Delivery highlights the main steps in the Direct Procurement with Inbound Delivery business scenario, from PO creation to Invoice Management.

For the purpose of Situation Handling, you need to pay particular attention to the PO confirmation step. With this Situation Handling use case, the system will notify the business user when the supplier has not confirmed or confirmed only a part of the original ordered quantity by the time the supplier confirmations are due. After creation of a PO, if a partial confirmation for the ordered quantity is created or there are no confirmations at all. Then, on the date that the supplier confirmations are due, a Situation Handling batch job will pick up the purchase order, because it hasn’t been confirmed in full, to send the preconfigured recipient a notification informing them that the supplier hasn’t confirmed the full ordered quantity.

Watch the following video to see how situation handling helps you to resolve this issue.

The situation is only triggered if the confirmed quantity deficit is higher than 10.

• The team is selected based on the team category and the company code and plant of the purchase order.
• The situation will be issued to the team members with the Operational Purchasing member function. 

• The team is considered as it refers to the same team category as indicated in the purchase order.
• The situation will be issued to the team if the purchase order fulfills the criteria of the responsibility definition (company code = 1010 or 1110 and plant is 1010 or 1110).

As the responsibility definition of the situation is defined for the Operational Procurement function, the situation will be issued to John Miller and John Morris.

You want your purchasers to be informed automatically when an RFQ is close to the quotation deadline but only a low number of supplier quotations have been received. Then, you as a business configuration expert can use the standard template Low Number of Quotations Received for handling this situation.

Usually purchasers can see the number of the received quotations as well as the quotation deadline only if they open an RFQ and check this information. The standard template Low Number of Quotations Received enables you to inform your purchasers about the approaching quotation deadline of an RFQ with a low number of received supplier quotations, so that the purchasers can keep an eye on such RFQs and contact the invited suppliers without submitted quotations if needed.

You can watch the following video to discover how you can access the situations and react to them.

The figure Requisitioning highlights the main steps in the Requisitioning business scenario, from PR creation to Invoice Management.

For the purpose of Situation Handling, you need to pay particular attention to the Confirm Goods Receipt step. With this Situation Handling use case, the system will notify the employee when the scheduled delivery date has passed but goods receipt has not been confirmed. After creation of a PR, a follow-on purchase order is created. When the goods receipt is not confirmed and once the scheduled delivery date is passed, a Situation Handling batch job will pick up the PR, because GR hasn’t been confirmed, to send the preconfigured recipient a notification informing them that GR for a particular PR item is overdue.