Outlining Central Requisitioning (1XI)

The Central Requisitioning (‏1XI‏) scope item belongs to the Central Procurement business area, which is part of the Sourcing and Procurement line of business.

Procurement departments across all company sizes are continuing to centralize their procurement processes globally or regionally. There is a trend to establish Shared Service Centers where buying is built over a centralized procurement system.

Central Processing of Purchase Requisitions offers centralized requisitioning processes across industries with a deep integration into the customer's landscape. It is connected to the customer's ERP systems, and exchanges master data and business documents to ensure end-to-end business processes into Finance and Logistics that run in the connected systems.

This scope item offers one platform where a procurement specialist can work centrally on requisitions from different organizations. Operational procurement processes are not the only tasks to profit from the hub approach. Strategic procurement tasks including Supplier Management benefit from the transparency and the possibility to initiate strategic activities from a central digital procurement control center.

The figure shows the Integration Scenarios in Central Requisitioning.

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Central Requisitioning you can use Guided Buying or OData API for creating central purchase requisitions. The services available from Purchase Requisition API are available for the integration of external systems with Sourcing and Procurement in SAP S/4HANA for purchase requisitions. The services helps you to create, read, update and delete purchase requisitions through an API call from a source system outside SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The above row in the End-2-End Process Flow through Central Procurement diagram shows the high level process overview for Central Requisitioning.

The business benefits include:

• Harmonize business process
• Get full transparency over all activities
• Ensure usage of centrally negotiated prices and contracts
• Provide single data access for employees and possibility to process procurement activities centrally (for example, sourcing, completion of requisitions, approval, and so on)
• Reduce TCO significantly for procurement departments through centralized process

The key process flows include:

• Create and approve purchase requisitions
• Assign potential sources of supply automatically
• Create the corresponding purchase orders
• Update the process status electronically while processing the goods receipt and the supplier invoice

The employee has the option of navigating directly from central requisition to backend PR to make any amendments.

Because the information is completed by the employee, procurement of the item becomes efficient.

You need to first enable the user for expert mode in the Default Settings for Users SAP Fiori app.

Then choose a backend plant and select the Expert Mode checkbox.

The employee creates the central purchase requisition in the SAP S/4HANA for central procurement system.

If any additional information required to be amended to the purchase request is not supported in SAP S/4HANA, using expert mode, the employee can access the purchase requisition in the backend system and amend the information directly.

Using this app, you can monitor and diagnose the issues that result in errors in the Central Procurement scenarios. The app displays the overview cards for the scenarios: Central Requisitioning, Central Contract Management and Central Purchasing. From each card, you can navigate to the detailed application to view the issues and their causes.

• Monitor the number of purchase requisition replications that have failed due to errors. The app displays the number of replications that require you to take action in either the hub system or in the corresponding connected systems. Selecting either the Need Attention in Hub System or the Need Attention in Connected System option opens the Central Procurement Interface Monitor app, which provides more detailed information about the failed replication and allows you to investigate the cause.

• Monitor the number of sources of supply extraction jobs that have failed due to errors. Selecting the Failed Source of Supply Extraction Jobs option opens the Central Procurement Job Monitor app, which provides more detailed information about the failed job and allows you to restart the job if necessary.

Monitor the business operations and their compatibility with the corresponding versions of the connected systems, that are required for the business operations to function.

• Monitor and diagnose the issues that result in errors in Central Procurement scenarios.
• Identify which business operations are compatible, not compatible, and not configured based on their corresponding functions.
• Information on connected systems, bounded context, API version, API name, feature pack type, feature pack version, software component, minimum support pack requirement, and more is provided.

You can schedule a job to check the status of connected systems and view the latest status in the Central Procurement Operations Monitor app.

• Schedule an application job to run at a time and frequency according to your business need.
• Monitor, copy, or cancel jobs that have been scheduled.
• Display the connected systems, their status, and when their status was last checked.

For centrally managed purchase requisitions, the approver can edit the purchase requisition before approving it. The approver can navigate to the connected system to edit the purchase requisition and approve it with updated information.

• Completing the purchase requisition in all aspects before approval
• Flexibility for approver to update the information for respective purchase requisition before approving, instead of rejecting and relying on the purchaser or employee to update and send it back for approval.
• Use of the My Inbox app along with a centrally managed application to navigate to purchase requisition in connected system
• Use of a centrally managed application to refresh the data for approval after making the changes in the purchase requisition

When an employee creates a central purchase requisition in the hub system, it is immediately replicated to the connected system without waiting for approval in the hub system. This helps in quicker assignment of supplier and allocation of budget, and hence a faster follow-on process. Employees have a better experience and companies can manage their resources more efficiently.

• Employees can place an order and replication happens immediately to the connected system.
• Ability to replicate central purchase requisitions that are still in status "awaiting approval" to the connected system without the need for any prior approval.
• Employees can easily create, edit, copy, and delete items in a central purchase requisition.

The following table lists the SAP Fiori apps that are used in the Central Requisitioning Process steps.

In Sourcing and Procurement, several Self-Service Configuration UIs (SSCUIs), also referred to as configuration steps, are available in the Manage Your Solution app. The following SSCUIs affect the area of Central Requisitioning: