Outlining Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (2NV)

The scope item, Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (2NV), belongs to the Operational Procurement business area, which is a part of the Sourcing and Procurement line of business. The target application component is Self-Service Procurement.

This feature enables your employees create requests for catalog items, existing materials, planned lean services, limit items for material and service, or free-text items by adding them to a request/shopping cart in SAP Ariba Guided Buying. The request is replicated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, where a purchase requisition is created. In the shopping cart, your employees can see the document numbers of the follow-on documents that were created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The data exchange of SAP Ariba Buying and SAP S/4HANA Cloud is routed through the SAP® Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network (Managed Gateway for Spend&Network).

SAP S/4HANA Cloud and guided buying integration capability targets employee self-service procurement. This integration allows procurement organizations to scale their purchasing processes across spend categories while enforcing compliance.

The guided buying capability creates a simple, smart, and elegant purchasing experience that increases user engagement across all spend areas. Guided buying serves as a central place where all buyers can shop across all goods and services. It enables procurement and individual line-of-business owners to specify procurement policies and inform and guide users whenever there appear to be policy conflicts. These capabilities enable purchasers to collaborate directly with suppliers and other procurement users in the context of the procurement need, making procurement more efficient.

Users find items across catalogs, including partial items, forms, and suppliers in a single search field. All spend contracted through supplier-provided catalogs and punch-out catalogs is available for the user to search. Using online shopping as an example, users can filter items by price or manufacturer.

Over time, the system learns from user behavior, so it can efficiently guide users to the right items.

The figure, Guided Buying User Experience Launchpad, shows the Guided Buying User Experience Launchpad.

The figure, Process Overview, shows the process diagram for Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (2NV).

The process consists of the following steps:

1. In SAP Ariba Guided Buying, an employee adds a catalog item to a shopping cart.

2. When the employee submits the shopping cart for approval, a purchase requisition is created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud with the status blocked.

3. Once the approver in SAP Ariba Guided Buying releases the shopping cart, the purchase requisition is unblocked in SAP S/4HANA.

4. In the shopping cart, the employee can see the document numbers of the follow-on documents that were created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud (purchase order, goods receipt, and supplier invoice).

The following are the business benefits:

• Increase employee performance with simple guided user experience.
• Application of procurement policies automatically through the guided process, enforcing compliance during the purchasing process, not after.
• Use of flexible configuration to allow line-of-business-specific definition of forms, permissions, and system behavior at field level and for workflows, so each persona in the process only enters their respective data. As a result, they avoid clerical errors and streamlining purchasing for each LoB.

The following are the key process flows:

• Access the customized guided buying app and search for items across catalogs, including partial items, forms, and suppliers in a single search box.
• Get policy guidance as items are added to the requisition.
• Perform budget checks in SAP S/4HANA Cloud before submitting the requisition.
• Approve decisions according to the configured workflow.
• Replicate approved requisition into SAP S/4HANA Cloud as purchase requisitions.
• Create purchase orders automatically from those requisitions.
• Receive and account for items in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud with Goods Receipt app.
• Receive and post the supplier invoice in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• Update the SAP Ariba requisitions with follow-on document record IDs for traceability.

Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (2NV) supports the following features:

• Storage locations in inventory reservation requests:

  Receive storage location from guided buying requests and create reservations against storage location in SAPS/4HANA Cloud for reservation-relevant purchase requisitions.

• Account assignment categories asset, order, and blank (for items with material number)

• UoM mappings

• Requesting contracted items

• Tactical sourcing

• Team buying

• Purchase order price type

• Mutual TLS authentication for outbound OData calls

• Procurement of planned lean services

• Procurement of planned lean services:

  The following features are supported for lean services:

  • Creating lean service requisitions in the guided buying capability for SAP Ariba solutions.

  • Processing follow-on documents for lean services, such as purchase orders, service entry sheets, and supplier invoices in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

  • If central procurement is integrated, creating follow-on documents in the systems connected to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which acts as a hub system.

  • Sending service purchase orders to suppliers on the Ariba Network.

  • Receiving and approving service entry sheets and invoices for lean service items in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud from your suppliers on the Ariba Network.

• Transfer of note texts and of customer-specific fields in requisitions from SAP Ariba Buying to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

• Multiple account assignment when you create a shopping cart in Guided Buying against SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

  Note

  Multiple account assignment is not supported for limit items in guided buying requests sent to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

• Transfer of attachments to the item of a request in SAP Ariba guided buying to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

  Note

  • Only the transfer of attachments at the item level is supported; attachments at the header level are not supported.

  • The maximum file size allowed for a single attachment for a line item is 35 MB.

  • Only the following file types are supported:

    txt, xls, xlsx, doc, docx, htm, html, pdf, xml, ppt, pptx, jpeg, jpg, bmp, rtf, gif, csv, png

• Transfer of the names of the requestor or the author of the guided buying request and of the recipient to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

• Adding quantity-based pricing in guided buying requests. The requests created in guided buying support quantity-based pricing of items. Quantity-based pricing allows the unit price of an item to be based on a different price unit quantity than 1. Guided buying requests use the new price unit quantity field for enhanced pricing calculation in requests. For sites integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, if the feature is enabled, the quantity-based pricing information is now additionally sent in the guided buying requests.
• Support of limit items in guided buying requests:
  • Enablement of the fields Overall Limit and Expected Value within the purchase requisition of the SAP Ariba Guided Buying scenario.
  • Ability to transfer limit items from the SAP Ariba Guided Buying to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
  • Replicate approved requisition into SAP S/4HANA Cloud as purchase requisitions.
  • Create purchase orders automatically from those requisitions.
• Adding new items or item-level comments and attachments to previously submitted guided buying requests and send them to SAP S/4HANA Cloud after approval.
• 

  Add limit items in Guided Buying requests for goods and lean services that correspond to item category E in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Limit items do not require goods receipts or service sheets. Limit items are bounded by validity periods to define the effective dates of the item and predefined amount limits to control spend. Limit items created in Guided Buying will also be integrated to SAP S/4 HANA Cloud where a purchase requisition is automatically created for 3EN integration scenarios and to SAP S/4HANA for 2NV and 3EN integration scenarios.

  • Define catalog or non-catalog items that do not require receipts or service sheets. These items are instead bound by a validity period and amount-based limits.
  • Set order max limits
  • Define a validity start and end date
  • Integrate limit items to SAP Central Procurement for 3EN integration scenario with guided buying
• 

  create requests for inventory items in guided buying, and send these requests to SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Inventory items are items stocked by your organization, such as MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) items or items manufactured by your organization.

  • Integrate inventory items to GB as a catalog
  • Inventory items show to user search results
  • Add inventory items to cart, same as other items
  • Inventory and non-inventory items can be on the same requisition
  • Use standard approval flow
  • Once approved a reservation request will be sent to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, if stock is available a reservation is created
  • View reservation numbers on the PR document in guided buying

The following features are not supported yet.

• Editing a guided buying purchase requisition in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to add a new line item

• Editing a guided buying purchase requisition in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to delete an existing line item

• Configuring SAP Ariba Shopping Cart specific workflows for overall release of purchase requisition in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

• Syncing changes made to field values on purchase requisitions in SAP S/4HANA Cloud with the corresponding fields in the requests in the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying

• Transferring attachments added at the header level of requests in the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying to SAP S/4HANA Cloud

• Supplier collaboration and request for proposals for lean services items in the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying

• Notifications on the dashboard with status information for requests that include lean services items in the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying. Users can view status information about a request only by viewing the History record of the request.

• Partial ordering and partial invoicing

• Multiple account assignment is not supported for limit items in guided buying requests sent to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The following are the restrictions while adding attachments to purchase requisitions (in both the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying and SAP S/4HANA Cloud):

• Attachments once added to a line item cannot be edited. Users must first delete the attachment and then add the updated attachment again.

• Multiple copies of the same file can be sent from the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Neither the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying nor SAP S/4HANA Cloud flags errors or warnings for duplicate file attachments

The following table lists the SAP Fiori apps that are used in the Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying 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 Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying: