Outlining Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN)

The Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN) scope item belongs to the Operational Procurement and Central Procurement business areas, which are part of the Sourcing and Procurement line of business.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Central Procurement is seamlessly integrated with

• Ariba Guided Buying capabilities
• SAP Ariba Contracts
• SAP Ariba Sourcing
• Ariba Network

The figure shows the End-2-End Process Flow through Central Procurement. In the first row of End-2-End Process Flow through Central Procurement diagram, you can view the high level process overview of the Guided Buying for central procurement.

The integration with the guided buying capability targets employee self-service procurement. Integrated with Central Procurement, it is possible to scale the purchasing processes across the whole unit by leveraging it over a centralized procurement system.

Guided buying in SAP Ariba Buying creates a simple, smart, and elegant purchasing experience that increases user engagement across all spend areas. It serves as a central place where all buyers can shop across all goods and services. It enables procurement and individual Line-of-Business (LoB) owners to specify procurement policies and inform and guide users whenever there appear to be policy conflicts. Central Procurement offers a centralized requisitioning process across industries with deep integration into the customer's landscape. It connects guided buying in SAP Ariba Buying capability to the customer's ERP or SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems, and exchanges business documents to ensure end-to-end business processes in finance and logistics that run in the connected systems. The integration allows the transfer and update of the requisition between the two, as well as the necessary master data.

The figure, Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying, gives you an overview of the systems and their connection in Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying.

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).

It is recommended to use the Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS) while setting up this integration scenario. With the included project management tool and complementary support information, CIAS helps reduce the time you need for manual tasks. CIAS provides a guided workflow that features:

• Customer-specific system information (for example, target URLs)

• Reusable configuration settings between tasks

• Automated execution capabilities

For a successful setup of Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN), you have to carry out the activities in the configuration guides for the building blocks of scope item Central Requisitioning (1XI). Also all the restrictions of Central Requisitioning (1XI) are applicable for Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN).

The diagram, Process Overview of Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying, shows the process overview of Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying.

The following is a list of business benefits:

• Run guided buying for the whole organization using SAP Ariba to leverage the central requisitioning processes
• Increase employee performance with simple guided user experience
• Apply procurement policies automatically through the guided process
• Reduce TCO significantly for procurement departments through centralized process
• Use flexible configuration to allow LoB-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, avoiding clerical errors and streamlining purchasing

The following outlines the key process flow:

• Access 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 shopping cart

• Perform budget checks in SAP S/4HANA Cloud before submitting the shopping cart

• Approve decisions as per the configured workflow

• Replicate approved shopping carts into SAP S/4HANA Cloud as purchase requisitions

• Automatically create purchase orders from those requisitions

• Receive and account for items in SAP S/4HANA Cloud with the Goods Receipt app

• Receive and post supplier invoice in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

• Update the SAP Ariba shopping cart with follow-on document record IDs for traceability

Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN) 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

  The following features are supported for lean services:

  • Access 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
  • Enable tactical sourcing by the employee easily
  • Validate and submit requisition for simulation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
  • Simulate requisition creation in the connected satellite back end
  • Create purchase requisition and send a request for a guided buying requisition
  • Perform budget checks and other validations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud before submitting the requisition
  • Approve decisions as per the configured workflow
  • Replicate approved requisition into SAP S/4HANA Cloud as purchase requisitions
  • Replicate the purchase requisition in the connected satellite system and receive confirmation that the replication was successful
  • Create purchase orders, goods receipts, and supplier invoices in a connected satellite system with updates of the references in the guided buying requisition history

• 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

• Transfer of note texts and 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

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

  Note

  The previously described features are disabled by default. To enable them in the SAP Ariba system, have your Designated Support Contact (DSC) in the SAP Ariba organization submit a Service Request (SR). An SAP Ariba Customer Support representative will follow up to complete the request.
• 

  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/4HANA 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, if stock is available a reservation is created
  • View reservation numbers on the PR document in guided buying

The scope item Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN) requires additional licenses for the SAP Ariba Procurement, cloud edition and SAP S/4HANA for central procurement.

The restrictions in the 1XI scope item are also applicable for the 3EN scope item. Only SAP standard purchasing requisition document types NB and NBS are supported for purchase requisitions replicated from Guided Buying. Also, the following are yet to be supported:

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

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

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

• Syncing changes made to field values on purchase requisitions in SAP S/4HANA 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

• 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

• Sending custom request forms as an attachment with a file size greater than 35 MB, from guided buying to SAP S/4HANA

• Sending material IDs as standard fields for service items in guided buying requests

• Sending material IDs as standard fields for limit items in guided buying requests

• Submitting requisitions with more than one item when header-level approval is configured for requisitions in SAP S/4HANA

• Editing the accounting fields in a requisition that was previously submitted with the account assignment category as 'U'

• Adding taxes and charges on requisition line items in guided buying

If the company codes across the (more than one) connected back-end systems are not unique and the master data from those (more than one) connected back-end systems converge into one Guided Buying with SAP Ariba Buying system, then custom configurations are needed to ensure that the master data can be identified with the correct back-end system.

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

• 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. Neither the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba Buying nor SAP S/4HANA flags errors or warnings for duplicate file attachments.

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