...As an SRM consultant, most of the challenges I've faced over the past few months have spilled beyond the procurement space. The products that are now available as a part of the SAP SRM suite offering are more robust to address several integrated challenges in the supply chain, however, the central theme is always around "Compliance & De-risking", that never changes...
What that means: It simply means that we have a suite offering that can extend beyond just procurement and address an enterprise-wide Supply Chain need.
In a recent engagement with an Oil field services major, there were multiple questions of extending SAP E-Sourcing / CLM to address the Tender and Contract Management process for the Sales side peocesses.
However, primarily, we are using the SAP E-Sourcing application for the Procurement Buy-side for running the Auctions Engine and Category Management.
How do we actually achieve this? Is this possible at all?
What's the effort involved and What's the complexity?
Yes, its achievable and we can have the Contexts Configured in such a way that the same application can be modeled for enterprise-wide usage (Both Buy & Sell side).
The development efforts in modelling the solutions are a Complexity High stature by themselves, but the crux of the business requirements are achievable making SAP CLM: An enterprise-wide Contracts Management solution, driving both the operational sales contract and also the attached Legal contract governing the relationship with the customer.
The best part is that, we can also use the standard integration provided by SAP for SAP ES and ECC integration to push the outline agreement to use it as the source of truth to quote for Customer Sales Tender requests. further driving contract compliance.
In-short, the solution addresses the following business process:
A Tender is Created in SAP E-Sourcing from a Referenced Sales opportunity from Sales force.com thats further submitted to the customer and upon awarding is converted into an MSA coupled with an internal dollar based approval + Legal Approval further making the Negotiated contract available in SAP ECC for the sales team to use for future quotes and 3 way invoice matching for customer receivables.
In addition to making it available for SAP ECC, there are many other extends for disparate enterprise-wide need. Ex. Call-offs, Analytics etc.
I think to start off, its a great model driven philosophy and extend the capabilities of the application to be 4 x 4.
I am keeping this discussion open to see, if such challenges are knocking your door, lets collaborate to understand any business situations that are similar on your side?
...Happy reading
Tridip Chakraborthy
- SAP Managed Tags:
4 Comments
