Lessons Learnt in an SRM 7.0 Plan Driven Procurement Scenario implementation.

Any consultant is thrilled when he is said to be driving a Green Field Implementation..so was I, this blog brings together the approach and flavor of a typical Plan Driven procurement implementation.

The storyline of the blog starts with a business challenge faced by the organization, formulation of business case to address it, implementation, process transformation and validation of business benefits.

In addition to that, we started with constraints such as 

 – not being able to use the eSOA features of SRM 7.0 working alongside SAP ECC 6.0 eHP4 since we were on ECC 5.0

 – we had to go with the BBP_EXTREQ_TRANSFER as a start point to push PR’s into SRM Sourcing ****-pit

 – Not being able to leverage on SAP PI help that we would have got with eSOA.

What was the answer? A Classic tweaked PDP process.

Note: If you want to implement SRM PDP scenario, in the most optimized way, it would be really worthwhile to have the backend version SAP ECC 6.0 eHP4

before we commenced implementation of SRM PDP with PM, we did a lot of research from multiple artifacts available in the marketplace to deal with it in the best possible way

The Consultants Guide to SRM

http://www.sap-press.com/products/The-Consultant%27s-Guide-to-SAP-SRM.html

 by Ramakrishna Potluri and Padma Prasad Munirathnam and “Enhancing Supplier Relationship Management” http://www.sap-press.com/products/Enhancing-Supplier-Relationship-Management-Using-SAP-SRM-%282nd-Edition%29.html were 2 main sources of truth for us to make a start.

Since we were a SOLMAN driven enterprise, we got the latest configuration guides from our SOLMAN business content and tried to mind map what our scenario would look like when implemented. It was 80% useful for the intent of the exercise.. The Regular SRM PDP with PM had a slightly different flow than what we implemented and it was mashed to meet the needs of our Enterprise.

The scenario that we implemented is articulated very clearly in the Schematic shown below

SRM Plan Driven Procurement Process Overview 

For all the people who are new to SRM PDP scenario, we need to clarify that, the PDP scenario is designed on the lines of Extended Classic, which means that the PO that goes out from SRM will be a BBP Purchase Order that cannot be changed, so how can we tweak this to meet a Classic deployment, lets find that out.

I have also laid out the BADI flow from start to the end of the process for readers to understand and articulate the approach we took.

Please don’t consider this as the only way to do the scenario, incase your business process complies with our scenario, its worth taking a peek into the flow.

SAP SRM Plan Driven Procurement with Plant Maintenance: BADi implementation process flow (without eSOA interfaces)

The BADi’s implemented in the flow diagram below helped achieve the PDP with PM scenario for Direct Material Sourcing from SRM Sourcing Cockpit, various BADi’s implemented helped overcome the design restrictions and process limitations coming in from the system behaving as an Extended classic implementation where as the scope of this implementation was Direct Material Sourcing in Plan Driven Mode.

Business Benefits

•An Integrated SRM Strategic Sourcing procurement process in a Plan Driven model, crafted for the Strategic Sourcing Supply chain Center to cater to a massive spend of almost 72% coming in from Direct Materials.

•Enhancing controls and compliance to Strategic Sourcing and Supplier collaboration process by making SRM the sole system to manage and drive strategic sourcing and Contract management practices, organization wide.

•Rolling out the latest version of SAP SRM 7.0 to key business users from plants world wide.

•Integrating with SAP CLM for Contract Compliance and SAP BI for Analytics

 I am not allowed to put in screenshots of the document flow, so it would look something like this below

 Purchase Requisition No (External requirement) -> Shopping Cart No -> RFx No-> RFx Response No -> SRM Central Contract No-> ECC Outline Agreement No->SRM Purchase Order No-> Updated Source list with new Contract No

Next time when the MRP run happens, it will not send the PR into SRM, instead it will create a Automatic Purchase Order in ECC.

This was kind of the cryptic end, but a challengingimplementation.