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Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano

S/4HANA 1610 Supplier Evaluation – HowTo (Basics)

Dear readers,

during these last years I had been mainly working as Team Leader for Logistics areas or Junior Project Manager in SAP Projects(ECC)… but when I had the chance to try out the new S/4HANA 1610 demo environment in these last weeks(setup by my company for self-study and training)I didn’t hesitate to “dirty” my hand once again 🙂

 

Introduction: why this blog?

After reading the S/4HANA Cookbook and most of its referenced files relevant for my expertise(Supply Chains, overall Purchasing and Logistics), my attention was caught by the “Supplier Evaluation by questionnaires” functionality: how different is this new functionality from the one provided by ECC since long time?

Of course, a lot of other functionalities are of interests for comparisons… I hope to have more time in the near future to explore them and eventually share my findings once again.

 

So, coming back to this topic, I noticed that a lot of features concerning this functionality have been taken from SRM. But, since all my previous experiences were based on ECC only, without any knowledge of SRM nor Ariba, I’m sharing the following steps to make everything running fine, hoping that they might be useful to whomever is in the same situation I was.

Finally, this blog is not intended to be a step-by-step config or user manual but just an high level document to successfully guide your across all the main steps. Indeed for all the details there is plenty of official SAP documentation; the difficult thing is to collect and sort it in the right way, so the aim of this article.

 

Supplier Evaluation: configuration steps

The following steps and print-screens are taken from the demo environment installed by SAP for our company and they are based on the sample data distributed along with it.

  1. create Questions Library under the following customizing path: Material Management > Purchasing > Supplier and Category Management > Supplier Evaluation > Basic Settings for Supplier Evaluation
  2. create all the number ranges under the following customizing path: Material Management > Purchasing > Supplier and Category Management > Supplier Evaluation > Number ranges for Supplier Evaluation
  3. create a SAP user ID able to run the RFC connection set up with the next step. This user must be granted with auth. role /SRMSMC/BG_SUP_EVAL_BUYSIDE 
  4. Setup a RFC connection for background processing(I created zBGRFC_SUPERVISOR by using BGRFC_SUPERVISOR as reference)
  5. assign your RFC connection to communication process type under the following customizing path: Material Management > Purchasing > Supplier and Category Management > Supplier Evaluation > Settings for Background Processing in Supplier Evaluation > Assign RFC connection…
  6. Be sure that every Purchaser responsible is granted with auth. role /SRMSMC/QUESTIONNAIRE_MANAGER
  7. Be sure that every Appraiser is granted with auth. role /SRMSMC/EVALUATION_APPRAISE. Moreover appraiser’s SAP user ID has to be linked to his/her personnel ID (i.e. thru transaction PRMD, otherwise there is no way to be selected from the corresponding Fiori app).

 

Supplier Evaluation: process flow

As stated by SAP, this new functionality have been designed to collect data based on “soft facts”, it means based on designated appraiser’s feedbacks. How? All the steps are described in the following document: SL4_S4CLD1702_BPD_EN_CN.docx . Anyway I’ll provide a brief resume with some printscreens.

 

First step in this process is to create the questions to use to evaluate suppliers, sections and groups, by app “Manage Questions”(Business Role: Purchase Responsible):

Then we need to create questionnaires in order to group the questions created in the above step, by app “Manage questionnaires”(Business Role: Purchase Responsible):

When questionnaires are done, we need to create and release an evaluation template by app “Create Template(Group-based evaluation), in order to indicate which appraiser are going to evaluate which suppliers, based on which questionnaires(Business Role: Purchase Responsible).

Once these two steps are done, emails notifications are sent to the selected appraisers(below a screen-shot of transaction SOST):

After receiving the mail notification, the appraiser can evaluate assigned Suppliers by app “Evaluate Suppliers”(Business Role: Appraiser):

And the Purchase responsible can monitor responses by app “Monitor Responses” or “Display Scorecards”. Moreover he/she can graphically analyse the scorecards by using app “Supplier Evaluation by questionnaire”(Business Role: Purchase Responsible):

 

Tips & Tricks

So far, just one tip on my side.

Be aware of step 4.5: In our system I faced with the error “ Invalid key predicate type for ‘SupplierEvalResponse’. Expected type is ‘Edm.String’ ” and we solved it by applying Note 2450228 (hereafter a print-screen from transaction /IWFND/ERROR_LOG):

 

Conclusions

This new functionality brings more flexibility to the supplier evaluation process. Users can decide at any time which supplier to evaluate, by which appraiser and, overall, based on which criteria. Indeed, up till now in ECC, in case they wanted to change some criteria, even in terms of score, they had to change customizing settings. But thanks to S/4HANA, users that don’t want/need to buy additional products such as SRM or Ariba can anyway benefit of evaluation suppliers based on “soft facts”.

And, last but not least, even our effort to train users on the whole process is eased. ?

 

 

Thanks for your time spent reading this article. And thanks to the colleagues who helped me in making this functionality working fine: @darionisoli @daniela_r @patrizia.rossi2 @marcon80

 

Regards

Saverio

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      21 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      This is an excellent article .One approach that SAP may need to explore is how supplier questionnaires can be exchanged in an offline manner bidirectionally with suppliers as an out of the box feature.Note such questionnaires need responses from specific supplier functions and so the current set up where emails are triggered to a general mail address or a clerks internet id may not be of much help.

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks for your comment.

      I've always considered this feature more for "internal audit" than coordinating evaluations with suppliers themselves(obviously in case of outcome discussions with suppliers we need a way for sharing data: it might be offline/online/export... ).

      But, of course, the more different opinions there are the more interesting scenarios will be built.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Excellent article ! is this available only for cloud or also in 1610 on premise ?

      Thanks

      / Ritwick

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Ritwick,

      thanks for your comment.

      I tested this feature onto 1610 on premise but it should be available on both...

       

      Regards

      Saverio

       

      Author's profile photo Kaustubh P Deshpande
      Kaustubh P Deshpande

      @saveriocalvano

      Where that document SL4_S4CLD1702_BPD_EN_CN.docx is located on support portal  please give us the path ??

       

      Kaustubh

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kaustubh,

      I found it among the best Practices referred to 1610.

       

      Regards

      Saverio

       

      Author's profile photo Fabian Krueger-Herbert
      Fabian Krueger-Herbert

      I still cannot find it. Please explain to me how I can find this document.

       

      Author's profile photo O. ProjectMember-2
      O. ProjectMember-2

      Hello Saverio,

      Where did you find the S/4HANA Cookbook and the reference document SL4_S4CLD1702_BPD_EN_CN.docx ?

      Please share the link so that i can go through the document.

      <email address removed by moderator as posting email address is against the forum rules>

      Regards,

      Chirag

       

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Chirag,

      I found it among the best Practices referred to 1610.

       

      Regards

      Saverio

      Author's profile photo Fausto Regis de Oliveira Motter
      Fausto Regis de Oliveira Motter

      Saverio,
      thank you for sharing.
      Some off our buddies are looking for references regarding the Supplier Evaluation... and this is the best reference that we found.
      Great material.
      Fausto Motter

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Many thanks for your comment 😉

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Saverio,

      Where did you find the document SL4_S4CLD1702_BPD_EN_CN.docx?

       

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Felipe,

      I found it among the best Practices referred to 1610.

       

       

      Author's profile photo Vijay Sharma
      Vijay Sharma

      Hi Saverio,

      Thanks a lot for such an informative article.

      I have a doubt that after releasing the evaluation template, the email to appraisers will be auto triggered or we have to send manually?

      Thanks in Advance.

      Vijay Sharma

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Vijay Sharma,

      emails are triggered automatically, as per configuration made during my trial.

       

      Regards

      Saverio

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Saverio,

      Very good article.

      For the “soft facts” Supplier Evaluation, can the process flow run in S/4 with T-codes instead of the Fiori apps (Manage Questions, Monitor Responses etc.). If yes, can you please share the T-codes. Thanks.

      Mustafa

       

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Mustafa,

      thanks for your feedback. Unluckily I don't remember any T-code for this process but only Fiori Apps

       

      Regards

      Saverio

      Author's profile photo Laure-Anne DAMAY
      Laure-Anne DAMAY

       

      Hello Saverio,

       

      Thank you a lot for this helpful explaination.

      Could you detail more the step number 4 ? : "Setup a RFC connection for background processing(I created zBGRFC_SUPERVISOR by using BGRFC_SUPERVISOR as reference)".

      Or is it possible to contact me to laureanne.damay@gmail.com ?

      Thank you very much.

      Author's profile photo Claudia Jost
      Claudia Jost

      Dear Saverio,

      searching for support to introduce S/4 Supplier Evaluation on a 1809 OP system I found your blog and it´s really great. Thanks for this.

      My question is, did you work with the supplier evaluation on a 1809 system? I am struggeling to assign the evaluation, as the system says, that the user is no appraiser. But I have maintained all the nessecary settings in the system. Do you have an idea?

      We do not have the employees in the system.

      Thanks Claudia

      Author's profile photo Saverio Calvano
      Saverio Calvano
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Claudia,

      thanks for your comment. Unluckily I haven't tried it in 1809 yet... anyway your issues sounds like an auth issue so I suggest to carefully review the roles assigned to the user.

       

       

      Regards

      Saverio

      Author's profile photo Almiro Sengo
      Almiro Sengo

      Hello community

       

      May you please share the book SL4_S4CLD1702_BPD_EN_CN.docx with me?

       

      my e-mail: almiro.sengo@gmail.com I tried to download it in best pratice but I couldnt find it.

       

      Thanks in advance

       

      Regards