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After three great releases that delivered various new innovations, we are now concluding this year that was fully dedicated to powering the intelligent enterprise to make your business succeed in today`s economy.



 
Supplier Delivery Prediction

As part of the last release of 2018 we ship yet another Machine Learning functionality that unlocks immense business value for procurement organizations. This one is dedicated to preventing problems caused by delayed materials that are needed for production. The lead time for materials stored in the material master often does not consider processing and approval time for an order and therefore is often inaccurate, which ultimately can cause issues for production.

To tackle this, we built a Machine Learning algorithm that predicts the delivery date of ordered materials more reliably. Using the filter functionality in the “Monitor Purchase Order Items“ app, purchasers can easily identify those purchase orders that have been predicted to be delayed. They can then take immediate action to mitigate any risks arising from the delay.



 
SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Central Procurement – Integration with guided buying in SAP Ariba solutions

Of course 1811 also entails further updates for the central procurement hub. If you are not familiar with the central procurement hub functionality, you can revisit it here. As you know with 1808 we shipped prebuilt integration of the guided buying capability in SAP Ariba solutions to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Now we enable this also for the central procurement hub including the connected systems landscape (ECC 6 EHP 6 or higher and S/4HANA).



In that manner, endusers can leverage the elegant and intuitive purchasing experience of guided buying while having full transparency into all follow-on business documents, such as purchase order, goods receipt and invoices created in the connected back-end systems.



Depending on the configuration, the approval of the purchase requisition can be carried out in SAP Ariba, the central SAP S/4HANA Cloud system or the connected back-end systems. As you can see, this provides a lot of flexibility to support your specific business setup.

Another new functionality for the central procurement hub is that we enable analytics for global purchasing spend. With the app “Global Purchasing Spend”, global purchasers at the headquarters can get full visibility in the global purchasing spend across the central as well as local backend systems. In order to analyze not only the spend from the connected backend systems, but also the spend from the central SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, the central purchase orders have to be loaded into the proxy table, in which also the local backend purchase orders are stored.

Similarly, we also offer analytics for purchase order items in both the central and the local connected backend systems. In the app “Monitor Purchase Order Items Centrally”, global purchasers in the headquarters have full visibility into all purchase orders in the connected system landscape.



They can monitor central purchase order items by delivery status, item counts by delivery status as well as total value by various dimensions. Using the app, they can also easily identify discrepancies between the order, delivered and invoiced value.

In addition, it is now possible to configure a flexible workflow for central purchase requisitions using the easy and intuitive app you know from past blogs.

 
Service Procurement Integration with SAP Fieldglass

Finally, I would also like that we now support the full end-to-end process to procure external services using the SAP Fieldglass solution. Using SAP Fieldglass, you can hire external workers to perform services you need. After you hired a contingent worker, a work order is created in SAP Fieldglass and a purchase requisition and purchase order is automatically triggered in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.



Once the external resource has submitted their time and given the approval of the same, a service entry sheet will be created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Based on the purchase order and the service entry sheet, a supplier invoice will be generated in SAP Fieldglass. Given that the respective supplier confirms the invoice, it will be posted to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for further processing and payment.

Based on this new service procurement integration, you can benefit from great efficiency gains based on the digitized processing of job postings and statements of work.

 
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:


 

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @KathHellmich and LinkedIn