Background/ Business Use Case
Many customers have a need to initiate employee self- service procurement in S4 HANA and still use the catalogs hosted on Third Party Platforms.
This blog covers the steps needed to support employee self- service procurement in S4HANA with the webservice call made to fetch the needed data from the catalogs hosted on Third Party Platforms. This ensures the process control/ spend visibility/ analytics capabilities offered in S4 HANA as well as the use of the punch out catalogs for better user experience and price competitiveness.
Set Up Needed to integrate S4HANA with Catalogs hosted on External Systems using OCI
One of the pre-requisites to support employee self- service procurement in S4 HANA is to create Employee as Business Partner. Since most companies have a separate HR system like Success Factors or Workday, it is best to integrate these with S4HANA to create Employee and use below report to convert it to BP. Use Report:
o SHCM/RH_SYNC_BUPA_EMPL_SINGLE : For Single Employee Conversion
o /SHCM/RH_SYNC_BUPA_FROM_EMPL : For Daily Sync Job
Typically, HR system is interfaced with S4HANA to bring in Mini master as an automated job to update the HCM Mini master tables (PA*) so the BUPA Sync can run automatically.
It is recommended to set up external number range for Employee ID and use the same prefixed by YE for Employee BP.
The following settings are needed to support this.
- Activate HR Integration with Business Partner
Transaction OOV2- Maintain T77S0 table
Group – HRALX
- Maintain System username (SY-UNAME) in the Communication Info Type of the HR Mini Master Record.
- Synchronize Employee ID with Employee BP i.e. Create Employee BP.
Transaction SA38
Program- /SHCM/RH_SYNC_BUPA_EMPL_SINGLE
Log can be checked using transaction SLG1 for Object SHCM_EE_INTEGRATION and Sub object - BUPA_SYNC.
- Once BUPA_SYNC is complete, SU01 will show User with Business Partner Assignment (Business Partner: YExxxxxxxx ).
Now the setup is complete from Employee BP perspective.
Purchasing Configuration for Employee Self Service
General Information – Give Webservice a name and description and YES for HTTP GET.
Call Structure – Set up with the following parameter names / values
Parameter Name Value Type
SECURE_AUTH_URL URL provided by Catalog host URL
USERNAME S4HANA Fixed Value
PASSWORD xxxxxxxx (provided by catalog host) Fixed Value
PURCHASING ORG XXXX Fixed Value
SAPUser SY-UNAME SAP Field
LANGUAGE SY-LANGU SAP Field
HOOK_URL Return URL
It is recommended to leave Parameter Value for HOOK_URL as BLANK and let system automatically fill it at runtime.
Parameter Name and Values can be added to the call structure to suit your Customer specific needs as some of these passed values are used in the Catalog system to determine user entitlements like a US User can only access US Catalogs or only Certain Users can access IT/ Hardware Catalogs etc.
Custom parameters can be passed to punch out catalog provider by implementing the below BADI method: BADI: MMPUR_OCI_PARAMETERS Method: MODIFY_PARAMETERS Check if the SAP Note “2972434 - Import parameter missing in BAdi "MMPUR_OCI_PARAMETERS" for method Modify parameters in SSP PR creation” correction has been already implemented. In this BADI method, custom logic can be implemented to find and set the purchasing organization value of the user at runtime to pass that as a query string in the OCI call. Additionally, below given ABAP class and method can be used to fetch the purchasing organization value at runtime from the default settings of a user: Class: CL_MMPUR_REQ_CONFIG_PROVIDER Method: IF_MMPUR_REQ_CONFIG_PROVIDER~GET_DEF_PURCHASING_ORG.
- Set Up Default Settings for Users (Procurement)
Using this setup, you can default for a User ID the following settings.
- Requisitioning Group/ Shop on Behalf of
- Company Code/Purchasing Org/ Plant/ Purchasing Group/ Currency
- Account Assignment/ GL Acct/ Cost Object (Cost Center etc.)
- Assigned Catalogs
Process Steps for Employee Self Service Procurement
- Create Purchase Requisition App to Launch an External Catalog
- Search the External Catalog for the item you need to purchase and add the item to the Cart.
- Check out the Cart and this will bring Catalog item into S4 HANA and create a Purchase requisition.
- Create the Purchase Order wrt the Purchase Requisition.
- Requester receives the goods and confirms the receipt.
- Supplier invoices and the payment is made.
Conclusion
Many companies are adopting S4HANA business suite but are in the midst of multi-year transformation journey. These companies want to leverage S4HANA capabilities for spend visibility, real-time analytics and process control and at the same time use their existing purchasing catalog hosting external applications. The set up described in this blog using the Webservice call to punch out to the Catalog Application and bringing the data into S4HANA for E2E process i.e. Purchase Requisition, Purchase Order, Approvals, Confirmation of Receipt, Invoicing and Payments offers a solution for Employee Self Service Procurement with Punchout Catalogs.
