S/4HANA Self-Service Requisitioning – Internal Procurement Catalogs

Introduction:

The purpose of this short blog is to highlight the specific case of working with Internal Procurement Catalogs for consultants and procurement employees who are using the SSP scope.

In my case, the described functionality is applicable to the on-premise version of S/4HANA.

Prerequisite:

Customizing process is well documented in ‘S4HANA_SSP_Config_CookbookV6’, that’s why I am not going to stop at this point. Just follow this guideline step by step.

Create the Purchase Requisition using the Catalog Data

Setting up the internal procurement catalog for the first time, I faced with the same issue that described in the community post on the following link: https://answers.sap.com/questions/12894158/s4hana-internal-procurement-catalog-set-up.html

When you run the ‘Create purchase requisition’ App, you can see the catalog (web service) list appearing. After you’re clicking on the internal catalog, a window is opened with the same ‘Create purchase requisition’ App initial screen. No catalog with item list is displayed.

At this step, consultants usually confused as expected some kind of punch-out catalog with the corresponding call structure.

However, after having looked into relevant documentation, I came to the conclusion that app’s behavior depends on what Open Catalog Interface (OCI) release is used in your S/4 system.

OCI 4.0 Scenario

If the catalog is based on OCI 4.0, please proceed with the following steps:

1. Open Create Purchase Requisition
2. On the Create Purchase Requisition screen, choose a catalog and select products listed in the catalog, add to cart, and check out to add it to your Purchase Requisition.

OCI 5.0 Scenario

If the catalog is based on OCI 5.0, please proceed with the following steps:

1. Hide the web service entry:

• Check the attribute of the web service with Don’t Show (refer to the section 3.3.2).

2. Enable the Search Bar:

• Enter transaction SPRO
• Go to SAP Implementation Guide -> SAP Implementation Guide -> Materials Management -> Purchasing -> Purchase Requisition -> Self-Service Procurement -> Define Settings for Cross Catalog Search
• Uncheck the option Hide Search Bar.

3. Open Create Purchase Requisition

On the Create Purchase Requisition screen, the catalog will not be displayed, search the catalog items in the search bar directly and select the required products, add to cart, and check out to add it to your Purchase Requisition.

In OCI 4.0 we make use of punch out procurement catalogs and in OCI 5.0 uses OCI extraction and cross catalog search so that catalog data is replicated to S/4HANA and the end users can search for items in all catalogs using SAP Enterprise Search without leaving SAP S/4HANA screen.

What does it exactly mean is that when OCI 5.0 is enabled in your system, you should only use search bar typing catalog item text/number or using * (asterisk) for search through a catalog.

Thus, the call structure of the internal catalog does not need to be filled with parameters.

Conclusion:

Hope this article will help functional consultants to understand how Internal Procurement Catalogs work via ‘Create Purchase Requisitions’ App when using Self-Service Requisitioning Scenario for P2P processes.

You’ll find much more on the community topic page for MM Purchasing and MM Purchasing post and answer questions.

Useful links and OSS notes:

Application Component: ‘MM-FIO-PUR-REQ-SSP’ – Fiori UI for Self Service Procurement

https://me.sap.com/notes/2214564

https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_ON-PREMISE/af9ef57f504840d2b81be8667206d485/685f165678958e51e10000000a4450e5.html

https://fioriappslibrary.hana.ondemand.com/sap/fix/externalViewer/#/detail/Apps(‘F1643’)/S23OP

Any feedback or Insights in the comment section below is highly appreciated.