Procurement organizations that are already using SAP ERP for operational procurement and want to introduce a more strategic Sourcing or Contract Lifecycle Management Solution like SAP Sourcing/CLM, are typically already following the concept of centralized purchasing in their company. Therefore it is important that this concept is also supported in the organizational model of the Sourcing/CLM solution. In this blog post I want to show you how this is supported in the standard integration package of SAP Sourcing with SAP ERP.
The following graphic illustrates the different ways how purchasing in the SAP ERP System can be organized.
If purchasing is set up on a cross-company-code basis, the customer works with central purchasing organizations that are responsible for global outline agreements and the negotiation of the relevant terms and conditions. This means that the purchasing organization is active for more than one enterprise and, in organizational terms, is not linked to one specific company code or particular plants.
To do so, you set up your organizational model in SAP ERP in a way where you do not assign purchasing organizations to company codes. This purchasing organization can then procure for all plants assigned to it, irrespective of the company code to which the plant belongs.
How is this concept applied in SAP Sourcing/CLM ?
The relevant part of the organizational data model of SAP ERP is also present in the SAP Sourcing System and all relevant data, in particular Company Codes, Purchasing Organizations and Plants can be easily replicated into the System during the initial setup. There are standard tools available in SAP ERP like ABAP report BBP_ES_CUSTOMIZINGDATA_EXTRACT to extract these data. Corresponding import functions in SAP Sourcing allow a direct import of the extracted files. All data that are relevant for the centralized purchasing concept are included.
Creating integrated Cross-Company Master Agreements
When you create a Master Agreement in SAP Sourcing, you assign a purchasing organization, purchasing group and company code on the 'Integration' tab. If you use a central purchasing organization (no assignment to a company code), the system does not validate the assignment of line item plants to the company code that is maintained on the 'Integration' tab, which corresponds to the functionality in SAP ERP for centralized purchasing.
You can then publish your Master Agreement to your ERP System, where an Outline Agreement will be created. The ERP system is connected via PI using the standard integration package, which is available since SAP Sourcing 7.0 / Wave 6. The centralized purchasing concept is supported from SAP Sourcing 9.0 / Wave 9 SP02. There are options to enable this via custom scripting in Version 7.0. Please contact SAP Support or myself directly if you need additional information on this.
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