What do we buy? From whom do we buy? What is the price of what we buy? Who will bear its costs? Only few problems what professionals are facing when creating purchasing documents. All boils down to the question: are we able to select the best suppliers and create value through our Procurement processes?

Should you create your POs manually, based on RFx, Shopping Cart or referencing a contract, SRM Purchase Order helps you leverage your Purchasing best practices to obtain seamless ordering process. The below pages of SRM Purchase Order process have the objective to explain the standard SRM PO behaviour, give you knowledge sources to deepen your understanding, and provide troubleshooting and debugging tips to analyse and correct Purchase Order issues in your system.

For all kind of troubleshooting topic, please visit our PO Troubleshooting Guides on the Purchase Order TSG Wiki site.

Purpose

The present page provides a detailed overview of the Purchase order process in SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

Overview

A purchase order is a document that records the quantity, time, and conditions under which a vendor or service agent is to deliver goods or provide a service to a requester. The purchase order is either created automatically by the system from a shopping cart or manually by the purchaser. It contains header data with general information that refers to the whole purchase order, and item data relevant for individual purchase order items. And the actual purchase order data is contained in the item details

SAP SRM can handle various ordering scenarios

Catalogue (external and internal catalogues)
Free text items
Material items
Service items
Limit items
Request external goods or services
Direct material items

POs can be created from:

Shopping cart
Sourcing
Bidding
Direct Manual PO

Technical scenarios related to SRM PO

The Extended Classic Scenario

The purchase order is created locally within SRM Server. If the data in the shopping cart is insufficient to generate a complete purchase order, the data is supplemented manually within SRM Server before being transferred to the back-end system. The purchase order in SRM Server is the leading purchase order. Goods receipts (confirmations) and invoices can be entered in SRM Server or in the backend.

For this scenario only RFC transfer is developed, no XML interfaces exist in SAP standard.

Please read following KBA about this topic:

2487433 - Purchase Order transfer method in Extended Classic scenario

The Standalone Scenario

Your shopping cart items create local procurement documents only. This means that all follow-on processes, such as confirmation or invoice, have to be performed in SAP SRM Server.

The Decoupled Scenario

This is not a scenario itself, but is a combination of more than one scenario, for example, a combination of the classic and standalone scenarios. Some items are handled locally, while others are transferred to the ERP back end.

Customizing

Please see the detailed information about PO customizing on the PO Customizing Wiki page.

Roles and Authorization

Purchaser

There are two different Purchaser roles in SRM:

. The Operational Purchaser (SRM role: /SAPSRM/OP_PURCHASER) is responsible for daily work, for example, incomplete local purchase orders, sourcing processes, bids, and auctions.

. The Strategic Purchaser (SRM role: /SAPSRM/ST_PURCHASER) is responsible for strategic issues, such as creation of contracts, global outline agreements, and vendor lists.

Direct Material

Ordering a direct material means ordering a product that will be received into stock. You have to choose Order as Direct Material in the item detail view. Order as Direct Material replaces the goods recipient with the plant you are ordering for and removes the Account Assignment information. The plants and storage locations are defined in the organizational structure in the extended attributes Locations and Storage Locations. After ordering the material as a direct material, you cannot change back to indirect; if you make a mistake, you have to delete this item. If you have a valid and definite source of supply, such as a contract, this source will be used. Items without a source of supply are to be completed by the purchaser in the sourcing transaction or in the worklist of incomplete purchase orders. The complete purchase order will then be replicated to the ERP back-end system. Changes to the purchase order are only possible in SRM, which is the leading system for this process. Those changes will be transferred to the ERP back-end then. Note: Although you can create shopping carts for back-end materials, SRM Server is the leading system for direct procurement. This means the system behaves according to the extended classic scenario..

Currency

Please see the Currency Related Issues and Debug Tips Wiki page about the Currency determination.

PO Transfer

In Extended Classic Scenario, PO is transferred to ECC after it is approved. The FM used to transfer the PO to backend is, BBP_PD_PO_TRANSFER_EXEC BAPI’s related to ECS PO are BAPI_PO_CREATE1 and BAPI_PO_CHANGE.

For more information about the PO transfer please check the Wiki pages of Topics of Purchase Order Backend Transfer .

Version Management

SAP SRM Server provides you with version management for purchasing documents like purchase orders, contracts, RFX, RFX response, auction, and invoice. The system creates a new document version in the background if you change and issue a document, for example, if you change the delivery date in a purchase order. Independently from the output of the documents, the system also creates change documents (no versions) to track your document changes in total. In contrast to the change documents that retain a change history, a version displays the status of a document at a specific point in time. You cannot change or output versions. This is only possible for the active document. Note: To activate document versions, maintain Switch On Version Control for Purchasing Documents in the IMG.

Important Sections in a PO

Header Basic Data

Item Basic Data

Partner Information

Follow On Flags

Statistics

Accounting details

Payment

Output

Status

PO History

Versioning

Important Reports

ECC report FBGENDAT

To get BAPI_PO_CREATE1/CHANGE test data, please check the Creating test data for ECC backend purchasing documents Wiki page for more details.

BBP_PD_PO_TRANSFER_EXEC (SE37 Function Module)

Used to transfer or re-transfer SRM PO to ECC.

This is always the start point for transfer debugging.

For more information please see the Debugging Guide for SRM PO transfer (Extended Classic Scenario) Wiki page.

RSPPFPROCESS

To transfer your purchase orders to vendors, schedule this report to run at regular intervals. In order to transfer Purchase orders to vendors we have to schedule report RSPPFPROCESS. The scheduling of this report is defined in actions of purchase order. Please check below path: IMG → Supplier Relationship Management → SRM Server → Cross-Application Basic Settings → Set Output Actions and Output Format→ Define Actions for Purchase Order Output.

CLEAN_REQREQ_UP

Document updates are executed asynchronously in the back-end system. You can only process the shopping cart in the SRM Server system after the update has been carried out. For example, the system updates the shopping cart with the back-end PO information. The system checks whether the documents have been updated. You need to schedule the job periodically, at least on a daily basis.

Transfer of Follow-On Document Data from SAP ERP to SAP SRM

You must ensure that the data of follow-on documents to a purchase order is transferred from the back-end to the SAP SRM system. To do this, run transaction FIBF in the back-end system. In this way, you activate the application SRMNTY in table TBE11. As a result, the SAP SRM system is notified when follow-on documents are created in the back-end system.

In the SAP SRM system, you must schedule a background job for the program CLEAN_REQREQ_UP (using transaction SA38), or vary an existing job in such a way that entries of type AV are processed in the table BBP_DOCUMENT_TAB. The background job calls the purchase order follow-on data from the database of the back-end system. For more information about the program CLEAN_REQREQ_UP see Reports.

When there is a problem on this please do check SMQ1 in ECC if there any stuck entry.

For more information please check the PO Actual Value, Final Entry and Final Invoice Flag Update Wiki site.

Important BADI’s

Within PO creation / PO change

BBP_DOC_CHANGE_BADI

BBP_DOC_CHECK_BADI

BBP_LONGTEXT_BADI

PO transfer

Within SRM

BBP_ECS_PO_OUT_BADI

Within ECC system

BBP_PO_INBOUND_BADI

Method:

BBP_MAP_BEFORE_BAPI

BBP_MAP_AFTER_BAPI

Purchase Orders with SRM Procurement for Public Sector (PPS)

SRM provides a number of functionalities in order to cover the requirements of the Public Sector. Support incidents should be addressed to the component PSM-GPR-POR. The Purchase Order related Wiki pages can be found under the main Public Sector site. Please see more information under Purchase Orders with SRM Procurement for Public Sector