Supplier Relationship Management
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Purpose

The present page provides a detailed overview of the shopping process in SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and presents the different Shopping Cart scenarios.

Overview

Self-service procurement empowers employees to easily shop for goods and services. Shopping carts relieve your purchasing department of a huge administrative burden while making the procurement process faster and more responsive. Shopping carts behave as Purchase Requisitions, but they offer a user-friendly way and a webshop-like experience to express your needs.

Depending on the technical scenario you implement in SRM, your Shopping Carts will create follow-on documents either in the back-end system (classic, extended classic and decoupled scenarios) or in SRM itself (lean scenario). The step-by-step shopping process is described in the SAP Help Portal. Ordering a Shopping cart will trigger an approval process in the system, where you can define various attributes in order to route your shopping baskets. You can hold your Shopping carts as templates and reuse them at a later stage.

SAP SRM can handle various ordering scenarios, available either in standard or by customizing:You could find general information about the default settings

  • Catalogue shopping (external and internal catalogues)
  • Free text shopping carts
  • Shop for / Buy-on-behalf scenario
  • Limit items
  • Team purchasing
  • Request external goods or services
  • Direct material items


Technical scenarios





Classic

Extended classic

Lean

Decoupled

Classic scenario

The shopping cart is created and approved in SAP SRM system. The remainder of the procurement process takes place in the backend ERP system(s) and all other follow-on documents, such the purchase order, goods receipt/service entry sheet and invoice, are located there. Goods receipts and invoices can be pre-entered in SRM or entered directly in the backend system.

Extended classic scenario

The shopping cart is created and approved in SAP SRM system. The purchase order and follow-on documents are also created there and then replicated to the backend system. The purchase order in SAP SRM is the leading purchase order and cannot be changed in the backend system. Goods receipts and invoices can be pre-entered in SRM or entered directly in the backend system.

Lean (Standalone) scenario

The shopping cart and purchase order are processed directly in SAP SRM. You could use this scenario if you have no ERP system or you don’t want to integrate the SRM shopping with materials management functions in your ERP system and, instead, use those in SAP SRM for all procurement processes. The final invoice is sent to a backend accounting system.

Decoupled scenario

You can also run these scenarios in parallel, on the basis of the product category. This suits customers who already have a productive materials management backend system, but wish to handle the procurement of some supplies locally and others within the backend system.

Determination of the technical scenario

You could also find detailed information about the technical scenario determination on the page: Determination process of the used technical scenario.


Types of the Shopping Cart applications

SAP SRM offers you three different applications in order to create Shopping carts. You can use the Professional Shopping Cart form, the Shopping Cart Wizard or the Simplified Shopping Cart.

Professional Shopping Cart Form


This application is a one-stop-shop with all the relevant fields, aggregated for the use of professional buyers and employees. The menu header contains all the critical information, like cart number, document name, status, creation date and “created by” fields as well as the action buttons like order, close, print preview, save and check. In the general data area, you can set the requester if you want to use the buy-on-behalf scenario, give a new name for your cart, set your default values and review the approval process. Notes can also be attached to the cart in the “approval note” or the “note to supplier” fields.  The same screen presents all the items of the cart, where you can specify a number of item characteristics. If enabled in the customizing, the team cart flag is also available on the screen.


Shopping Cart Wizard


The shopping cart wizard is a step-by-step guide very similar to any public web shop. Composed by 4 steps (3 steps from SRM version 7.02), the Wizard will take you through the entire Shopping process from the scratch. This scenario can be suitable for employees with no or minimal purchasing skills. While this application offers less settings options for the end-users this way of ordering is very clear and easy to use. Default settings for items section can be activated with the BBP_SC_MODIFY_UI BAdI.


Simplified Shopping Cart Form


Similarly to the extended view, this application also offers a one-stop-shop but with a reduced number of fields. This process can suit for users with limited employee authorizations and no purchasing experience. Simplified form relies heavily on your catalogues; practically it contains no other options than catalogue and free-text shopping.


The Shop for – Buy On behalf shopping

Purchasing assistants and purchasers can buy products on behalf of other users, for example, their manager. This can be of advantage to managers as it saves them time that they could use for more strategic tasks. It can also be advantageous when employees are absent or have not yet started in the company, but still need certain products such as PC configuration, for example. It allows for more flexibility in the procurement process. This option is directly available only in the Professional Shopping Cart form.

The users for whom purchasing assistants or purchasers can shop must be specified as values for the attribute REQUESTER in the organizational structure.


Direct Material

A direct material is used directly in production process and it is mostly held on stock. No account assignment should be specified for direct materials. In order to follow direct procurement process, you have to check the flag “order as direct material” under the Shopping Cart s Item Data tab. Subsequently the account assignment tab gets cleared and only storage location is given in the Shopping cart. Once you have checked the flag, it is not possible to change it back on the item: you have to delete the item and add a new one.


Tabs in the Shopping Cart

Every shopping cart item is composed by the following tabs:

  • Item Data
  • Account Assignment
  • Notes and Attachments
  • Delivery Address/Performance Location
  • Sources of Supply/Service Agents
  • Table Extensions
  • Availability
  • Approval Process Overview
  • Related Documents


Item Data serves to show all the general item data, such as product ID, product category, purchasing group, currency, pricing and incoterm data.

Account assignment presents who bears the costs of the item and what is the cost distribution.

You can add attachments and different type of text notes to your item in the Notes and Attachments tab.

Delivery Address/Performance Location tab contains the address to which item should be sent or where the services should be performed.

Sources of Supply/Service Agents tab is responsible for the assignment of possible suppliers.

Table Extensions shows the possible customer table extensions.

Availability holds data about the item availability in the ECC system.

Approval Process Overview shows the approval status of your cart, as well as the current processor. It is also possible to add and remove approvers and reviewers there.

In the Related Documents tab, you can see the follow-on documents of your Shopping cart (e.g. backend Purchase Order number, Confirmation number).



Currency

Compared to the Purchase Order the Shopping Cart could have other currency than the vendor's currency. You could find details about the currency integration between the ECC and SRM system and about the total value currency of the shopping cart in these pages:

 

Default settings

The default settings provide the possibility for the user to assign a certain starting value for some fields like the delivery address, product category or account assignment. This make the creation of the shopping cart easier if the user need to order in some way similar items so there is no need to assign a certain value every time for every new item.

Further pages related to the default settings:
Account assignment tab in default settings
BBP_SC_MODIFY_UI
Default Purchasing Group
Restrictions regarding the default settings
Shopping cart default settings is not saved when leaving the cart screen


Shopping Cart transfer

You could find a detailed overview about the shopping cart transfer process on the page: Transfer process of the Shopping Cart

Shopping Cart deletion

You could find the SRM standard working in terms of Shopping Cart item deletion as well as a debugging guide on the page: Shopping Cart deletion.

Related Content

Related Documents

Determination process of the used technical scenario

Transfer process of the Shopping Cart