Contract compliance, supplier management, transparency, and increased Return on Investment have been key topics of recent customer conversations, so Procurement in SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010 (I2010) will not disappoint. In this blog, I will present an overview of the new features and functions that will be coming soon to our on-premise Procurement customers in SRM 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 and ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 5. In this Business Suite release, we strengthened our central purchasing hub to support the orchestration of local and central procurement, we further advanced the integration between SRM and ERP to expand ERP e-procurement functionality, and we improved supplier collaboration and procurement processes outside the company boundaries.
Some key highlights of this release include:
Central Purchasing Hub
SAP ERP E-Procurement
Supplier Collaboration
Furthermore, the improved user experience and productivity will enable procurement end users and other key stakeholders to participate in value-adding actions, such as contract management and supplier management, which lead to significant ROI and sustainable value generation from procurement.
Starting with the Business Suite 7 release last year, SAP offers Procurement customers a platform for adopting new functionality as it becomes available. The benefit of this platform is a foundation for scalability and continuous innovation. Customers can add new functionality to the platform through enhancement packs, which contain major new features and product innovations. In the enhancement pack model, customers can pick and choose the functionality they want to deploy using a switch framework to "flip the switch" for that specific functionality. Thus, customers on SAP Business Suite 7 can change, augment, or extend their procurement and sourcing capabilities without a major upgrade.
The following are the new Procurement features introduced in the latest enhancement packs in SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010 - SRM 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 and ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 5.
Those who have followed the SRM roadmap know that we integrated SRM and ERP (MM-SRV) functionality to extend procurement capabilities to complex service scenarios. These complex services requirements are often specified in hierarchical structures that capture milestones, stages, groupings, or other material and service combinations. Procurement in Business Suite 7 I2010 allows those hierarchies to proliferate to other scenarios, functions, and users, including the representation of service specifications in the procurement catalog, contract compliance in invoicing, and central contract management.
Direct Invoice against a Contract
SRM 7.0 delivers a central contract repository for all procurement contracts. Maintenance and all information related to contracts, such as contract call-off history, can be accessed in the central document. Furthermore, the contract terms can be distributed to the local systems that need to execute on the contract to achieve centralized purchasing. With the addition of the service hierarchies, SRM expands the types of contracts that can be managed centrally to services contracts. New features in central contract management provide support for creating central contracts for services structures and role-based contract analytics.
Embedded Analytics - Contract Management
Business Suite 7 supports a closed loop, end-to-end process, between sourcing and procurement. Furthermore, sourcing can be performed centrally in SRM from requirements in one or more procurement systems (ie: centralized sourcing). In enhancement pack 1, SRM introduces new bidding capabilities for the supplier and more flexibility for handling service hierarchies. SRM provides new options for supplier bidding, more RFx settings at line-item level, and an enhanced RFx response comparison.
Offline Bidding Using Interactive Forms
Self-Service Procurement is one of the most common scenarios deployed by customers. Both novice and advanced users access the system to initiate their purchasing requirements. We had worked with our customer user groups to develop a wizard-based shopping cart to address the needs of the novice user. In the next enhancement pack, SRM will deliver a web-like user experience that will be familiar to those who shop online. In addition, the next enhancement pack will deliver greater procurement document handling and sourcing integration.
New Shopping Cart User Interface
Supplier Management delivers improved support for registration, qualification, and creation of suppliers. With this enhancement pack, supplier managers can distribute the registered and approved business partner to their ERP or SRM systems. Changes and transfer status can be monitored in the supplier registration work center.
This simplified implementation and operation section has attracted much excitement in our Enhancement pack 1 preview presentations. One of the main objectives of the enhancement pack 1 development had been to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase Time-to-Value. Accordingly, we now offer more simplified deployment and implementation scenarios, and options to reduce the dependency of additional components, such as Business Intelligence (BI), Process Integration (PI), and Portal.
New Navigation Frame without Portal
Look for more information on the Services Marketplace at http://service.sap.com/srm (login required) or the Help Portal at http://help.sap.com/srm.