Good morning,
I am a master student and at the moment I am dealing with my master thesis in a company.
The goal of the thesis is to boost and smooth the whole procurement process, from the order creation in the plant to the final booking by the purchase department.
The present situation is characterized by a low automation in the order creation process. Indeed, all the orders, (including also those delivered on a regular basis) are manually created, every single time. This of course generates many problems, errors and mistakes with many consequences on other departments (e.g. financial controlling).
The order most of the time is sum of services positions and materials as well. My idea furthermore is to create a standardised catalogue where to include the most frequent orders. This catalogue should have then in memory the standardised services and materials positions, associated with the esecution and realization of the order.
Thus, my idea would be to include a drop down menu, as first step when selecting the process to book. Hence, during the order creation, rather than entering all the fields, simply selecting the desired order from the catalogue (if already inserted into it) would fill automatically all the basic services and materials positions. Besides the reduction in mistakes and inconsistencies, every order can be easily and faster generated. Of course, the developemnt of this catalogue would head towards including always more and more orders.
Thanks to this new tool, controlling, analysis of internal trends, analysis of expenditure and turnover would become finally available. At the moment, due to different specifications and descriptions of every entry, none of the just mentioned options is possible.
The unique controlling that can be run is a general overview of the total turnover for some material goods.
A substitutive option might be the generation of "correct" orders, that can be then simply copied and reutilized in every occurrence. It may partially solve the problem but, from my understadning, this would not rerpesent a real solution to the problem.
My question furthermore is: how could I propose the realization of such a tool in SAP? How can this catalogue be generated and included in SAP? Must it be done out of business functions or how else?
Thank you very much for any help.
Happy Christmas
Best regards