2 - Sourcing

Now that self service procurement has left the purchasing departments free to focus on strategic purchasing operations, and providing that the Company has left a few heads in the purchasing department, how can it be achieved?

Sourcing simply does not happen only through system great functionality. The human factor is critical in achieving a fruitful relationship with a supplier, but SRM can contribute to it by providing good visibility and control across the entire procurement chain, as well as providing a support for managing an integrated supplier negotiation and award process.

SRM functions include: preparing a bidding event, executing electronic requests for quotes and reverse auctions, evaluating bids, awarding suppliers, and creating and managing contracts.
The professional buyers can publish bid invitations in Internet marketplaces, interested parties can access the bid invitation and submit their bids directly from the marketplace. Bid invitations can also be converted to reverse auctions.

In sourcing, visibility is key, and the implementation of a Business Intelligence (BI) system along with SRM can be a useful tool to, for example, rate a provider's services or analyse the Company spending. This helps achieving a seamless integration of SRM with SAP or non SAP backend systems.

3 - Supplier enablement

Supplier enablement is a measure on how well the suppliers interact with the organisation.
Again, good interaction is the result of a good relationship between the buyer and the supplier, but it can be facilitated by cost-effective methods that enable suppliers of all sizes to connect to a number of processes along the sourcing and procurement cycles. For example interaction can be achieved by enabling the exchange of documents such as Purchase Orders with the supplier, or by providing access to a portal infrastructure for supplier self-service over the Internet.

Supplier Portal:

Developed on SAP Netweaver technology, the supplier portal is a secure and role-based single point of access to suppliers of all sizes to SAP applications.
It technically enables single sign on for various SAP applications. For instance, at the supplier site, a planner role can be given to an employee to coordinate supply chain activities, receive and respond to purchase orders, search for pending invoices by various parameters, and check unpaid invoices.
Another example is the ability for the supplier to view and respond to RFQ in the bidding engine, or to upload supplier-managed catalogue content into the buyer???s catalogue content management tool.

SAP has also recently launched the SAP Supplier Network offering, which offers hosted services for non strategic procurement collaboration. It brings together document exchange capabilities, supplier self-service, supplier 'on-boarding' services, and a supplier and buyer call centre in one solution offering.
This is the SAP branded marketplace which includes approx. 16,000 suppliers