SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 Sourcing and Procurement Highlights

Introduction

In today’s article, we summarise the latest updates in Sourcing and Procurement that are included with SAP S/4HANA’s latest 2202 release. This post takes the lead from our two previous summaries on SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2102 Finance Highlights and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Supply Chain Highlights.

The most impacted business areas in S/4HANA Cloud 2202 Sourcing and Procurement are Central Procurement, Invoice Management, Sourcing and Contract Management, Supplier Management and Operational Procurement.

In SAP, Procurement is the full process to gather all the materials you need for your products, services, and indirect costs. In Procurement, we create orders with suppliers, receive the goods, and pay for them. Procurement is an end-to-end process that covers everything from planning purchases to negotiating the pricing, making the purchases, handling inventory control and storage.

Sourcing is the stage that comes before purchases are made and can be considered a key subsection of the Procurement process. Before you procure materials from suppliers, you must first find and define a group of suppliers. Sourcing is about balancing the quality and affordability of raw materials.

This new year brings forward more innovations, changes and novel approaches to many areas in S/4HANA Cloud. The most recent changes have been available since late January 2022, so all the information highlighted and discussed in this blog post is hot off the press.

Sourcing and Procurement

In this section, we are going to present the main changes and new features that have been deployed with release 2202. The highlights concern the following areas:

1. Central Procurement

With this release, a new Business Add-In (BAdI) has been created to allow the end-user to confirm the receipt of goods on behalf of a colleague, or another collaborator.

2. Contract Management

Two new Business Add-Ins for purchase contracts have been created:

1. The first one can be used to extend the defined conditions to restart the flexible workflow in purchase contracts.
2. The second one is used to define criteria for editing purchase contracts created from SAP Ariba in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Once this is implemented, the purchase contract in SAP S/4HANA Cloud gets decoupled from the contract in SAP Ariba.

Two new Business Add-Ins have been added for purchase scheduling agreements

1. One is used to change data before the creation of release documents
2. One for changes after the creation of release documents for purchase scheduling

3. Operational Procurement

Three highlights are noteworthy:

1. Configuration for Sourcing and Procurement: With this release, new configuration objects or configuration items for settings related to Sourcing and Procurement have been added to the configuration environment. Some changes have been made to some previously delivered configuration objects.
2. Manage Workflows for Supplier Confirmations: Possibility to configure workflows to optimize the approval process for supplier confirmations as a configuration expert. The new app provides different options to determine the approver, by cost centre responsible, for example.
3. Manage Purchase Orders: With this app, you can view the Status Details on the header level of a purchase order. The Status Details include, for example, information on the Delivered Value and the Invoiced Value of a purchase order.

4. Sourcing

In this area, two highlights are noteworthy:

1. Schedule Release of Supplier Lists for Sourcing with Adaptations: A configuration expert can make use of this app to schedule the release of supplier lists for Sourcing with adaptations that are overdue for approval.
2. New Situation Templates for Managing Sourcing Projects: New templates have been made available for quotation processes and negotiation of deadlines.

Conclusion

SAP is diligently working to deliver more modifications to customers. We believe the use of these new features will warrant the roll-out of the release.
The official OpenSAP website contains a section for podcasts, where you can find a series on SAP S/4HANA. This podcast presents different topics not only for SAP experts, but also for clients, end-users, and partners. There is also a set of videos on YouTube published by the SAP Technology brand channel, which is freely available for everyone. They promote and discuss all the recent updates from the latest releases. All this content is official and constantly updated with new and up-to-date information.
If you want to learn more or need guidance to navigate this change, please get in touch with our team. We provide hands-on expertise and ensure a seamless roll-out of the business.

References

• SAP Help Portal
• What’s New in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 – document release by SAP
• Blog Post “Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 Release”
• Blog Post “S/4 HANA Central Procurement – The future of procurement”
• YouTube Channel SAP Technology