E-sourcing integration with SRM

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I need some info regarding E-sourcing 5.1 integration with SRM 5.0....any input on possible Integration points,Technical fesibility and any design/development docs would be realy helpful.

Thanks.

[Former Member]

Hello there

What is the business benefit to do Sourcing in E-sourcing and only shopping carts in SRM? Arent you just better off doing everything in SRM? Other than Forward auction and Project management capabilities, SRM has everything else one needs, so why bother with E-Sourcing?

For clients who dont plan on using SRM, I do see the business benefit of doing E-sourcing since its easy to implement..

Thanks - Nikhil

[tridip_chakraborthy]

I agree with Nikhil and moreover, with SRM 7.0, the Forward auctions are also available inside SRM

with SRM 5.0 , forward auctions were a gap

if the sourcing is strategic and complex - we can use the optimizer component of eSourcing to drive the value in complex sourcing

If the sourcing is operational, we can use SRM, and with the SRM 7.0, a lot of extended features of eSourcing are maneouvered inside SRM

Incase customer doesnt want the CLM license for the Clause repository, the document builder with SRM servers the purpose

Hence it becomes very important to understand the dynamics of these applications in the Suite in the customer side to actually propose an integration amongst overlapping functionalities

regards

tridip

[Former Member]

Hi Tridip,

While appreciating your comments, I would like to add few more points.

Lot of organizations tend to implement best of the breed solutions both for indirect procurement, MRO procurement and also the sourcing functionality. This drove them to implement standalone modules for getting the richer functionality from niche players.

Unfortunately, SAP SRM is not rated as the best of breed, but it is rated as the BIC (Best in class) or best in suite with the tighter integration with the productive ERP (R/3) backends.

Your comments are turly justified had it been a brand new SAP implementation where the organization runs a transformation program than a simple SAP implementation project.

The reality of the SAP world is business case wins over the techno-logical discussions. This has resulted in the implementations of peripheral systems for richer functionalities and integrate the e-procurement and FI systems for running the business processes without compromising the business metrics and measures.

Also, accepting the change is very difficult when a tool is deployed globally in a productive environment and also when there are BPR companies evaluating the best of the breed solutions, SAP SRM takes a step back when it comes for the niche market.

This may be one of the reasons why we see the best of breed procurement solutions like ARIBA, EMPTORI, CATERA which are non ERP based ep-procurement vendors being deployed by lot of fortune 100 customers.

I do agree with the overlapping functionality, I.T. perspective, it is easy to implement with one system which may require to compromise on certain functionalities. Also, e-sourcing system being highly utilized by the external people (for example vendors) than internal employees, big organizations tend to think, de-coupling the systems will also allow have a bit flexibility on the system access and the firewall issues etc.

Hope this helps!!!

DV

[Former Member]

Hi Rammohan,

We have implemented e-sourcing 5.1 and SRM 6.0. SAP provided standard integration between ERP (R/3) and e-sourcing for customizing and master data objects.

We have integrated e-sourcing to SRM for bringing contracts into SRM for operational execution.

01) All the sourcing events reside within e-sourcing.

02) Vendor onboarding was not in e-sourcing or in SRM (managed outside SAP)

03) All Legal (Master and Sub agreements) contracts (both direct and indirect) are authored, negotiated from e-sourcing.

04) Direct contracts are published to ECC system as per the standard integration provided by SAP

05) Indirect contracts are published to SRM via a custom interface for the operational part of the contracts during procurement and spend reporting.

06) e-sourcing contract terms are sent to SRM contract and SRM PO refers to the payment and inco terms of the e-sourcing contract reference.

07) Certain e-sourcing contract lines are published directly to MDM catalog and enriched so that the contract lines will become an internal catalog on which the purchasing work flow step is designed. (incase of MDM catalog, the work flow is not routed to the purchaser).

08) The PO spend is continuously updated on the contract on SRM, but the spend amount is not sent back to e-sourcing meaning the interface is synchronous and one way.

09) contract expiry for validity period alerts are generated from e-sourcing and the contract spend for the value are triggered out of SRM system.

The overall effort was around 1000 hours in conjunction with the contract compliance process with in SRM.

Hope this helps!!!

DV

[former_member183819]

Hi DV

Very interesting.

Request in SRM

Procurement in E-Sourcing?

are requestor also must be present in e-Sourcing ?

can you elaborate?

only Buyers sits in e-sourcing application?

what are the challenges you faced in user management / master data sysnchronisation?

good stuff to know.\Rao

Muthu

[Former Member]

Hi Muthu,

Yes, indeed it was an interesting interface we have designed especially when the SAP road map was not lucrative for us. We had to make a decision build vs buy. We have built. On top of that we have lot of contract complaince enhancements along with this interface. This interface supports all those enhancements as well.

Shopping Carts are in SRM.

e-sourcing cannot handle procurements.

E-sourcing works on a different method. You just need the contract owner and the corresponding SRM technical fields in sync. Then the real time validation happens. We do have close to 3000 contracts (created in e-sourcing pushed to SRM) in SRM.

Global procurement works in e-sourcing and order management team works in SRM.

I am trying to write a blog or white paper on this. I will upload in SDN which will be useful to the entire community.

Thank You for your rewards,

DV

[former_member183819]

Thnaks Rao

[Former Member]

Hi Venkateswara Rao

Could you please share some information on how to do custom integration between CLM and SRM for contracts using PI

Thanks in Adavance

M G REDDY

[former_member183819]

/people/marko.navala/blog/2009/02/02/sap-e-sourcing-integration-to-erp-and-srm

E-Sourcing Integration to SRM

The standard integration between E-Sourcing and SRM will not be available in E-Sourcing 6.0 product but is planned for the future releases of E-Sourcing application after version 6.0.

Despite the unavailability of standard integration between E-Sourcing and SRM, a number of customer projects have successfully used the components and building blocks available for the ERP integration in order to integrate E-Sourcing with their SRM systems.

The observed integration approach between E-Sourcing and SRM is as following:

The presented integration approach between SRM and E-Sourcing assumes the following:

Master data are in sync between the ERP, SRM and E-Sourcing system. It must be ensured the same master data are present in E-Sourcing as in SRM. This is a process consideration and standard interfaces can be used for replication of master data from ERP to SRM as well as from ERP to E-Sourcing

SRM requirements (shopping carts) are transferred to E-Sourcing RFx via ERP Purchase Requisitions and RFQ. The ERP RFQ is simply a technical grouping mechanism and a starting point for the transfer of requirements from ERP to E-Sourcing and does not play a major role in the overall process

The above approach assumes SRM deployment in the so called "Classic" mode

The standard outbound mechanisms for document publishing are leveraged from E-Sourcing, in other words either from an Award or an Agreement in E-Sourcing standard outbound integration is used into XI. In the XI system it is necessary to decide if the document will be replicated to ERP or SRM. This can be modeled based on the content of the transactional document e.g. document type, organizational data or custom attributes

The Custom API in ERP can be quickly built based on the standard SRM interfaces

The integration approach for SRM described above can be used to integrate E-Sourcing versions 5.0 and above with SRM 5.0 and above and ERP 4.7 and above.