Procurement through OCI

[Former Member]

Hello Experts,

Does anyone have any idea about how does the material procurement happens through OCI and what are its per-requsites?. For your information, I have gone through various weblinks and threads but still unable to go into the depth.

Please advise.

Thanks,

F. Fernandes

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Fernandes,

Although I have not worked exactly on Open Catalog Interface but I will try my best to provide you some suggestions on this. But for one thing I am sure that this exercise is not easy and really requires good effort to achieve this complex scenario.

For material procurement, there are already adopted scenarios like - attaching material component on activities then raising the commitment cost etc etc. Then having BOM and exploding it in PS and there are few scenarios also in place including MRP too. But OCI is totally different from all of these.

Actually, you can use OCI (Open Catalog Interface) for a manual assignment of material components.

Using this interface, you can employ the tabular overview of the material components of an activity to call an external catalog for selecting material. The external catalog can be a company-internal intranet catalog, or a catalog of a fixed vendor that is accessible via the Internet.

After you have called a catalog and selected material from this catalog, you can use the interface to transfer data on the selected material to the SAP system and thereby add material components to an activity. If an appropriate material number for the catalog material can be detected in the SAP system the material component can be assigned as a stock item (L); otherwise, it is assigned as a non-stock item (N).

I hope this may help you to some extent.

Regards,

Amit

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi there, where do I get the OCI documentation for Version 5.0 ? Try to do some search but got me nowhere.

Regards,

Fong

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Please go through the provided link.

http://www.attpurchasing.com/Files/OCI_40_EN20030611.pdf

Catalog Interface (OCI - Open Catalog Interface) - Task Lists (CS-AG/PM-PRM-TL) - SAP Library

Catalog Connection in MM-PUR - ERP SCM - SCN Wiki

Regards,

Amit

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Amit,

But what would be the pre-requisites for this. How do I proceed with the customization. Can you have the steps wise list.?

Thanks,

F.Fernandes

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

A prerequisite for using the OCI is that you define the external catalog and its call structure, that is, the URL and the corresponding parameters regarding user and password, for example, in SPRO.

and then assign the catalog to the network. As of SAP ECC Release 5.0, you can assign several catalogs to one network type. In this case, when you call the catalog interface in the application, a dialog opens and prompts you to select the catalog.

In Customizing, you additionally need to define the mapping of the catalog HTML fields to the fields of the material component in the SAP system. You also might have to specify conversions between catalog data and the field values in the SAP system. If necessary, you can also define conversion modules for determining material numbers,

Please find the SPRO settings as mentioned below:-

Regards,

Amit Rajoria

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Amit,

thanks. Issue closed.

F.Fernandes