Vendor Management

[Former Member]

Hello SAP Experts,

Is there any way for SAP to flag certain vendors at PO creation stage to indicate to the procurement officer that the selected vendor is under
investigation for whatever reason (i.e. past performance issues)? I don’t want to block the vendor but rather generate a warning message to the user.  There are times that certain vendors are barred from doing business with the organization due to performance, legal, criminal issues and procurement officers will have to
follow internal approval processes to issue the contract to that vendor.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

T.

[jagdeepsingh83 · Accepted solution]

Do you have any identified field in vendor master or any transaction which make an entry in the z table that vendor is under investigation ... if you can make system get the value from tables .. then you can use release strategy user exit .. and populate field in Users defined field such USRC1 or USRC2.. use this is your classification to determine the different release strategy other than your regular procurement.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Jagdeep,

Thank you for your detailed response.  I will have to research this a little bit more.

Cheers

T.

[michael_kozlowski]

Hi,

You can create customer specific field(s) to store "soft" blocking codes in vendor tables e.g. table LFA1. See also http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/580266

You can use enhancement spot ME_PROCESS_PO_CUST (tr. SE18) to display messages during PO dialog. Use Method CHECK for this purpose.

Regards

Michael

[JL23]

I am not aware of any standard function to accommodate this desire. Purchasing module does in general not work with pop-ups like it is seen in SD.

If you don't use PO release yet then I could imagine to use it for this control. Otherwise, you may need a small development with Z-tables for your candidates together with a short text, and a custom check in your PO to check on the Z-tables and to issue an own message.

SAP GTS works in general with sanction party lists, and I know from SD where we use it that it will block the processing until somebody releases either the customer in general or just the document.

[Former Member]

Hi Jürgen,

Thank you for your detailed response; greatly appreciated.

I started looking at PO Release Strategy and came across your post entitled: " Purchasing Release Strategy - an expanded explanation and a GPS through SCN and SAP notes.  Very informative.

Would you know if we could setup the PO release strategy for specific vendors only?  these are the vendors that are under investigation for various reasons.  if this is doable, this might be an interim solution I could propose to my clients.

I recently started my role as the SAP System Analyst so I apologise if my questions are silly.

Thank you

T.

[jagdeepsingh83]

It is interesting topic, but I do not think SAP have provision for capturing such data.. you can block vendors seems to be only option if you have blacklisted the vendor.. System will not allow you to create PO until flag is removed for one day or you have taken offline approval to remove the flag for your contract.. Lets wait for other experts to share their knowledge on this topic.