Recently, my colleague Marijn posted a blog about spot buying functionalities in SAP Ariba. As Compera specializes in SAP Procurement and not only SAP Ariba, I would like to introduce spot buying functionalities in other SAP solutions as well.

What is spot buying?

Within organizations, not all spend is under management. Usually purchases for the following categories will be bought without any support from procurement:

  • One-time or Emergency buys
  • Low dollar / Low complexity buys

For these types of purchases, the requester will find and select the supplier himself. This is what we call spot buying. As this part of the tail end spend can count up till over 20% of the total indirect spend, it is more than enough reason to take a closer look at this.

How does it work?

Normally you first search for an item within your catalog. This catalog can be connected to different SAP Procurement solutions, such as SAP MM, SAP S/4HANA and even within the User Interface Add-On of SAP SRM. The catalog solution will not only perform a search in the catalog, but in parallel it will also search via so called API’s in well-known marketplaces. Example of these marketplaces are amazon.com and bol.com.

If the proposed search result doesn’t provide sufficient items from the connected catalog, we can select a marketplace as an alternative and the items from the marketplace will be displayed.

After selecting the desired items from the marketplace, the requisition will follow your regular purchasing process, including the approval workflow. Also the invoice from the chosen marketplace will be sent to your company.

What do you require?

To implement this scenario, you will need the Catalog Cloud Services (CCS) solution from BeNeering (see SAP Note 1993452). CCS is a catalog solution with all the benefits of a modern webshop, such as Cross-Catalog search, that easily integrates with the SAP SRM User Interface Add-on, SAP MM or SAP S/4HANA. From CCS, we will call the bol.com API for example. Please see the below figure that explains the scenario.

What are the advantages?

Connecting marketplaces to your catalog solution, lets you not only access their assortment, but you can also benefit from their ecosystem. It’s an easy way to procure non-sourced items, and you will finally be able to bring this spend under management. Buying one-off items is now according your procurement policies!

Want to know more about the Catalog Cloud Search solution from Beneering, including the marketplace connections, please contact us.[:]