Effortless Procurement in SAP

Shopping online, we can all do it. Hands up who was taking advantage of the sales from the comfort of their own sofa over Christmas and New Year?  Amazon, eBay, ASOS, John Lewis, Tesco, we no longer think twice about it. What’s more, we regularly do it on our smart phones and tablets. We then get back to work and suddenly buying some pens and paper clips for the office stationery cupboard using SAP becomes a 10-minute ordeal – minimum. It might even require assistance from a colleague and a trip to the coffee machine to recover. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We are all accustomed to using devices with simple interfaces and the “tap, tap, swipe” method. Yet many still can’t get the same experience in their work environment. Why not? Digital transformation is happening right now. SAP is a fantastic ERP system and SAP’s latest and greatest, S/4HANA, is once again proving that you cannot stay static for long. Faster, more powerful, a complete overhaul on the User Experience (UX) and a raft of Fiori apps to go with it, no wonder people are road mapping how to get there now.

With ECC6 running ou of support in several years, people are asking – how do I get S/4 UX and functionality into my SAP system today?

Taking the procurement example above, using ‘traditional SAP ECC’, there are normally 5 or 6 stages where interaction with SAP is required:

• Shopping cart creation
• Shopping cart approval
• PO creation
• PO  transmission to the vendor
• Receipt of the goods or services
• Payment of invoice

By giving the user a true UI5 app experience, simplifying what the user sees and taking advantage of simple automation, this can be cut in half to just 3 using Absoft’s Self-Service Procurement (SSP) solution. The simple diagram below shows you the difference our SSP solution can make by reducing the number of touchpoints you need for traditional procurement in SAP (grey) and by using our SSP solution (gold).

Absoft have developed a full suite of apps that give the users a simple, easy to use solution for indirect procurement of goods and services in SAP. They are:

• Shopping Cart – Punchout to hosted vendor catalogues and free text shopping carts as standard
• Internal Catalogue – Create and maintain your own internal approved catalogues
• Approval App – Mobile ready and offline approval capability as standard
• Receipt App – Automated posting to SAP as standard
• Analytics – Drill down into your procurement process with dashboards, KPIs and real-time reporting.

Learn more about our UX solutions and get in touch to discuss your specific needs here.