The purchase order request in SAP They have a very good control function for the organization, since they do not commit to the purchase of a material as such, they only establish request conditions that will later determine whether the purchase is made or not.
In SAP, they have great functionality because they can come from any area of the company and then be approved by the purchasing department to execute them or not.
The transactions to access them can be found in the start menu tree or by code ME51N / ME52N / ME53N.
We use ME51N to create the request, ME52N to modify an existing one, or ME53N to view the order request.
One of the most common practices is creating that need using the purchase order request, but without knowing who the supplier is. That is, any area of the company needs material "X" and does not necessarily know who to request it from (supplier). Instead, the purchase order request is filled out and subsequently, the department or responsible person can assign a source of supply or directly, a signed contract or information record with special conditions with supplier "X" of their choice.
Purchase orders are divided, like all SAP documents, into different parts:
Header data:
In the header data, we have to indicate whether we want to assign a source of supply or not, indicate in the Texts any type of comment that we want to transfer in it or to the approver of the purchase order itself.
Position data:
In the item data, you fill in the material to be requested, with the quantities, item group, plant, etc. You can select the fixed supplier if you have one, a contract, etc. In this section, you place all the items that belong to that purchase requisition.
Detail of the purchase order position:
In this part of the application, we will complete all the information that comes to us for each tab of the specific position. For each position, we will have all these tabs enabled.
Material data, quantities and dates, Valuation, Allocations, Sources of supply (if selected), Status, Contact person, Texts, Delivery address, Custom fields.
Each tab contains information relevant to its title, and you can customize fields that you want to make mandatory, inattentive, or optional. All of this will be defined during the implementation of the system in the company and can be modified with a different document name.
Once we have everything clear, it is saved and it provides us with an order request number (also customizable) and we would move on to the next level, which can be either the order transformation itself or the approval by the different approvers that the corresponding flow has.
Workflow for order request approvals:
Flexible Workflow is a general feature that allows you to define workflows for condition-based approval processes. Flexible Workflow for Purchase Orders allows you to define single- or multi-step approval processes for purchase orders based on your needs. Approvers can approve or reject corresponding work items in the My Inbox app.
For order request authorization, you have two options:
General release
The entire purchase order request is approved. This type of authorization is also called header-level authorization.
Release of purchase requisition itemsyes
Items in a purchase requisition are authorized individually. This type of authorization is also called item-level authorization.
For each of these options, the following workflow scenarios are available:
- Scenario for regular order requests
- Scenario for central order requests, provided you use Central Procurement
Approval managers receive notifications about new work items in the SAP Fiori launchpad. If necessary, you can also configure email notifications that will be sent immediately to each user.
Applicants can also receive an email notification when their order request has been approved or rejected.
If you don't want all order requests to be automatically approved (the default option), you need to configure the flexible workflow to be agile and accurate to market demands.
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