Purchase Master Data

In Item Base Data, you can specify items and item data on a general level. Before you can carry out purchase procedures, you must also specify purchase-related item data in Item Purchase Data.

You can specify and calculate several lead times for a combination of purchased item and business partner.

If you enter a purchase order line, you must calculate a planned receipt date. The planned receipt date is calculated based on the order date, the item lead times, and the horizon. Depending on the horizon, the planned receipt date can be accurately or globally determined.

Sourcing is the way in which you assign orders to business partners who deliver the same items. You can give suppliers a priority and a sourcing percentage.

Companies often order components from purchase business partners who do not produce the components themselves. These intermediate purchase business partners offer equivalent components, which are items that conform to their original item's specifications, from different manufacturers. You can use the multiple manufacturer item functionality or the manufacturer part number (MPN) item functionality to specify, approve, and use manufacturer's items.

In purchase scheduling, planned delivery moments must be generated for a combination of item, buy-from business partner, ship-from business partner, and warehouse. These moments are used by Enterprise Planning for lead-time offsetting.

Before you can perform purchase procedures, you must define purchase organizational data, such as the purchase order types that define the mandatory steps in the purchase order procedure, purchase offices that you can use to create purchase contracts, purchase orders, and purchase schedules, and user profiles with user-specific default data.

You can validate purchase orders against approval rules before their status can become Approved. These rules enable you to specify conditions based on which purchase orders are approved.

You can automate the processing of purchase orders. For each activity that is linked to an order type, you can specify its execution mode: automatic or manual.

You can use rate determiners to specify which date is used to determine the exchange rates. Amounts in foreign currencies are converted to the home currency based on the valid exchange rate.

Before you can perform purchase procedures, you must specify general purchase data, such as an approver list for use in the purchase requisition procedure, data to track order changes and to determine the reason for the changes, and additional cost sets.

Cost items are used to define charges such as freight, handling, and administrative fees. These costs can be added to an order so the order accurately reflects charges billed to a customer or charges billed to you by your buy-from business partners. Additional costs can be placed on an order as extra cost (items) after the last item recorded. Several additional cost items can be assigned to an order by bringing them together in a cost set. LN can automatically apply these cost sets to purchase orders.

You can specify a list of valid requisition approvers (individuals or departments) and define a hierarchy in the approval structure.

You can use budget control to check purchase transactions against available budgets. For purchase requisitions, orders, and receipts, you can specify if, how, and when budget checks must be executed.

A purchase order of one company is always linked to a sales order of another company. Therefore, a change in a purchase order can influence the corresponding sales order, and vice versa. You can specify the handling of change order information.

Before you can perform the purchase schedule procedure, you must specify the purchase schedule master data, such as segment set, patterns, and release types.

You can specify product catalogs to group items into logical product categories. Catalogs can be structured hierarchically and contain, at the lowest levels, items that can be sold or purchased.