Investment Buying

Use

Investment Buying helps you decide whether you could best cover future requirements by purchasing articles now that are due to increase in price. The purpose of investment buying is to buy efficient quantities of suitable articles just before the price goes up.

To determine the best possible quantity to buy, the system compares the current stock on-hand, the forecast requirements and the cost of ordering, transporting and storing the goods in a calculation based on return on investment (ROI). The system works out whether it is worthwhile procuring articles before they are actually required, and, if so, when and how much to procure. If the return-on-investment is greater than the calculated risk set in Customizing, SAP Retail automatically includes the quantity in the purchase order.

Integration

Investment buying is integrated with the following areas:

Purchasing

Purchase requisitions or purchase orders can be generated as a result of Investment Buying.

Workflow

Before follow-on documents are generated, you can have the system generate work items. The work items are processed by the staff and converted to purchase requisitions or purchase orders. You can configure workflow so that the system sends the work items to the inbox of the relevant staff member.

Load Building

Investment buying can be included in load building

Prerequisites

Before you can use investment buying, you must have the authorization for creating a purchase order or purchase requisition.

You must define the relevant purchase price condition types in Customizing. When these condition types change, this is taken into account in investment buying and can trigger procurement.

Before you can determine requirements, you have to run report RMEBEIN4 to determine all the relevant condition changes for the required period. This report generates condition change pointers that are analyzed during requirements determination.