Supplier Evaluation
Over the last years, the importance of a generic evaluation tool within collaborative scenarios has increased as a result of the need for customers to reduce procurement costs, enhance and optimize collaboration, and globalize procurement activities. This is possible with supplier evaluation. It also fulfills the certification requirements of suppliers.
It not only evaluates suppliers and retrieves rich evaluation data, but rather evaluates and optimizes the whole procurement process. In other words, supplier evaluation is a part of an analytical application within mySAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM).
To select a new supplier, you need information to determine whether the supplier is, in principle, interesting for your procurement activities. This can be achieved using a request for information (RFI), in response to which the suppliers provide information about themselves. The buying company is then able to evaluate this information or make an improvement as an audit. This can be seen as the first step in a supplier evaluation tool. Afterwards, the supplier is included in the procurement process and purchase orders, confirmations and invoices are processed. These business transactions can then be evaluated, for example, using surveys and scores, with a view to improving supplier performance. To enhance the performance, it might be necessary to hold feedback meetings to discuss the evaluation with the supplier and define targets which could be reviewed again. In this way the target can be optimized, leading to an optimized procurement process and higher supplier performance. Procurement costs are reduced and the production process becomes more stable.
Note
The standard Business Content of supplier evaluation is built to use only Web templates as an analysis instrument. The queries and views are only intended for use with Web templates.
Compared to other reporting scenarios in SRM, the scenario for supplier evaluation is a more complex process. To configure the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP Enterprise Buyer systems for supplier evaluation, several extra actions have to be carried out in addition to the common configuration steps.
Customizing depends on where you will evaluate your suppliers and where you will capture the scores of the suppliers. For example, you get the scores in the EBP or BW system via questionnaires or you get automatic scores from the SAP R/3 supplier evaluation. It is also possible to integrate scores from other supplier evaluation systems or tools via the common interface.
Afterwards, you can monitor all evaluation data in SAP BW.
Technical Data
| Available as of Release | mySAP SRM 5.0 |
|---|---|
| BI Content Add-On Release | SAP BI Content 7.0..2 Add-On SP01 |
Features
Supplier evaluation uses a questionnaire tool that is available in the ABA of the R/3 system. This tool is called Web Survey Cockpit and enables the customer to define and maintain surveys and questionnaires for manual evaluation on document level. Customers can select the criteria they want to evaluate (for example, delivery reliability and quality). They can also define when the evaluation is to occur and create questionnaires for invoices, confirmations, and supplier lists. The answers in the questionnaires can be changed subsequently.
The questionnaires are included in SAP Enterprise Buyer processes in that a questionnaire has to be filled out when a document (confirmation, invoice) is posted (online evaluation). A new browser window opens up, and the Web Survey questionnaire can be filled out as documents are being maintained. In case of supplier lists, in contrast, the evaluation has to be started proactively by the user.
The questionnaires are also included in the BW system where you can evaluate confirmations, invoices and vendsuppliers on product or product category level (offline evaluation, because it is not integrated in a document posting process like confirmation). These suppliers and documents can originate from Enterprise Buyer and/or R/3 systems. The questionnaires included in SAP BW can be accessed from different roles and users directly from the OLTP system or via a URL.
It is also possible to enhance evaluation data with the R/3 automatic supplier evaluation scores or with scores from a third party tool.
The following table sums up the different ways in which the supplier evaluation process can be performed, depending on the system you evaluate in and the event that triggers evaluation:
Evaluation System | Event that triggers evaluation | Evaluation mode | Evaluation data |
SAP Enterprise Buyer | Confirmation is posted | Manual online evaluation/e-mail | Confirmation (SAP EBP) |
Invoice is posted | Manual online evaluation/e-mail | Invoice (SAP EBP) | |
User starts evaluation proactively from the supplier list | Manual online evaluation | Suppliers from supplier list (SAP EBP) | |
SAP Business Information Warehouse | User starts evaluation proactively accessing questionnaire from a BW query via role menu or URL | Manual offline evaluation Can be scheduled | Confirmations, invoices, suppliers from OLTP systems (SAP EBP, SAP R/3, amongst others) |
SAP R/3 or other | Defined by the system settings | Automatic | Defined by the system settings |
Note
You can combine all these processes. To report on all evaluation data in SAP BW, you define grouping and weighting rules in supplier evaluation customizing in SAP BW.
SAP BW enables the customer to evaluate the data gathered from the surveys and questionnaires. The information can help to select suppliers and negotiate conditions. The questionnaire data is updated in the delta structures and extracted into SAP BW.
When the data has been extracted from SAP BW delta structures into SAP BW, and when the ODS object and the InfoCube have been updated with grouping and weighting, this information is available in SAP Enterprise Buyer or SAP R/3 via queries. These queries serve as additional information to support the procurement process. They are shown in the supplier list of SAP Enterprise Buyer, in the sourcing cockpit, in SAP Bidding Engine, in contracts or in the R/3 system via Web Link in the role menu.