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 Vendor Evaluation. It also fulfills the certification requirements of suppliers.

It not only evaluates vendors and retrieves rich evaluation data, but rather evaluates and optimizes the whole procurement process. In other words, VE is a part of an analytical application within mySAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM).

To select a new vendor, you need information to determine whether the vendor is, in principle, interesting for your procurement activities. This can be achieved using a request for information (RFI), in response to which the vendors 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 vendor evaluation tool. Afterwards, the vendor 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 vendor performance. To enhance the performance, it might be necessary to hold feedback meetings to discuss the evaluation with the vendor and define targets which could be reviewed again. In this way the target can be optimized, leading to an optimized procurement process and higher vendor performance. Procurement costs are reduced and the production process becomes more stable.

Compared to other reporting scenarios in SRM, the scenario for Vendor Evaluation is a more complex process. To configure the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) and SAP Enterprise Buyer systems for vendor evaluation, it is necessary to carry out several special steps aside from the usual ones..

Customizing depends on where you will evaluate your vendors and where you will capture the scores of the vendors. For example, you get the scores in the EBP or BW system via questionnaires or you get automatic scores from the SAP R/3 vendor evaluation. It is also possible to integrate scores from other vendor evaluation systems or tools via the common interface.

In this way, you can then monitor all evaluation data in SAP BW.

Features

Vendor 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. The customers can choose the criteria that they want to evaluate (for example delivery reliability and quality). You can also define the time of the evaluation, and create questionnaires for incoming invoices, confirmations, and vendor lists. The answers can be changed afterwards.

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 vendor 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 vendors on product or product category level (offline evaluation, because it is not integrated in a document posting process like confirmation). These vendors 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 vendor evaluation scores or with scores from a third party tool.

The following table sums up the different ways in which the Vendor Evaluation process can be performed, depending on the system you evaluate in and the event that triggers evaluation:

SAP BW enables the customer to evaluate the data gathered from the surveys and questionnaires. The information can help to select vendors 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 provide additional information to support the procurement process. They are shown in the vendor 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.