You can use this business process to process your requirements and to improve your source of supply by evaluating the ability of your suppliers to provide materials and services. To prioritize the requirements, you can define and display priority for your requirements in the Sourcing application accordingly.

Once a requirement has been created, you can assign requirements to different purchasing groups manually or automatically. This enables you to react to temporary absences among persons responsible for requirements, or organizational changes to the structure of your purchasing groups.

You can assign the sources of supply proposed by the system to items automatically (for example, if there is a single contract for the item being procured) or manually in the case of a quota arrangement, contract, or supplier from a supplier list. You can also assign a source of supply from catalogs that you access in Sourcing.

You can then create an RFx or an auction in the SAP Bidding Engine. In the case of an RFx, you can publish it immediately, or group multiple requirements together for publishing later.

You can also disable the automatic assignment of a source of supply in requirements during sourcing. This enables you to add your preferred supplier as a source of supply in the requirement. The system displays a list of possible sources of supply — defined either locally or in the back-end system — for the products or user-defined texts you add to the requirement. When adding an item from a catalog, however, the system finds a unique source of supply for that item, and assigns the source of supply for the item automatically. If you deactivate the automatic source of supply, you can define your own supplier in the requirement. If no preferred supplier or source of supply is assigned, the system creates an incomplete purchase order locally, or an incomplete purchase requisition in the back-end system, depending on the deployment scenario implemented.

It is also possible to define the threshold for background processing in the Sourcing application so that requirements with a number of items exceeding the threshold will be processed in background mode. To do this, you must activate the Customizing switch Advanced Background Processing Features (SRM_701_BACKGROUND_PROC), and define the threshold value in a dialog box. Once the value defined under Number of Items is reached in the application, background processing is started immediately and the dialog box is not displayed to the purchaser.

This business process is modified if you have activated the SRM Service Procurement Innovations (SRM_SERVICE_PROC_1) business function. It brings additional features, such as enabling of info lines in contracts, central contract as default in the Sourcing application, and enabling of contracts with service hierarchies as source of supply in the Sourcing application.