You use this business process to create contracts, trigger the approval process, inform purchasing organizations about released contracts and output contracts, change existing contracts, and reassign the workload of employees involved in contract management.

Purchasers can create contracts in a number of different ways:

Before implementing the Contract Management business scenario, the purchasing organization determines which purchasers should receive authorization to create and use contracts. It is also possible to categorize contracts as "confidential", which means that users need special authorization to access these contracts. In the contract itself, the purchaser can then decide whether or not other users should receive authorization to display or change certain parts of the contract. Users are therefore provided with different levels of authorization.

You can use this business process to distribute the data of an approved central contract to authorized purchasing organizations in the back-end SAP ERP or SAP SRM system. You can send them an e-mail about the approved contract. The purchasing organizations can register themselves to use this central contract for their requisitions, purchase orders, limit confirmations, and invoices.

After you have approved the contract, the system creates a purchasing contract or scheduling agreement that serves as a source of supply either in Sourcing or in business objects such as requisitions or purchase orders in the back-end SAP ERP system. You select the contract to create a requisition, purchase order, limit confirmation, and invoice. The system then updates the contract in the SAP SRM system with the released value.

You can configure whether you would like to group items that belong to the same release-authorized purchasing organization together into a single back-end contract or purchasing agreement, even if they belong to different locations. This requires you to create a contract with a ternary relationship between item, release-authorized purchasing organization, and location.

Once the contract is complete, a workflow is triggered and the contract is sent to the responsible manager for approval if applicable. Once approval has been granted, the authorized purchasers can use the contracts to process purchase orders or invoices. In addition, you can upload the approved contract to SRM-MDM Catalog.

You can also use this process to reassign the responsibility for a contract to another purchasing organization. This is necessary, for example, if an employee is on holiday or due to organizational changes.

Apart from the generic search function, you can use a full text search supported by TREX that includes text fragments in documents attached to the contract.

You can either make individual changes to contracts, or use the mass change function to make multiple changes to more than one contract at a time.