Within the purchasing department of a company, a manager or high-level employee needs to have a controlled view over all the high-level purchases. SAP provides a solution to smooth this task. The provided solution is a release procedure for purchase orders. Within this solution, SAP tracks each order for certain values and, if needed, asks the authorization from the right people before releasing the order for processing.
What is a release procedure for purchase orders?
Release procedures for purchase orders are defined settings that will check newly made purchase orders. These settings can be, for example, a maximum net value. Within these settings, you can determine when and by who the new purchase order needs to be reviewed and released. Before the release, the purchase order will be blocked.
How does a release procedure for purchase orders work for a user?
The release strategy will ease the departments purchasing for mid- to high-level purchases as it can happen through the purchasing department, but the authorization can be applied from the right people.
In the above process flow, we can observe how a standard SAP release procedure flow gets executed.
First, the purchasing department creates a purchase order.
Once the order is created, SAP checks the data and crosschecks these with the defined release procedure data. After this crosscheck, SAP either keeps the order released so that further order processing can happen. Or SAP blocks the order and asks for approval from an authorized party.
The authorizing party can grant approval via the Tcode ME28. Here the authorizing party will have to fill in their release code to get an overview of all orders that need approval. From this list, approvals can be granted. This can either be an individual release, where each document can individually be released, or a collective release, where more than one order gets released at the same time.
Once the approval is granted, SAP will automatically unblock the order so that the purchasing department can further process the document.
If the approval is not granted, the authorizing party will have to choose an individual release to decline the purchase order. In the collective release, the authorizing party will not have the option to decline a document. If the document has been declined the blocked status will remain.
What are the benefits of the release procedure for purchase orders?
The main benefit that this solution brings to your company is the high-level overview of the purchasing department is clearer. All purchases can be made by the same purchasing department, and SAP will filter these for further approval requests by the right parties.
The release strategy will further provide a number of key approvals within your company. A few of these are:
- Better overview of mid- to high-level purchases
- Improve the structure of your purchase orders
- Flexibility for the release strategy
- Flexibility of the work process for purchase orders.
- Overall control of the purchasing
What can PIKON do for you?
The release procedure can be applied to companies that would like to smoothen and integrate their release procedure for purchasing. With PIKON’s 25+ years of experience, we can help you with this optimization.