The customer maintenance of Parts Procurement Assistant can be done by business department or business administration, but also by the IT department.
Which department does the single maintenance depends on the organisation and the individual definition of the single customer.

The Parts Procurement Assistant customer maintenance can be called by using the single transactions or by using the user menu.

Here we describe the following maintenance topics:

Maintain the Material Master

The Parts Procurement Assistant uses the Material Master in order to define the criteria you want to use to determine fast-moving vs. slow-moving parts. This setting has to separate from the business perspective the parts that are allowed for stock optimizing from those that should not be moved internally within one organization’s locations. This separation is client-specific and has to be agreed internally prior to the installation.

In standard delivery, the Parts Procurement Assistant will use the field ABC Indicator (MARC-MAABC) as criteria to differentiate among the parts, where:

A – Significant Material will be excluded from stock optimization (no internal Stock Transfer Order will be allowed)
B – Medium Significance will allow stock optimization but only in direction external purchasing (it will be possible to change the Stock Transfer Order purchasing suggestion to external Purchase Order)
C – Low Significance will allow stock optimization both internal and external (for Stock Transfer Orders it will be checked the stock level within the locations defined)

Additionally, the customer can define and implement own selection criteria in the material master (including Z fields).

The settings using the following technical objects:

T-Code: MM02
Tab: MRP1
Table: MARC-MAABC

ABC Indicator in the Material Master

Plant specific settings

In order to check for available stocks within your organization, you need to define the “partner locations” for each location and also the business scenario applied for each plant. This customizing step is done upon installation of the Parts Procurement Assistant and can be adjusted as the business requirements change.

At plant level, it is important to check the SAP Settings for:

The MRP Run – in order to determine how the procurement proposals are created
The Stock management at MM Level – in standard delivery of the Parts Procurement Assistant, the SAP Standard Field Valuated Unrestricted-Use Stock (MARD-LABST) it is used as reference for stock optimization; therefore it is important to have activated this type of stock at plant level as well to assign a Storage Location to the selected materials

As these are SAP Standard settings for the Material Management, please check the SAP documentation for more details.

Purchasing settings

The settings in Purchasing determine how your external procurement of materials and services is working, determine the possible sources of supply for a requirement and monitors the deliveries and the payments for deliveries.

Steps required by the Parts Procurement Assistant:

Configure the Purchase Requisition – SAP Standard Setting
Allow automatic creation of Purchase Orders from Purchase Requisitions – SAP Standard Setting
Configure the creation of Sales Transfer Orders– SAP Standard Setting
Setup the Vendor Master Data – SAP Standard Setting

Vendor settings and the Suggested Vendor in the Parts Procurement Assistant logic:

In the Parts Procurement Assistant, the user has the possibility to change the purchasing proposal Stock Transfer Order to Purchase Order in case the second one makes more sense from a business perspective (press button switch PO/TO in the ALV List).

In this case the fields Plant and Storage Location will be initialized and greyed out and the field Vendor will become available. In order to support the users the field Vendor will be prefilled with automatically if the following pre-requisites are defined in your system:

You have defined a Fix Vendor in the Source List – Transaction ME01

Vendor setting in the Material Source List

Alternatively, you have defined only one information record – use this vendor
If there is no Fix Vendor defined and no Info Record or if more Info Records are defined in the system, the field Vendor will not be pre-filled and the user will have to specify the Vendor in order to create the purchasing document.

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