Functional Overview
Buyer Performance – Value Creation is a governed process that ensures Procurement value is captured, validated, and approved in a structured and auditable way.
- Buyers capture value creation initiatives and their expected benefits.
- Controllers independently validate their business and financial credibility, and only approved data is released downstream for calculation and reporting
This ensures clear ownership, strong governance, and trusted inputs for Finance-owned calculation and reporting, while allowing Procurement to transparently demonstrate its contribution to business performance.
Syensqo has built in legacy systems, a framework to evaluate Buyer Performance / Value Creation. This framework will be re-platformed in Syway Project, with the intention to "lift & shift" without introducing changes.
This framework has following elements:
- A tailored Frontend so that buyers can create "Actions & benefits" which will represent the "plan" to be achieved (normally savings) for specific purchasing categories in specific GBUs / Geographical Areas. This frontend will allow the Buyers to submit the "Actions & Benefits" and controllers will be responsible to approve or reject them. Once approved, those benefits will be measured against actuals to monitor the buyer's performance.
- A Data Warehousing Solution which will store all the information required for reporting and KPI measurement. This data warehouse solution will store:
- The "Actions & Benefits" from the Frontend.
- The "Actual Spent" which will come from the ERP Instances (ROW and China).
- "Control Data" which will be updated by Process Administrators. This data will contain spend corrections, VBF corrections, Filter values, etc.
- A Reporting & Analytics tool which will be responsible to:
- Provide reports merging "Actions & benefits" generated in the buyer's frontend and the actual spent to verify how plan is tracking to actuals.
- Generate KPIs.
- Allow the Process Administrators to upload "Control Data".
Applications Involved
- The frontend will be built in SAP BTP and it's data will be initially stored in Hana cloud.
- The data warehousing will be deployed in SAP Datasphere.
- The reporting & analytical solution will be SAP Analytics Cloud.
- The actual spend will be stored in S/4HANA ROW and China instances.
System Architecture
- SAP BTP:
- Value Creation Application: this application will allow buyers to capture Value Creation Activities and Benefits which will be submitted for approval to controllers.
- Benefit Approval Application: this application will allow controllers to approve / reject benefits recorded by buyers.
- All data generated in both apps will be stored in the HANA DB from BTP.
- It is expected that all the master data used in the Value creation App will be either sourced from S/4HANA or maintain locally if the master data object does not exist in S/4HANA.
- Material Groups (From S/4HANA).
- Sites / Plants (From S/4HANA)
- Domains and Segments (From S/4HANA, from global hierarchies)
- Zone, GBU, Geography / Organisation: maybe maintained in BTP directly.
- Also, the BTP application will allow:
- to have a chatter so that Buyers and Controllers can clarify topics in the context of an Action/Benefit.
- An application to allow controllers to approve benefits in bulk.
- S/4HANA
- Actual spend will be replicated from S/4HANA into SAP Datasphere. The main source of truth will be Supplier Invoices.
- Also, all the relevant master data will be replicated to SAP Datasphere & SAP BTP to marry Value Creation and Actual Spend.
- SAP Datasphere:
- All Actions and Benefits will be replicated from SAP BTP Hana DB.
- Actual Spend replicate from S/4HANA ROW and China replicated to Datasphere.
- Control Data will be updated via SAC into Datasphere to apply calculation corrections, calculation rules, etc.
- SAC:
- The process administrator can upload calculation rules (also called control data) and it will be replicated to SAP Datasphere.
- The process administrator can request to re-calculate the KPIs via SAC after uploading new control data.
- Reports/KPIs/User Stories can be consumed via SAC against the reporting layer in SAP Datasphere.
WRICEFS
- [ERP-1322] Buyer Performance: Value Creation – S2P part Buyer Input (SAP BTP) - Jira
- [ERP-1209] Buyer Performance: Value Creation - Finance/ R2R -Owned Datasphere & SAC - Jira
Functional Specs
Important Master Data Objects
- Material Groups, Segments & Domains: SAP S/4HANA is the source of truth. When creating a new action in Value Creation App, these fields will be attached to the Actions & Benefits. Then, also when reading actual spend data, material group can be used to be allocated to actions and benefits for Plan vs Actual comparison.
- Plants: SAP S/4HANA is the source of truth. When creating a new action in Value Creation App, plant will be attached to the Actions & Benefits. Then, also when reading actual spend data, material group can be used to be allocated to actions and benefits for Plan vs Actual comparison.
- Business Unit/GBU: When creating a new action in Value Creation App, Business Unit will be attached to the Actions & Benefits. This field will also need to be used to marry with actual spent on that business unit. The "actual spent" will be captured against a profit centre and the profit centre hierarchy will help to determine the Business Unit / GBU.
Approach to link Benefits with Actual Spent
Jason / Shashank i think we need to try to put some high-level approach on how we link data generated in the Value Creation App with the Actual Spent.
- S/4HANA has not a field called GBU, but i believe the GBUs are represented as profit centers. We need to have an approach to link Profit centres to GBUs.
- Do we drive all the GEO locations based on a SITE ? (Plant)
- Same for purchasing zone.... what is it ? Is it purchasing Org ?
Calculation rules
Jason / Shashank i think we need to try to put some high level approach on how this works.
Data Migration
In order to run reports comparing data generated in Legacy Systems (Convergence and ECC Spend Data) historical data will need to be captured and loaded into Datasphere:
- Spend Data, last 3 years.
- Value Creation Actions and Benefits, last 3 years.