Sorry Wendy I wasn't clear enough! I meant item master (define item).

For suppliers that you don't have punchout for, and don't get an item catalog, what's the business process for defining items (to prevent your users from just buying any item randomly from any supplier).

No worries at all.

One caveat- we are still using the non-fluid ePro Requisition, vs the Fluid Requisition.

Our organization has a group that manages the creation of items in define item only. We have rules around when an item ID is necessary or if it's a onetime special request that does not have an item ID.

Procurement users are then responsible for adding and maintaining purchasing attributes- price, lead time, suppliers, auto sourcing and the like.

Most of our requests for items are driven by replenishment or external sources, which looks at the items purchasing attributes set up. For the one manually created requisitions, the priority 1 supplier populates on the requisition. Since most of our items are set to auto source, even if the requester enters a different supplier, it's still sourcing to the priority 1 supplier in purchasing attributes. I believe this is just part of the delivered sourcing processes.

We have these processes scheduled to run several times a day.

I do know if someone manually sources the requisition (expedite requisitions), it takes the supplier provided though. In those cases, no one would know any better.

As far as how, we actually do item creation and maintenance in an external system. The item definition and some pieces of purchasing attributes are integrated into PS. For new items, the group that creates and maintains the item master can send a supplier and the lead time as part of the data. They cannot send the supplier or lead time if they are making an update to the item master.

We have category managers that maintains large groups of items, typically based on contracts with specific suppliers so pricing is updated via a CI on a regular basis. Outside of that users in Procurement are responsible for maintaining the item's purchasing attributes.

For supplier changes, pricing updates and such, our admin team (me and others) can run an excel to CI to update large volumes for Procurement and do on a regular basis. Anything under 30-40 items, they would manually maintain.

Holler if you have questions, glad to help

Wendy🐞