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Definition

Business Context and Use

Retail purchasing request processing uses retail purchasing plans to create purchase orders. The retail purchasing plan specifies the planned quantities of items to be allocated on specified dates to the store groups listed. This makes retail purchasing request processing a significant step  to go from planning to execution of the assortment plan.

The Retail Purchasing Request Processing process component allows applications to be provided that manage a retail purchasing plan that contains a plan for purchasing a specific product category for a specific season and for a specific store group.

The Retail Purchasing Request Processing process component is retail specific.

Use case
The following use case shows a typical business process for the interaction of Assortment Planning with Retail Purchasing Request Processing process component.

Create assortment plan for seasonal (fashion) merchandise on style/color/size level in SAP Merchandise and Assortment Planning (MAP) and release this plan to the SAP ERP back-end system.

For the coming season you (an assortment planner) want to plan your assortments for the fashion merchandise group you are responsible for.

The prerequisites are as follows. 

• The assortments are defined for this merchandise area (any article hierarchy level). 
• The assortments are assigned to stores that have identical dimension values (such as presentation capacity, price level, or delivery region). 
• Furthermore you have created a size curve in SAP MAP to be used to distribute the plan from color to size level.

Now you can start.

1. Plan your targets for each assortment (cluster) for example the receipt units that should be allocated to the stores. Plan at the level of the article hierarchy node, assortment, season, season year and rollout.
2. For the correct product mix in your assortment planning, you may require new styles. You create these planned styles by entering some basic master data information. You also define the colors for these styles. Normally, not all planned styles are included in the final assortment plan. Determination of the correct product mix is usually an iterative process. You plan the receipt in units and value at the style/color level to reach your targets.
3. Next distribute the receipts from color level to size level according to the size curve that you created in SAP MAP.
4. You check your assortment plan, you change some quantities and delete some planned styles. You finish the assortment plan. 
5. You release this assortment plan using the SAP MAP Release Workbench (outbound service operation Request Retail Purchasing Plan ). 
6. The Retail Purchasing Plan is created in the SAP ERP back-end system (inbound service operation Maintain Retail Purchasing Plan )
7. Open the retail purchasing plan (called retail purchasing list) using Operational Assortment Planning And Control (OAPC) in the SAP ERP back-end system. Now you can again adjust this plan (for example assignment of further styles to the assortments, changing the planned quantities, definition of prepacks, enhancement of master data information of the new planned styles).
8. You release this retail purchasing plan to the follow-on processes.

• Master data creation (new styles and their variants are created in the SAP ERP back-end system)
• Purchasing (purchase orders are created in the SAP ERP back-end system).

Further use cases

1. You plan your assortments only down to style/color level in SAP MAP, you release this assortment plan using outbound service operation Request Retail Purchasing Plan and then you finish the size plan in the SAP ERP back-end system using OAPC.
2. You just plan down to style level in SAP MAP and release this assortment plan using outbound service operation Request Retail Purchasing Plan . All other steps to detail the plan are done in the SAP ERP back-end system using OAPC.
   

Integration

This process component communicates with other process components using the following interactions:

• Assortment Planning - Retail Purchasing Request Processing

Structure

The following entities are part of this process component:

Service Interfaces

Business Objects

Notes on SAP Implementation

B2B and A2A related information
The back-end systems involved are SAP Retail and an SAP BI system (Merchandise and Assortment Planning). Optionally a third party Shelf Optimization system can be included.

SAP Retail is a special retail solution, which you can use by setting up the SAP ECC component. You do this by activating the SAP Retail business function set. For more information, see the SAP Library under SAP for Industries -> SAP for Retail -> SAP Retail

Configuration

To use the service operations in the Retail Purchasing Request Processing process component, the SAP ERP back-end system must be configured and running so that retail purchasing plan records can be created.