SAP Purchasing Group in Details

 the Purchasing Organization and its assignment to other organizational units (company code and plant).

In the purchasing function, there is another unit that can represent the structure of an enterprise purchasing department, which is Purchasing Group. Unlike the Purchasing Organization (which is an Enterprise Structure organizational unit), the Purchasing Group is not assigned to other organizational units (such as company code, plant, or Purchasing Organization).

A purchasing group is represented by a client-unique 3-digits alpha-numeric.
We can use purchasing group to:

• Represent a buyer or a group of buyers that are responsible for a certain type of purchasing activities. For example we can create two purchasing groups for our business scenario:
  
  • “A10” purchasing group for group of buyers who are responsible for sales material/service purchasing activities.
    
  • “A20” purchasing group for group of buyers who are responsible for non-sales material/service purchasing activities.
• Be a parameter in purchasing documents (such as Purchase Requisition, Purchase Order, etc) release procedure. By doing so, we can set different release procedure for different purchasing documents with different purchasing group.
  
• Be an authorization object, so we can restrict a specific role can only create/edit/display purchasing document with a specific purchasing group. Since purchasing group is not assigned to any enterprise structure organization units, we can’t restrict the use of a purchasing organization in an enterprise structure unit (such as in company code, plant, or Purchasing Organization). But we can restrict it through the authorization object in the user’s role.
  
• Group the purchasing documents in purchasing reports. We can generate report of purchasing documents per purchasing group.

We create purchasing group from the following menu path of “SPRO” t-code: IMG - Materials Management - Purchasing - Create Purchasing Group:

The above image is © SAP AG 2010. All rights reserved

The above image is © SAP AG 2010. All rights reserved