Thank you all for your responses. I am unsure what IM is sorry and would need clarification. I am a SAP novice sorry and I am trying to collate best practice for material procurement and/or better use of SAP functionality, for example PO automation. We use a vanilla package which we have adopted reasonably well and MRP is utilized for inventory items with MM only. I believe currently all GL's are linked to the material groups.
Most of the materials procured outside of inventory are not indirect procurement but materials procured for construction and maintenance of our Local Governments infrastructure and services. For example most stormwater pipe, water supply, facilities, park furniture, Fleet maintenance, chemicals, PPE and hardware etc. Stores inventory would account for a very small percentage, maybe 5-10% of total material value with proposed future models to reduce this further. We also now utilize asset management within SAP to maintain these assets. Our procurement office is proposing full use of external catalogues for all materials including Stores and based on my research of SAP users thus far this would not appear very common or efficient. I could of course be wrong. I guess my question was around how this could work and if there were any businesses out there actually do this sort of material procurement using SAP.
Current PO modification rates are very high. PR to PO processing is slow and we experience high invoice mismatch rates. Reporting on material spend is tedious and at best we get total value of a material group but little detail in actual materials purchased. This is causing large gaps in our material contracts. I was anticipating that the use of extensive MM for all materials would assist with some of these issues.
Regards
Aaron