Procurement Planning in IFS

Since I didn’t get any response from the IFS experts in this Community, did my own research by digging deeper into ‘Strategic Procurement’ capabilities in the new 21R1 and thought that these capabilities ideally address the need for a non-manufacturing organization like ours. Also thought of posting it here at a high level, thinking someone else could benefit as well. :)

Mainly this module (located in Procurement / Strategic Planning in IFS navigator) addresses the need to have a central hub for Procurement planning compared to earlier IFS versions where these capabilities were spread across different parts of the application. I identified 2 main capabilities in this module.

1. Category Management

This lets you classify your purchase parts into categories (and subcategories and so on) grouped under similar traits. E.g. ‘Segment’ IT > ‘Family’ Software > ‘Class’ Business Function Specific Software > ‘Commodity’ HR Software

Located inside Procurement / Strategic Planning / Procurement Category / Procurement Category Assortment

What is unique under this ‘Category Assortment’ is that you can expand the classification structure where you see the levels of subcategorization. Say, if you have filled in excel format your internal part categorization, then you can easily get it into IFS via a migration job.

Additionally you can define a Global Representative / Local Representative (In our context we define Procurement Leads overseeing the categories) under each category.

2. Spend Analysis

Here you can define various Spend Analysis Settings like Analysis Period, Category Assortment basis (the classification mentioned above) and Company / Companies and thereafter generate Spend Analysis Data through a Scheduled Task. Spend Analysis data generated thereby will be available in Procurement / Strategic Planning / Spend Analysis / Spend Analysis.

Here the idea is to only review the generated data. i.e. you use it to recategorize / clean the data before you do the actual analysis using BI tools. For instance, in Spend Analysis I can exclude specific lines or add a missing category assortment node for a line and then only move onto the actual analysis.

The actual analysis can be done either through the IFS Business Reporter (You have ‘Spend Analysis’ as an Information source there) or Power BI reports which are readily available in IFS Aurena unlike previous versions.

In my view, this is a great capability in IFS 21R1. I think IFS RnD is still working on the Supplier Categorization. When that is available, this will provide a comprehensive solution for Procurement Planning. Overall, I figured that the bold part below is covered, and the rest will be available in future releases.

Define Category > Category Responsibility > Spend Analysis > Derive Characteristics from the Category > Build a Strategy / Vision / Target > Identify Suppliers

Hopefully someone finds this useful. Appreciate if anyone else has anything to add here.