- Abstract:
Procurement is the process of obtaining new assets for the company. The Asset Management Suite helps to manage the procurement process. It provides templates to create and manage procurement related items such as stockroom, catalog, purchase request, purchase order and invoice. This helps to track the assets throughout their lifecycle.
- Relevance:
The first step in the procurement process is to create stockroom, supplier company and then catalogs. Once the procurement environment is ready, you can start the purchase and receive processes.
Stockroom : Stockroom lets you keep track of the catalog items. When an asset is in the Stockroom, you update its location as the Stockroom and its status as In Stock. When the asset belongs to a user, you update its owner and location fields.
Supplier Companies: You must create company configuration items for suppliers from whom you purchase assets and consumables.
Procurement Catalog : Procurement catalogs house the information that you need to request assets.
Add items to the procurement catalogs : After you create procurement catalog, you must populate it with the consumables, assets, or software that users can request.
- Details:
The Procurement process:
Create a purchase request - To order any assets or software items, you must create a purchase request. This initiates the procurement process.
A purchase request can contain a mix of catalog item types and items from different catalogs. For example, a purchase request can contain a Dell computer, Dell monitor, Hewlett-Packard keyboard and mouse, Cables Direct Ethernet cable and Microsoft Office software.
You specify the stockroom, requestor and the catalog items that you want to purchase in the create purchase request dialog box. You also set the Approval Status to Approved.
Generate a purchase order - A purchase order is a document that you send out to a supplier to order the items that your company requires. However, you can also create a purchase order manually. You use the purchase requests to generate the purchase orders. When a user submits a purchase request, the requestor’s manager has to approve it before you can create a purchase order. After you create a purchase order and send it to the supplier, the procurement process pauses until the items on the order arrive.
Note : Before you can generate a purchase order, the approval status of the purchase request must be set to Approved.
Generate an invoice - When a shipment arrives, you generate an invoice for receiving the items. Use the purchase order to generate the invoice. The invoice contains catalog items from one supplier and is expected to be a copy of the invoice that you receive from the supplier company. To the invoice that you generate in the Symantec Management Console, you can attach the physical invoice that your supplier sends.
Receive items - As the final step of the procurement process, you receive the items and place them in the stockroom or pass them to the owner. When you receive an item, you can specify how you want to handle it. You can create a new resource in the Configuration Management Database(CMDB) or you can update the existing item.
A video demonstrating the procurement process will be uploaded shortly.