How do I resolve a purchase order that reaches Permanently Failed status?

For a purchase order in Permanently Failed status, the resolution depends on whether the purchase order transmission failure occurred due to a configuration issue in SAP Ariba Buying solutions or in your supplier's SAP Business Network account.

Case #1: SAP Ariba Buying solutions failure

A purchase order never made it to the SAP Business Network. Several possible reasons for failure are:

• Your supplier is not configured correctly in your site (for example, the SAP Business Network ID number is missing).
• You don't have a trading relationship with the supplier on AN.
• You're trying to send a purchase order to a Standard account supplier, but you have one of the supplier organization's vendor IDs associated with an existing supplier record in your SAP Business Network account.
• Your supplier's SAP Business Network account is suspended for non-payment of their SAP Ariba subscription.

Corrective action: Ariba will try to resend the order for 24 hours. You will need to take the corrective actions within this time period, to allow one of the resend attempts to send the order correctly to the SAP Business Network. Otherwise, you will need to cancel (or close) the order and create a replacement order.

To cancel the purchase order:

1. Search for and open the purchase order.
2. Click Force Order at the top of the order.
3. After it moves to Ordered status, you can now click Cancel to cancel the order.
4. The cancellation generates a new version of the requisition, which is sent for approval.
5. After the cancellation requisition is fully approved, both the order and requisition move to Canceling.
6. At the top of the order, click Force Cancel to push the status to Canceled. Note that using the Force Cancel option is required because the cancel operation would try to send to the SAP Business Network, but it will fail due to an incorrect supplier configuration.

Case #2: SAP Business Network failure

A purchase order made it to the SAP Business Network, but it did not route successfully through the supplier's routing method (Email, Fax, cXML, EDI). Some possible reasons for failure are:

• Your supplier configured an invalid email address or one of the email recipients has an out-of-office message enabled.
• Your supplier configured an incorrect fax number.
• Your supplier's back-end order-processing system has an extended outage or is configured incorrectly for cXML or EDI routing.

Corrective action: Because the purchase order reached the SAP Business Network, you don't need to resend the purchase order. Your supplier can resend the purchase order from the SAP Business Network after correcting the configuration issue.

Purchasing > Purchase Orders