If your organization goes live without a purchasing unit structure, begins creating approvable documents, but later decides to implement purchasing units in your site, existing approvables won't have a purchasing unit assigned to them. This can lead to errors when changing documents or when processing receipts or invoices against purchase orders with a blank purchasing unit value: The value of Purchasing Unit is not acceptable.

*The BackPopulateProcurementUnits scheduled task should never be run by SAP Ariba Customer Support*

Run the BackPopulateProcurementUnits scheduled task in your site to populate the Purchasing Unit field retroactively on existing approvable documents without you having to touch the documents manually. This task doesn't change the approval flow of approvables that are in the approval process. When updating existing approvables, the task adds a history entry to indicate the change from the blank purchasing unit to the new value.

We recommend running this task in the test site first to make sure it works as expected and to ensure there are no adverse effects. Additionally, before running this task, review your purchasing unit defaulting parameter settings. The scheduled task references these parameter settings to determine how to default the purchasing unit on each approvable type.

For example:

• Application.Approvable.Defaulting.ProcurementUnit."ariba.purchasing.core.Requisition"
• Application.Approvable.Defaulting.ProcurementUnit."ariba.receiving.core.Receipt"
• Application.Approvable.Defaulting.ProcurementUnit."ariba.invoicing.core.Invoice"
• Application.Approvable.Defaulting.ProcurementUnit."ariba.invoicing.core.InvoiceReconciliation"

Each of these parameters specifies a list of field paths from which to default the Purchasing Unit field for that document type. For example, the requisition purchasing unit parameter has a default setting of CompanyCode.ProcurementUnit, Requester.PartitionedUser. This means that the scheduled task looks first to the purchasing unit associated with the requisition's company code. If that doesn't have a value, it moves on to the requester's default purchasing unit. If none of the field paths contain values, it will keep the requisition purchasing unit as blank.

SAP Ariba Customer Support can modify these parameters to add new field paths and change the ranking of the field path choices to ensure that the scheduled task is pulling from the right place.

Before implementing purchasing units, the Purchasing Unit field isn't required on approvable documents. After enabling purchasing units, the field becomes required for any newly created documents or existing documents that are involved in the processing of a related document (for example, submitting a new receipt for an existing purchase order that has a blank purchasing unit).

The scheduled task cycles through documents in the order of workflow (from oldest to newest to for each approvable type before moving on to the next type):

1. Requisitions
2. Purchase orders
3. Receipts
4. Invoices
5. Invoice reconciliations

Depending on how many historical documents there are that need to be updated with a purchasing unit value, the task could take several hours to complete.

The BackPopulateProcurementUnits scheduled task should not be run by SAP Ariba Customer Support for multiple reasons:

1. Purchasing units logically divide a company into multiple units. Therefore the task and work associated with it should be handled in the scope of a project.
2. A full impact analysis needs to be done prior to running this task to ensure this task is the right decision and the customer is setup properly for it.
3. This task is performance intensive and a should be coordinated to be done during off hours and/or without users in the system. It should also be determined how many documents would be impacted by this task prior to running the task. A migration plan needs to be in place for this reason.
4. The task cycles through all approvables and updates one by one. If it encounters an issue with a document, the task stops. That document would need to be reviewed and fixed before running the task again.

For all the above reasons customers should engage the services of SAP Consulting whenever there is a requirement to retroactively populate purchasing units on approvables.

Core Procurement > Core Administration > Purchasing units import