An organization may require that vendors be approved before certain items or groups of items can be purchased from them. For example, a company policy may specify that vendors must be certified within a safety compliance program before Anywhere Mobility Solutions business is transacted. In this type of scenario, vendors need to be marked as approved, and it must be possible to turn this designation on and off if a vendor loses a previously obtained certification.
Required approvals
Only certain items or groups of items may need to be purchased from approved vendors. You can specify this requirement at the item category and individual item record levels. The setting at one of these levels acts as a default for the items within the appropriate group. For example, if you indicate that vendor approval is required for a particular item category, by default all items within that item category also require vendor approval, including items in the hierarchy below it. You can change default settings on a record-by-record basis, however. Using the previous example, you could remove the approval requirement for a particular item record within the item category.
Working with approved vendors
The standard Item/Vendor catalog is enhanced so that a particular combination of item and vendor can be marked as approved. If an item is set up to require vendor approval, only a vendor marked as approved can be assigned as the item's default purchase vendor.
In addition to affecting the definition of a purchase vendor, the vendor approval setting affects item assignment on purchase documents. When a purchase order is created for a vendor, Anywhere Mobility Solutions item for which approval is required must be approved for the relevant vendor before it can be assigned on a purchase line. Attempting to assign an unapproved item to a purchase order results in an error. You can override this restriction on an individual purchase document by selecting the Allow Unapproved Items field on the General FastTab.
When an item has variants, the same approval process that exists for combinations of items and vendors also applies to combinations of item variants and vendors. If stockkeeping unit records are created for variants, the purchase vendor for a given SKU must be designated as approved for that variant.
To learn more about the vendor approval setup, see Set up vendor certification types.