Buying Organization

In the Procurement application, a Buying Organization is a group of users who have similar business needs. A single enterprise may be divided into several Buying Organizations based upon:

• Different business units,
• Regional divisions, or
• Job function.

For example, there may be:

• An organization for everyone who needs access to suppliers of plumbing materials,
• Another organization for buyers of automotive parts,
• Another for office supplies, and so on.,
• And so on

For the convenience of users in a large enterprise, with many different purchasing needs and many suppliers, each user is assigned to one or more Buying Organizations:

• Each Buying Organization contains users who all need to select and purchase from the same subset of the items and suppliers in the complete the Procurement application Catalog (that is, all of the items, in all of the suppliers' catalogs.)
• The contents of the entire the Procurement application catalog, and every Buying Organization catalog are grouped into a hierarchy of commodities, categories and sub-categories, for example:

Entire Catalog > Cleaning Equipment and Supplies > Janitorial equipment > Cleaning equipment > Cleaning pails or buckets > 6 GAL WASH TANK

and so on.

• Each member of a Buying Organization has available to them a single, consolidated Procurement application catalog containing only the commodities and items, needed by the members of that Buying Organization, available from all suppliers with which the Enterprise has a purchasing relationship.
• Each member of a Buying Organization is governed by the same Workflow, Approval Hierarchy, and so on.

In a large enterprise, there may be several levels of the Buying Organization hierarchy, so that:

• The enterprise is sub-divided into several Buying Organizations,
• Each Buying Organization may be sub-divided into child Buying Organizations,
• Child Buying Organizations may be further sub-divided into another level of child Buying Organizations,

By default, Inheritance applies to Buying Organization rules. After rules are enabled for any Buying Organization, they also apply to the children of that Buying Organization, and further children down the line.

However, the Administrator, using the Advanced Administration application, may choose to override a rule that was enabled in the parent, by re-configuring the approver assignments for the rule in child Buying Organizations.

Note: Approvers may be an individual approver or a member of an approval group.

For casual buyers, the most important information is that:

• Different Buying Organizations may have access to different catalogs, and
• A user with wide purchasing needs may be a member of several Buying Organizations.

If you belong to more than one Buying Organization, you may use the Organization drop-down menu, on the Procurement Home Page.

You should contact your the Procurement application administrator with specific questions about your own organization.