Maintaining and Administering Oracle Sourcing

This chapter covers the following topics:

Introduction

Your Oracle Sourcing system requires maintenance to account for changing business information. This chapter identifies such areas of maintenance. This is not an exhaustive list of ongoing activities you should perform, and your company may have its own list that better suits your business practices. This chapter simply gives you an idea of typical ongoing activities.

Supplier Registration and Profile Maintenance

At regular intervals, you may want to invite new supplier users to register. As new supplier users register with the system, you must approve their registration requests before they can participate in your negotiations.

Also, if supplier administrators update their profile information, updates must be approved before they can be promoted into the system.

See the iSupplier Portal online help for instructions on registering and approving supplier users and maintaining supplier profiles.

Deactivating Supplier Contacts

There may be times when you or a Purchasing Manager need to deactivate a supplier contact. See the Oracle iSupplier Portal Implementation Guide for instructions on deactivating a supplier contact. Inactivating a supplier contact has the following impact:

Deactivating a Supplier Site

There may be occasions when you need to deactivate one or more sites for a particular supplier. You can deactivate all sites for a supplier. If a supplier has no active sites, buyers can still invite contacts for this supplier, award business to the supplier, but cannot generate a purchase order for that supplier.

Suppliers on Purchase Order Hold Status

There may be occasions when a supplier is put on Purchase Order Hold. You can accomplish this by assigning the supplier a status of Purchase Order Hold. See the Oracle Purchasing User's Guide for instructions on performing this task.

Canceling or Deleting a Negotiation

There may be times when you need to terminate a negotiation in progress. You can cancel a negotiation while it is still open. You might need to do this if your business requirements change and you no longer need the items in the negotiation.

You can also delete negotiations that have been closed. You might need to do this for negotiations created during training sessions, mock RFQs or auctions, as well as negotiations created before a specific date/time.

To cancel a negotiation in progress:

  1. From the Negotiations Home Page, click the Administration tab.

  2. On the Administration page, click "Cancel / Delete Negotiation."

  3. On the Cancel /Delete Negotiation page, enter the number of the negotiation you wish to cancel, and click Go.

  4. Click Cancel Negotiation to end the negotiation. Click Cancel to stop the cancellation process.

  5. Click Done.

To delete a negotiation:

  1. From the Negotiations Home page, click the Administration tab.

  2. On the Administration page, click "Cancel / Delete Negotiation."

  3. On the Cancel / Delete Negotiation page, enter the number of the negotiation you wish to delete and click Go.

  4. Click Delete Negotiation.

  5. Click Done.

Using Sourcing Events

A sourcing event is group of negotiations with related items. Buyers may want to create a sourcing event to monitor several related negotiations together as a group rather than individually. Buyers may also want to create an event to encourage suppliers to participate in multiple, similar negotiations.

Both Sourcing Buyers and the Sourcing Super User can create events. Events are always public. Negotiations cannot be added to an event after the inactive date

When you create a new negotiation, you can associate the negotiation with an existing event. You can also monitor your sourcing events from the Manage Events page.

Sourcing events can be in one of three statuses:

To create a sourcing event:

  1. Click "Event" under the Create column of the Quick Links section of the Negotiations Home page

  2. On the Create Event page, enter a title, description, and an inactive date/time. No negotiations can be associated with this sourcing event after its inactive date and time has passed.

  3. Click Apply.

To cancel a sourcing event:

  1. Click "Events" under the Manage column of the Quick Links section of the Buyer Home page.

  2. On the Manage Events page, search for and select the event you wish to cancel.

  3. Click Cancel Event.

  4. On the Cancel Event page, you can choose to cancel all the negotiations associated with this event, or just cancel the event itself.

  5. If you chose to cancel both the event and its associated negotiations in the previous step, you can supply an explanation of why the event is being cancelled. This explanation is sent to all invitees and anyone else who may have responded to one of the negotiations in the event.

  6. Click Apply.

Unlocking Draft Negotiations

There may be times when buyers cannot finish creating a negotiation in a single session, or the creation process involves collaboration between several buyers. Or possibly a buyer needs to create a negotiation but not actually submit it until sometime in the future. In each of these cases, buyers can create a draft and save it for later editing or submission.

Buyers creating drafts have the option of locking the draft so that no one else within their company can access and modify the draft. On occasion, you may need to unlock a draft so that you or others can work on it. For example, a buyer may have inadvertently locked a draft before going on a business trip. A Sourcing Super User can unlock and edit, delete, or submit any draft sourcing document. Also, you can unlock a draft and allow anyone with the Manage Draft Sourcing Document to work on it.

To unlock a draft:

  1. From the Negotiations Home page, Click "Drafts" under the Manage column of the Quick Links section.

  2. On the Manage Draft Negotiations page, search for locked draft.

  3. Select the locked draft, and click Unlock to release the draft.

Using the Concurrent Manager to Administer Large Negotiations

Large negotiations are negotiations that process several hundreds of lines. Since these negotiations would take time if processed online, you can tell the system to process a negotiation offline by flagging it as a large negotiation. You do this by specifying a threshold number of lines (see Set Up Negotiations Configuration for instructions on setting this threshold). Any negotiation that has more lines than this threshold is considered by the system to be "large" and is processed using concurrent requests. Since large negotiations generate concurrent requests to perform many tasks, there may be times when you need to monitor and administer the operation of these requests.

When a concurrent request is generated by a large negotiation, it is given a request ID. You can use this ID to monitor the request and, if necessary, intervene during its operations.

To monitor a concurrent request:

  1. From the Administration page, click Concurrent Requests. You are taken to the System Administration feature of Oracle e-Business Suite and placed on the Find Requests form.

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  2. By default, the All My Requests radio button in checked. If you have only one request running, simply click Find. If you have multiple requests running and you know the ID of the request you wish to view, select Specific Request, and enter the number in the Request ID field and click Find.

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  3. On the Requests page, if the request is still active, you can cancel the request or put the request on hold. Once the request is completed, you can view the details, the output, the log file for the execution. See the Oracle E-Business Suite System Administration Guide for details on the actions you can take on this page.

Applications Setup

Periodically review other setup options that you initially performed. For example:

See instructions in previous chapters for how to perform these tasks.