This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Project Contracts provides support for many types of contract documents, including solicitations, bids, proposals, awarded contracts, procurement contracts, subcontracts, and facilitates document management. Management of these various document types may be from both the perspective of a contract issuer (outbound procurement contracts, with intent to buy) and the perspective of a contract recipient (inbound sales contracts, with intent to sell).
Oracle Project Contracts enables you to setup repositories of standard articles (standard contract clauses or regulations such as FAR and DFARs) and terms and conditions (shipping method, payment terms, freight terms) that can be assigned to any contract document, including templates. You can assign articles to billing methods to allow enforcement of clauses. You can also enter statement of work (scope of work) as well as standard notes for any contract documents, or for a particular contract line.
You can define contract work breakdown structures using contract lines (CLINs, ELINs) and sublines (SLINs) in unlimited hierarchies. Articles, terms and conditions, standard notes, and parties can be assigned at each level.
Many parties in different contract business roles may be assigned to a contract document. Business roles represent different services like billing, payment centers, work performed at, ship-to, mark for, and ship-from. Parties can be external trading partners or internal organizations. You can also enter the contacts with whom they interact.
Realizing that different industries and different legacy systems track different contract attributes, Oracle Project Contracts has the capability to define and also flowdown user-definable attributes. You can add as many user-definable attributes as needed by their business requirements.
Oracle Project Contracts includes an Authoring Wizard that guides you through the process of creating a new contract document. A new contract document can be created from another contract document of any type, for example, creating a proposal from an existing proposal, a solicitation, or an existing awarded contract, or from predefined templates. You can select a subset of contract information that needs to be copied to the new contract document.
The Authoring Wizard supports creation of new documents by three methods: creating a new blank document, creating from an existing document, or creating from a template.
Contract data is manually entered by the user.
The source document is identified by type (award, solicitation, proposal, subcontract, delivery order, master agreement) and specific number. Next, the user selects the type of new document to be created from the source document, and the Wizard guides the user through a series of steps to create the new document.
The template is identified by type (award template, solicitation template, proposal template) and specific template number. The Wizard guides the user through a series of steps to create a new document from the preexisting template. Examples could include storing a template for each billing method type (contract type), along with the required Articles and Terms and Conditions for that type, storing templates of standard subcontracts, storing solicitation and proposal templates for procurements which are repeated over time. In addition, storing contract templates from various customers could be beneficial.
Note: The Contract Authoring Wizard is a function that can be secured using responsibility level function security. Only authorized users can create new contract documents. For more details, refer to the Security chapter .
Oracle Project Contracts allows contracting professionals to author contract documents throughout the entire contracting life cycle - from solicitations, bids and proposals in the acquisition phase to awarded contracts, basic ordering agreements and delivery orders in the award and execution phase.
Different industries like Engineering and Construction, Aerospace and Defense, Professional Services, Telecommunications, and Public Sector use different terminology for different contract documents. For example, the acquisition process can refer to a solicitation document as Request For Information (RFI), Request For Proposal (RFP), Invitation For Bid (IFB), or simply Solicitation. Oracle Project Contracts allows flexible definition of contract document types.
The Authoring Workbench allows you to enter contract and related information. Each tab corresponds to a subset of the information.
Attribute security is available for contract header and line attributes. To enable attribute security, see the Security chapter.
You need to set up party roles, contact roles, and associated role sources before entering parties and contacts information for your contract. Oracle Project Contracts provides you with commonly used roles during the installation of the product.
Refer to the Setting Up chapter of Oracle Project Contracts Implementation guide, for more information on how to set up roles and role sources and the list of seeded roles.
You can enter both standard articles and one-time articles against a contract. Standard articles are predefined contract clauses that can be referenced in a contract.
If your contracts typically reference many standardized contract clauses, such as FAR, DFARs or UCC codes, we recommend that you setup those clauses as standard articles.
Refer to the Overview of Setting Up section, for more information on how to set up standard articles.
Oracle Project Contracts enables you to define additional contract attributes to fit your contract repository requirements. Attribute security is also available for user-defined attributes.
For information on how to set up user-defined attributes, see: Setup.
For information on how to enable attribute security for user-defined attributes, see: Security.
Contract flowdown is available for contract header and line attributes, articles, terms and conditions, and standard notes.
The Flowdown Matrix determines the subset of contract information that should be flown down to a particular business area. The Flowdown Matrix is specified using attribute groups, article subjects, terms and conditions types, and standard note types.
For information on the Flowdown Matrix and its ramifications on implementing Contract Authoring, see: Flowdown.