This chapter covers the following topics:
Supplier Management consists of Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management and Oracle Supplier Hub.
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) provides an extensive set of features to maintain supplier information. Additionally, Supplier Management has tools to track supplier compliance with corporate and legal requirements. Organizations can exercise proper control over suppliers throughout the lifecycle of their relationship with the organization; from initial discovery, through qualification and on-boarding, to ongoing maintenance and possible obsolescence.
A key factor in improving the quality of an organization's supplier master file is to establish proper processes to formally qualify different types of prospective suppliers. SLM enables buyers to gather any and all information required to assess a prospect and then routed the information through the organization to ensure efficient review of the supplier's credentials.
When a supplier has been approved, SLM enables organizations to gather feedback from key stakeholders as part of the overall supplier performance tracking process. In addition, SLM allows key stakeholders to identify and track critical compliance documents and attributes that need to be gathered from suppliers on a periodic basis in order for the two parties to maintain an active business relationship.
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management includes the following features:
360 Degree Supplier View
Extended Supplier Profile
Supplier Search
Supplier Profile Management
Registration and On-Boarding of New Suppliers
Managing Supplier Qualification
Compliance and Profile Audits
Performance Evaluation
Supplier Notifications
One of the challenges with managing supplier information is that the pieces of information gathered about a supplier can be stored in a variety of applications and systems. Data in disparate locations can hamper organizations as they look to review supplier performance or to comply with audit requirements.
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management has a single repository for storing information from a variety of applications and systems. Buyers can access supplier information such as addresses, contacts, business/diversity classification, general classification, product and service categories, banking details, supplier party relationships, qualification and evaluation information, deliverables and certifications.
Buyers also require to use additional supplier details in order to track supplier performance, create vendor profiles, and analyze supplier information. Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management uses user-defined attributes (UDA) to extend the existing supplier definitions and to group them into logical profiles.
Administrators use control tools to restrict and manage user access in the extended set of profile sections.
Administrators need to manage supplier information for their organizations and the advanced search capabilities of Supplier Hub enable them to search for and retrieve records.
Advanced Search enables administrators to use any of the standard and extended profile attributes as search criteria and view the results using multiple display formats. You can retrieve the profile information from the search results and then export it into a spreadsheet format. Additionally, you can personalize the advanced search criteria and display various other formats using the administrator and business user levels. .
Most organizations maintain a team of administrators to manage administrative updates from trading partners containing changes to their company profile details. To make this process efficient, Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management extends existing Oracle iSupplier Portal to allow supplier users online access in order to maintain a wide range of their profile details.
The supplier user can maintain standard company profile details such as address, contacts, business/diversity classifications, products and services category, and banking details. Administrators then review and approve the updates made by suppliers.
Suppliers are also able to access and update qualification and on-going compliance information that are required by the buying organization to maintain the supplier status in the system.
Companies use their corporate websites to enable potential suppliers register their interest in establishing a business relationship. This allows the organization to obtain key information from the supplier that can be used to determine whether they are a suitable trading partner. . The Registration form can be modified to include addresses, contacts, business classification, product and services category, banking details and any of the extended supplier profile attributes. The prospective supplier can also upload attachments as part of the registration process.
To support various qualification procedures, administrators can also create RFI documents that enable the capture of supplier profile and compliance information.
Additionally, buyers can pre-register and send invitations to prospective suppliers, requesting them to provide additional details for pre-qualification and approval using the self-service capability. To support complex or lengthy supplier registration, prospective suppliers can save their draft registration request at any time, and return to it at a later date. When a prospective supplier has registered, their request is routed through an approval hierarchy for review.
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management enables buyers to track new supplier requests SLM uses the Approval Management Engine to enable buyers to process approvals for supplier requests and registrations.
SLM also enables companies to support multiple channels for receiving new supplier requests and reviewing supplier credentials.
While there are regulatory requirements for some types of organization to maintain and update key supplier profile elements, Compliance and Profile Audits are also important processes among non-regulated organizations that are looking to meet corporate social responsibility standards that they have set for themselves.
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management enables administrators to utilize RFI (Request for Information) templates to gather and manage supplier compliance and profile information that is required on an annual basis. Administrators can outline the key compliance information that is required from suppliers. They store the feedback provided by suppliers into the supplier profile.
Buying organizations know that employees who interact with suppliers can provide insights and feedback on the suppliers' performance. Buyers use this information from suppliers to initiate an overall assessment of a suppliers performance. This assessment, and it's results, help improve relations with suppliers. .
Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management enables administrators to generate internal RFI documents that can be sent to key personnel within the organization to evaluate and score specific aspects of a supplier's overall performance. This enables stakeholders in a diverse range of departments, such as procurement, finance, supply chain management, manufacturing, quality, design, and legal to combine their opinions into a rating of how well the supplier is doing. The feedback gathered about the supplier is stored in the supplier profile allowing performance trends to be tracked and risk to be effectively managed.
To assist with supplier communication, Supplier Lifecycle Management provides tools to allow notifications to be selectively communicated to a buying organization's vendors. Administrators enter notification information and then use search tools to generate the list of suppliers that are to receive the message.
Oracle Supplier Hub is a new application that provides a portfolio of Master Data Management tools to enable organizations to better manage their supplier master records. Supplier Hub can be used by organizations that need to aggregate supplier data from a range of application systems and also by organizations that run a single instance of Oracle e-Business Suite.
Oracle Supplier Hub provides comprehensive capabilities to manage supplier data: consolidating supplier information from disparate systems and business lines into one repository, cleaning and enriching data centrally, and providing the resulting data to consuming applications, enterprise business processes, and decision support systems.
Deploying Oracle Supplier Hub enables organizations to gain an understanding of the trading partners that they use to procure the various goods and services required to support their business. This understanding is essential in order to be able to carry out effective analysis, for example, of spending patterns, so that buyers can make better decisions about their company procurement policies.
To enable customers to manage supplier records across their organization, Oracle Supplier Hub supports the following deployment modes:
Standalone Mode - separate instance of Oracle e-Business Suite
This is the traditional Master Data Management deployment mode - Oracle Supplier Hub is set up in a separate instance and vendor data from an organization's source systems is loaded into the Hub in order to be processed.
Integrated Mode - existing instance of Oracle e-Business Suite
This configuration allows a customer to run the Supplier Hub functionality as part of their existing Oracle e-Business Suite R12.x transactional instance.
Note: The product is referred to as Oracle Supplier Hub Add-on for Oracle e-Business Suite when it is licensed as an option that is part of an existing e-Business Suite install.
This hybrid setup is essentially an extension of the Integrated Mode. It enables customers to run the Hub as part of an existing instance of Oracle e-Business Suite. Additionally, customers can input additional supplier records from other legacy systems in Oracle Supplier Hub in order to process data across varied legacy systems.
The main features of Oracle Supplier Hub are:
Oracle Supplier Hub enables an organization to gather key vendor information from heterogeneous environments and store the details in a central repository. Given the wide range of supplier information that Purchasing and Payables departments need to maintain, Oracle Supplier Hub enables buying organizations to store data for the following categories:
This refers to the attributes that uniquely identify an individual supplier - primarily the supplier name and tax reference ID and number(s).
These attributes are typically required to capture the supplier's business information. Details such as supplier identity, location, contact, and bank account information are stored.
These details capture supplier profile data such as the corporate structure of the supplier, names of C-level officers, the goods and services they provide, classifications that apply to them, and 3rd party credit risk information.
Receiving, invoicing, and payment information is captured in this category. This information is used by both the buyers and suppliers.
All data categories can be managed using the Integrated deployment mode. The Standalone and Mixed deployment modes support the Identity, Business and Profile category details.
In order to analyze supplier categorized information, and to track supplier performance, buying organizations require to store additional supplier details. Buying organizations also need to use analytical tools to gain insights into supplier performance.
Oracle Supplier Hub uses the User Defined Attributes (UDA) framework that enables administrators to extend the existing supplier definitions and to group them into logical profile sections. The extended profile attributes allow disparate details to be imported from a variety of source systems. This information is captured and stored centrally along with other attribute information.
Administrators use control tools to restrict and manage user access in the extended set of profile sections.
Buying organizations require to track classification and diversity information across their supply base in order to ensure that spending patterns can be matched to corporate social responsibility goals. To allow organizations to track a wide variety of classification and diversity information about their suppliers, Supplier Hub enables administrators to define multiple classification schemas. This classification information can be used to build reports in order to track spending patterns.
Supply Base Analysis is used to study the relationships between the supplier and different departments of the organization. Analysts can then assess the spend patterns of the organization.
Using supplier hierarchy management, you can identify parent and child supplier company relationships across all supplier records that have been consolidated from the different units of an organization.
In addition to defining parent and child relationships, Supplier Hub allows business users to define an unlimited number of custom supplier relationship types and then use these to track relations between different suppliers. The custom hierarchy information can be viewed in a tree structure and can be utilized for various reporting and supplier management purposes.
Supplier Hub provides an Import Workbench to allow administrators to set up and control the process of consolidating supplier records from other applications or systems that are part of the buying organization. The Import tools enable the supplier Identity, Business, and Profile details from multiple spoke/source systems to be cross-referenced. Batch Management capabilities then allow the administrator to control the loading of the imported supplier data into the Hub repository.
The Data Quality Management (DQM) tools in Oracle Supplier Hub provide features that allow an administrator to carry out systematic removal of duplicates and cleansing of supplier information. The DQM tools also work during supplier creation processes to prevent the creation of multiple records for the same supplier.
DQM provides tools to set up rules required to perform de-duplication tasks.
The Supplier Data Enrichment tools enable organizations to enrich their supplier profile information by importing detailed information from D&B. Information packets for a supplier(s) can be gathered during the supplier registration process and also as part of general supplier profile management. Administrators or business users are able to interactively search the D&B repository and order/purchase various D&B products to enrich supplier information.
One of the primary reasons for using Oracle Supplier Hub is to establish a single definition for each supplier and then make sure that this definition is used consistently across systems.
The Supplier Data Publications feature set provides the capabilities to integrate Supplier Hub with other systems. It provides the infrastructure to initiate publication of updated supplier information. APIs also can be used by spoke systems to query and use the updated supplier information. It also provides the facility to query potential duplicate supplier records in Supplier Hub and for processing the source system supplier information into the Hub.
Features available in both Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management and Oracle Supplier Hub include:
Extended supplier profile attributes
Setup, view, and edit extended supplier profile
Advanced search based on extended supplier profile
Export supplier profile into spreadsheet
If both products are installed in the same application instance, these features are integrated seamlessly.