Assessments are documents that you (as a buyer or administrator) create in order to estimate or appraise supplier profiles or performance and overall relationship with the buying organization. Assessment documents gather information from suppliers and then proceed to evaluate or score or simply appraise and audit suppliers. Assessments have the following phases in their lifecycle: initiating assessments, evaluation, closing of assessments, scoring, score locking and completing assessments.
Using Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management, you can create three types of assessments:
Supplier Profile Audit: Administrators can gather and manage supplier compliance and profile information that is required on a periodic basis. This information becomes part of the supplier profile.
Supplier Performance Evaluation: The buying organization requests those personnel who interact with suppliers to evaluate and score specific aspects of a supplier's overall performance. A consolidated performance evaluation is then created and used to assess the supplier's significance to the buying organization.
Supplier Registration and Pre-Qualification: During the registration of a supplier, the buyers can also ensure that the supplier meets or qualifies with the requirements of the buying organization. This assessment enables buyers to ensure that the suppliers are evaluated and assessed at the time of registration.
User Procedures
Using an appropriate Supplier Management responsibility, navigate to Suppliers > Home > Quick Links (Manage Assessments) > Create Assessment.
Click Create Assessment and a popup displays, prompting you to select a template. Select an assessment template from the drop-down and click Apply.
The Create Assessment: Header page opens, and you can enter the assessment details in the following pages:
Header: Enter questionnaires, collaboration teams, approvers here.
Controls: Determine the controls for your assessment.
Suppliers: Invite suppliers for this assessment. In the Suppliers tab, if there are multiple contacts, you can select the Primary Contact check box to identify a specific contact as the primary contact. If there is only one contact, then the application automatically identifies this contact as the primary.
Mapping: Map evaluation assessment to the supplier. User defined attributes (UDA) enable buyers to manage additional supplier information. Typically, the administrator creates UDAs and associates them with supplier profiles. See Setting Up User Defined Attributes, Oracle Supplier Management Implementation and Administration Guide for more information.
When you click the Mapping link, the Define Profile Mappings for Assessment page appears. Use this page to map the responses from an external supplier to a specific attribute on a supplier's profile for the assessment. If the administrator has added a questionnaire list to a supplier profile, then this questionnaire is also available for you to map.
For information about assessment components, see:
Controls, Oracle Sourcing User's Guide
Save your assessment as a draft (Save as Draft) and click Review and then Submit for Approval. When the approvers complete their approval of the assessment, click Publish in order to publish the assessment. An assessment must be published so that it can be visible to suppliers.
Use either Collaboration Teams or Approvals Management Engine (AME) to ensure the assessments are approved by multiple approvers in the organization.
Oracle Approvals Management Engine (AME) is used to manage and define approvals for SLM Assessments. The seeded Transaction Type called Assessment Approval is used to enable AME Approvals for Assessments. AME uses the Document Total or Item Category to set the approval hierarchy. Use the Administration tab > Update Assessment Style page to start using AME for assessment documents. For a specific negotiation style, navigate to the Approval Controls region, and select the AME Transaction Type value as Assessment Approval. This value is defaulted in the drop-down. If you would like to use the collaboration team approval list instead, leave the value in the drop-down blank. If you prefer AME to be used in the withdrawal of negotiations process, click the Allow Document Withdrawal check box. If you need withdrawal notifications to be sent to approvers, click the Send Withdrawal Notifications to all Approvers check box.
For more information on approvals using the Collaboration Teams, or AME Approvals, see: Oracle Sourcing User's Guide.
Recurring or Periodic Assessments
As an administrator or buyer, you can specify that you want periodic or recurring assessments that will go out to supplier after a regular time interval. You can specify the time interval after which the assessment will be sent to suppliers. Or you can specify an event (Purchase Order Close, Agreement Approval, Invoice Approval, or Invoice Paid) after which the assessment will be sent to suppliers. The recurring assessment also enables you to specify various milestones to automate the creation of recurring assessments. When you enter the rules for creating such an assessment, the system automatically creates the periodic assessment and sends it to the suppliers when the milestones are reached. When you set up the Assessment Events and Milestones correctly, Assessments governed by the specific Recurring Assessment Rule are executed with minimal manual intervention.
This topic provides information about:
The Search region in the Manage Recurring Assessments page enables you to search for the assessment rule you created. Enter search criteria such as title, periodicity, assessment rule number, etc., and click Go. The assessment rules that match the search criteria are displayed in the search results region.
The search results region enables you to select one rule and either update it or put it on pause mode. If you select an assessment rule by clicking the radio button and then click the Update button, the Update Recurring Assessment Rule page opens, enabling you to update the rule information.
If you select an assessment rule by clicking the radio button and then click the Pause button, you get a warning message that this current assessment cannot be paused; only subsequent recurring assessments will be paused. You are prompted to click Yes or No to continue with the assessment pause or not. If you click Yes, the assessment is paused. To restart a paused assessment, click Restart Assessment in the Update Recurring Assessment Rule page.
The search results region shows you the assessment rule number, Title, Event (Time based or event based), Event (only applicable for event based assessment rules), Rule Status (Paused or Published), Next Assessment Status (N/A for paused assessments), Draft Assessments, Open Assessments, Completed Assessments (click on the number link to see the relevant assessments popup that shows you the number and title. Click an assessment number to open the assessment in the Create Assessments page). Please note that the assessment number is derived from the assessment rule number. For example, if the assessment rule number is 1212, the assessments created from this rule are numbered 1212.1, 1212.2 and 1212.3 and so on. The Created By and Creation Date columns show you the user who created the assessment rule and when the assessment iteration was created.
The Manage Draft Assessments page (Suppliers > Home > Quick Links (Manage Assessments) > View / Update Assessments shows you all the draft assessments, including recurring assessments. The Manage Draft Assessments page has a column called Periodic, which displays Yes for recurring assessments, and No for non-recurring assessments. You can update a draft recurring assessment the same way you would update a non-recurring assessment.
Using an appropriate Supplier Management responsibility, navigate to Suppliers > Home > Quick Links (Manage Assessments) > Create Recurring Assessment Rule. Specify a template (this is mandatory) from the popup and click Apply. The Create Recurring Assessment Rule page is a page that enables administrators and buyers to create the rules for a periodic or recurring assessment. When you create and publish the rules in the rule page, recurring assessments are automatically created by the system on a periodic or event-based basis, thereby eliminating a lot of your time and effort to create such assessments.
The Header region enables you to enter the header information for the rule page. Enter a title and description for the rule, as you would do for any draft assessment. Provide a brief description of the purpose of the creation of this assessment so that the assessment team has enough information before they review the assessment. The template (for example, audit or performance evaluation) and assessment type are defaulted, based on the template name you selected in the template popup window. Additionally, the buyer name and operating unit (this is updateable) are also defaulted for you.
The Assessment Events region enables you to specify if the assessment rule should be time-based or event-based.
A time based assessment rule is based on the dates you specify, and the subsequent days/dates that the system calculates using the days/dates you have specified. Thus in a time based assessment rule, you first need to enter the Supplier List (this contains static and dynamic supplier lists) and Start Date.
An event-based assessment rule sends recurring assessments when the selected event is triggered. For example, purchase order closure, agreement approval, when invoice approval is reached or invoice is paid. The system then automatically sends the assessment to the supplier. For example, by creating an invoice-based assessment rule, you can send a recurring assessment for all paid invoices for a particular supplier or supplier list that are greater than the threshold amount or the invoice amount. You can use this assessment internally to assess the payment terms of the supplier and other factors.
Select Purchase Order or Agreement from the Event field and then select a purchase order number or agreement number. The current status of that document (purchase order or agreement) is defaulted in the Status field. Select a Target Status from the drop-down list. For example, if the status of the purchase order is Incomplete, then select the Target Status as Finally Closed. When this purchase order status reaches Finally Closed, an assessment is sent to the suppliers.
Select Invoice in the Event field and then select a supplier or a supplier list. You cannot select both. The functional currency defaults from the operating unit. In the Invoice Amount field, specify the invoice amount threshold that will be considered to send the assessment to the supplier. You can specify a range for the threshold amount. Select Approved or Paid as the invoice status based on, which an assessment is initiated.
Note that the first time when you create invoice events and run the Manage Recurring Assessment concurrent request, the request creates assessments for all the rules that meet the events' criteria. If assessments are sent once, then when subsequently the request is run, it considers only those rules, which match invoices that are created after the concurrent request is run the first time. This is to avoid sending assessments to the same supplier repeatedly.
For both time-based and invoice event-based assessment rule, specify a Start Date for assessment creation and enter the number in the Repeat Every field. For example, you may want to repeat the rule every 5 days or 4 weeks or 3 months. Also indicate the Repeat Until frequency - either a date or a number of occurrences (for example, repeat the rule every 5 days, repeat until 31-Dec-2017, or repeat 10 times).
Using the Assessment Milestones region, indicate the publish, close and complete milestones. Enable the system to calculate the publish, close and complete milestones by specifying the following:
Number of days the assessment remains as a draft before it can be published.
Number of days the assessment is open for suppliers to respond.
Number of days the assessment is open for suppliers to respond. Number of days the assessment is open for evaluation and scoring teams to provide feedback.
Select the Receive Notification when Draft Assessment is created check box if you require a notification when the draft assessment is created.
Click Save as Draft if you need to save the assessment rule page. If you are done, click Publish. After the assessment rule is published, you return to the Suppliers > Home page. Click the View / Update Recurring Assessment Rules link to open the Manage Recurring Assessment Rules page.
You must schedule the Manage Recurring Assessment concurrent request to run at specific intervals. To run the request, use the Supplier Management responsibility and navigate to the Concurrent Requests subtab in the Administration tab. The concurrent request considers the recurring assessment rules set in the application and verifies whether rules' criteria meet before generating assessments. This concurrent request includes a single "Validate only" parameter, which is optional. To review your concurrent request, click the View Requests link to navigate to the Requests page. For your request ID, click the Details icon link and then View Log to review the details.