This chapter describes how Oracle Contracts integrates with other Oracle applications.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Sales Contracts and Oracle Procurement Contracts are no longer standalone applications. They are options that enhance the existing core sales and procurement applications. The contract management capabilities of Oracle Sales Contracts and Oracle Procurement Contracts are now embedded within the Procure-to-Pay and Quote-to-Cash flows. Thus, Oracle Sales Contracts requires either Oracle Quoting or Oracle Order Management, and Oracle Procurement Contracts requires Oracle Sourcing or Oracle Purchasing.
On the sell-side, you can author sales contracts in Oracle Quoting or Oracle Order Management, and execute them in the Order Fulfillment system. You can author and manage sales agreements (with price-holds) for future orders, or contracts for a one-time sale. On the buy-side, procurement contracts can be authored in Oracle Sourcing or Oracle Purchasing and executed in the Purchasing system. The Contract functionality is integrated into any organization's existing business processes for procurement, sales, and service. Negotiated terms are automatically enforced during order execution without the need for additional integration, enabling streamlined contract management processes and focus on building profitable supplier and customer relationships.
Oracle Contracts integrates with the following Oracle applications:
Oracle Procurement Contracts enables you to:
Negotiate and capture long-term purchase agreements.
Track volume commitments.
Identify agreements that are up for renewal.
Manage supplier performance.
Analyze internal contract utilizations and leakages.
Link related contracts and view the contract hierarchy.
If you need to negotiate long-term purchase agreements and individual purchases, consider deploying Oracle Sourcing.
Oracle Contracts extends the Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Sourcing functionality by offering embedded terms and conditions based on a standard terms library, contract-deliverable tracking, and formal contract change management capability. Using the Contract Expert feature, companies can define their business policy rules that govern the contract clauses to be included in purchasing or sourcing documents. While authoring, reviewing, negotiating, and approving contracts, contract terms can be downloaded to Microsoft Word and edited offline. The Deviations report enables companies to streamline the approval process and improve internal control by highlighting nonstandard terms and conditions for approvers.
Oracle Purchasing provides the contract terms authoring capabilities. You can author contract terms directly on a purchasing document, such as a purchase order, blanket purchase agreement, global blanket purchase agreement, or contract purchase agreement. The buyer can apply a contract template, add additional clauses, and specify contract deliverables. Further, buyers can select the Manage Related Contracts action for a purchasing document and add related contracts. For more information, see the Oracle Purchasing Users Guide.
Contract negotiation is enabled through Oracle Sourcing, a global negotiation platform that enables buyers to source for best value. Buyers can author contract terms directly on a sourcing document that may be a solicitation, tender, request for quotation, auction, and so on. The buyer can apply a standard contract template containing appropriate standard clauses to the sourcing document. If necessary, the buyer can add additional standard clauses from the library, or create nonstandard clauses that apply to a particular transaction. The buyer can also specify deliverables to a sourcing document (for example, an RFQ) to track and manage supplier milestones during the negotiation. On contract award, a purchasing document is created with the negotiated contract terms. For sourcing response documents the supplier can download, upload, or preview a contract, and the buyer can review the contract deviations. For more information, see the Oracle Sourcing Implementation and Administration Guide.
Oracle iSupplier Portal is a collaborative application that facilitates the transparent and structured exchange of business transactions between a buying organization and its suppliers in a secure self-service environment through the Internet. Suppliers play a key role in the procurement contract management processes and require information to ensure that they are meeting commitments or deliverables. By using Oracle iSupplier Portal in conjunction with Oracle Procurement Contracts, suppliers can:
Review and print contract clauses.
Sign purchasing contracts electronically.
Submit and manage contract deliverables.
Change requests to contract terms.
Oracle Sales Contracts extends Oracle Quoting and Oracle Order Management by offering embedded terms and conditions authoring and negotiation capabilities. Contracts functionality is integrated into the quote-to-cash process for seamless integration into your existing business processes. Negotiated terms are automatically enforced during order execution without the need for additional integration, allowing companies to streamline their contract management processes.
Oracle Contracts extends the Oracle Sales Contracts functionality by offering the following features:
Contract Expert: Contract Expert is a rule-based contract creation tool that assists companies in authoring complex contracts. Using Contract Expert, companies can define their business policy rules that govern the contract clauses to be included in business documents.
Integration with Microsoft Word: The integration allows the contract terms to be downloaded, edited off-line in Microsoft Word, uploaded as the contract of record, and then integrated into the contract Adobe PDF document.
Deviations Report: The report streamlines the approval process and improves internal control by highlighting nonstandard terms and conditions for approvers.
When the contract authoring process starts in Oracle Quoting, contract terms can be added and negotiated directly on the quote document. Upon approval and customer acceptance of the quote, including the products, prices, and contract terms, the fulfillment phase of the ordering process may begin. For more information, see the Oracle Quoting User Guide.
With Oracle Order Management and Oracle Sales Contracts, sales representatives and contract administrators can create a long-term sales agreement or one-time sales order including terms and conditions. For more information, see the Oracle Order Management User's Guide. Oracle Order Management business documents support the sales contract flows for:
Quoted orders
Sales orders
Sales order releases
Sales agreements
Customers shopping on the Web store can review the standard terms and conditions for their shopping cart during checkout when Oracle Sales Contracts is implemented. If customers disagree with the terms, a sales representative can facilitate the negotiation of the contract terms through Oracle Quoting and Oracle iStore. This contract functionality has the following major features:
Customers can review standard terms and conditions in the specialty store when they proceed to checkout. Oracle iStore retrieves the standard terms and conditions from a contract template.
Customers can accept or reject the contract terms in the specialty store. If customers disagree with the standard terms, they can request sales representative assistance. Using Oracle Quoting, the sales representative can access the shopping cart (which is a quote), modify the terms, obtain appropriate internal approvals, and publish the new quote to the Web store for customer review and acceptance.
Oracle Service Contracts uses the Contract Terms Management functionality that is provided by Oracle Contracts. You can use this functionality to author service contracts by applying standard contract templates containing standard clauses. You can also author nonstandard clauses, modify standard clauses, or add standard clauses from the Contract Terms Library. For more information, see the Oracle Service Contracts User Guide.
The Contract Expert feature uses Oracle Configurator to process and evaluate the Contract Expert rules that bring additional clauses into a business document. Oracle Contracts needs to run certain concurrent processes periodically to import data into Oracle Configurator. The data that is imported from the Contract Expert setup, in Oracle Contracts, to Oracle Configurator includes:
Contract Expert rules
Contract template information (only Contract Expert-enabled templates)
Value sets in questions that are used to define Contract Expert rules
When business partners enroll in a program, they might be expected to sign a contract. Oracle Partner Management leverages the functionality of Oracle Contracts to display terms and conditions that the partners need to review and accept as part of the Partnership enrollment process. For more information, see the Oracle Partner Management Implementation Guide.