This chapter describes the overview and key features of Oracle Procurement Contracts.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Procurement contracts play a critical role in all businesses. Companies rely on procurement contracts to define:
Specific products or services that they buy.
Contract terms governing their price, shipment, payment, quality, and other mutual obligations of the involved parties.
Oracle Procurement supports the basic business processes of the procurement contract life cycle. Oracle Procurement Contracts enhances the ability of buying organizations to manage these stages by adding sophisticated contract management and compliance features to Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Sourcing, and Oracle iSupplier Portal.
Note: Oracle Contracts and Oracle Purchasing are mandatory prerequisites for Oracle Procurement Contracts; Oracle Sourcing and Oracle iSupplier Portal are optional.
Oracle Procurement Contracts supports all the stages of a complete contract life cycle. The key stages of the contract life cycle are:
Note: In Oracle Procurement Contracts Implementation and Administration Guide, the expressions "contract" and "business document" both imply any Sourcing or Purchasing document that contains contract terms. When appropriate, the more explicit expressions "sourcing document" and "purchasing document" are used.
You establish company-wide standards to manage your contracts by incorporating best practices that ensure all contracts are authored and executed based on approved legal and business policies and procedures. This streamlines your processes and reduces contractual risks.
When you author contract terms, you leverage standard clauses, templates, and business rules set up in the library to define contractual obligations driven by legal and business requirements. You also set up and monitor tasks that enable the fulfillment of these obligations.
During negotiation, you create sourcing documents, such as RFIs or RFQs, with draft contract terms. Suppliers review, respond, and may suggest changes to the contractual terms. After all parties have reached agreement, and all sourcing documents have been submitted, an award is made. You track and archive all interactions with the prospective sellers for retrieval in case of disputes.
For the contract approval and signature process, you specify and communicate the guidelines to the concerned individuals in your organization, and you authorize who can sign the contracts in your organization. For standard contracts you fine tune your review process; for exception cases you allocate additional legal review time.
As you execute the contracts, you capture transactional data to enforce the agreed upon contract terms. The contracts are monitored to ensure that the contractual obligations, as defined in the contract terms, are fulfilled. Alerting and escalation mechanisms are defined and adhered to.
For contracts present in contract repository and purchasing documents, you can link the related contracts and view the relationship hierarchy. Linking related contracts organizes and simplifies access to contracts that are relevant to the contract at hand. In addition, the relationship of the related contract is indicated providing visibility to the contract hierarchy and enabling you to see contracts that are impacted, such as, a need to extend or renegotiate, due to changes to other contracts.
Define a formal contract change request process for your organization and the supplier community. Amendments to contract terms are routed to designated individuals for approval. You keep track of the changes for audit trail purposes.
After all contractual obligations have been fulfilled or the contract has expired, you can renegotiate the contract to obtain optimal market pricing, or you can decide to close out the contract.
Content Search enables you to search for words or phrases in contracts and in text contained in the attached contract documents. You can search for words or phrases both in structured content, such as contract number, and in unstructured text, such as content contained in attached contract documents.
Limitations of content search are that you cannot search for:
Special characters such as -, =, (, and so on
Stoplists containing words that are not indexed such as, a, and, and so on
Image files
For more information about special characters and stoplists, see Oracle Text Reference.
The content search feature uses Oracle Text indexing and requires certain concurrent programs to be run periodically. To perform the content search, first you must run the Create Contract Content Search concurrent program. Then, based on your requirement, you must run the following concurrent programs periodically:
Synchronize Contract Content Search Index
Optimize Contract Content Search Text Index
Content Search: Generate Draft Attachments
To search for a word or phrase in contracts and in the attached contract documents:
On the Contracts Content Search page enter the word or phrase and, optionally, enter additional search criteria.
The following table maps the Status Group LOV and what it means for a contract in the contract repository, in a purchasing document, and in a sourcing document:
| Status Group Value | Contract Repository | Purchasing Document | Sourcing Document |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active | Approved Signed |
Approved Reserved Open |
Active |
| Draft | Draft Pending Approval Pending Signature |
Incomplete In Process Pre-Approved Requires Re-approval |
Preview |
| Inactive | Canceled Rejected Terminated |
Rejected Returned Hold Frozen Cancelled Not Reserved Closed |
Closed Awarded Canceled |
Click Go. View the search results on the same page.
Click the icon in the Contract File column. The Contract File page opens. This page lists the document names as links that can be downloaded.
Expand the Details column to view snippets containing the word or phrase that you have searched for.