Maintaining and Administering Oracle Sourcing

This chapter covers the following topics:

Introduction

Your Oracle Sourcing system requires maintenance to account for changing business information. This chapter identifies such areas of maintenance. This is not an exhaustive list of ongoing activities you should perform, and your company may have its own list that better suits your business practices. This chapter simply gives you an idea of typical ongoing activities.

Supplier Registration and Profile Maintenance

At regular intervals, you may want to invite new supplier users to register. As new supplier users register with the system, you must approve their registration requests before they can participate in your negotiations.

Also, if supplier administrators update their profile information, updates must be approved before they can be promoted into the system.

See the iSupplier Portal online help for instructions on registering and approving supplier users and maintaining supplier profiles.

Deactivating Supplier Contacts

There may be times when you or a Purchasing Manager need to deactivate a supplier contact. See the Oracle iSupplier Portal Implementation Guide for instructions on deactivating a supplier contact. Inactivating a supplier contact has the following impact:

Deactivating a Supplier Site

There may be occasions when you need to deactivate one or more sites for a particular supplier. You can deactivate all sites for a supplier. If a supplier has no active sites, buyers can still invite contacts for this supplier, award business to the supplier, but cannot generate a purchase order for that supplier.

Suppliers on Purchase Order Hold Status

There may be occasions when a supplier is put on Purchase Order Hold. You can accomplish this by assigning the supplier a status of Purchase Order Hold. See the Oracle Purchasing User's Guide for instructions on performing this task.

Canceling or Deleting a Negotiation

There may be times when you need to terminate a negotiation in progress. You can cancel a negotiation while it is still open. You might need to do this if your business requirements change and you no longer need the items in the negotiation.

You can also delete negotiations that have been closed. You might need to do this for negotiations created during training sessions, mock RFQs or auctions, as well as negotiations created before a specific date/time.

To cancel a negotiation in progress:

  1. From the Negotiations Home Page, click the Administration tab.

  2. On the Administration page, click "Cancel / Delete Negotiation."

  3. On the Cancel /Delete Negotiation page, enter the number of the negotiation you wish to cancel, and click Go.

  4. Click Cancel Negotiation to end the negotiation. Click Cancel to stop the cancellation process.

  5. Click Done.

To delete a negotiation:

  1. From the Negotiations Home page, click the Administration tab.

  2. On the Administration page, click "Cancel / Delete Negotiation."

  3. On the Cancel / Delete Negotiation page, enter the number of the negotiation you wish to delete and click Go.

  4. Click Delete Negotiation.

  5. Click Done.

Using Sourcing Events

A sourcing event is group of negotiations with related items. Buyers may want to create a sourcing event to monitor several related negotiations together as a group rather than individually. Buyers may also want to create an event to encourage suppliers to participate in multiple, similar negotiations.

Both Sourcing Buyers and the Sourcing Super User can create events. Events are always public. Negotiations cannot be added to an event after the inactive date

When you create a new negotiation, you can associate the negotiation with an existing event. You can also monitor your sourcing events from the Manage Events page.

Sourcing events can be in one of three statuses:

To create a sourcing event:

  1. Click "Event" under the Create column of the Quick Links section of the Negotiations Home page

  2. On the Create Event page, enter a title, description, and an inactive date/time. No negotiations can be associated with this sourcing event after its inactive date and time has passed.

  3. Click Apply.

To cancel a sourcing event:

  1. Click "Events" under the Manage column of the Quick Links section of the Buyer Home page.

  2. On the Manage Events page, search for and select the event you wish to cancel.

  3. Click Cancel Event.

  4. On the Cancel Event page, you can choose to cancel all the negotiations associated with this event, or just cancel the event itself.

  5. If you chose to cancel both the event and its associated negotiations in the previous step, you can supply an explanation of why the event is being cancelled. This explanation is sent to all invitees and anyone else who may have responded to one of the negotiations in the event.

  6. Click Apply.

Unlocking Draft Negotiations

There may be times when buyers cannot finish creating a negotiation in a single session, or the creation process involves collaboration between several buyers. Or possibly a buyer needs to create a negotiation but not actually submit it until sometime in the future. In each of these cases, buyers can create a draft and save it for later editing or submission.

Buyers creating drafts have the option of locking the draft so that no one else within their company can access and modify the draft. On occasion, you may need to unlock a draft so that you or others can work on it. For example, a buyer may have inadvertently locked a draft before going on a business trip. A Sourcing Super User can unlock and edit, delete, or submit any draft sourcing document. Also, you can unlock a draft and allow anyone with the Manage Draft Sourcing Document to work on it.

To unlock a draft:

  1. From the Negotiations Home page, Click "Drafts" under the Manage column of the Quick Links section.

  2. On the Manage Draft Negotiations page, search for locked draft.

  3. Select the locked draft, and click Unlock to release the draft.

Using the Concurrent Manager to Administer Large Negotiations

Large negotiations are negotiations that process several hundreds of lines. Since these negotiations would take time if processed online, you can tell the system to process a negotiation offline by flagging it as a large negotiation. You do this by specifying a threshold number of lines (see Set Up Negotiations Configuration for instructions on setting this threshold). Any negotiation that has more lines than this threshold is considered by the system to be "large" and is processed using concurrent requests. Since large negotiations generate concurrent requests to perform many tasks, there may be times when you need to monitor and administer the operation of these requests.

When a concurrent request is generated by a large negotiation, it is given a request ID. You can use this ID to monitor the request and, if necessary, intervene during its operations.

To monitor a concurrent request:

  1. From the Administration page, click Concurrent Requests. You are taken to the System Administration feature of Oracle e-Business Suite and placed on the Find Requests form.

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  2. By default, the All My Requests radio button in checked. If you have only one request running, simply click Find. If you have multiple requests running and you know the ID of the request you wish to view, select Specific Request, and enter the number in the Request ID field and click Find.

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  3. On the Requests page, if the request is still active, you can cancel the request or put the request on hold. Once the request is completed, you can view the details, the output, the log file for the execution. See the Oracle E-Business Suite System Administration Guide for details on the actions you can take on this page.

Mass Update of Sourcing Documents

Use the Submit Requests window to run the Mass Update of Sourcing Documents. You do this to update the trading partner contacts for negotiations which are not Cancelled, Deleted, or Paused. The bid headers, contract deliverables are also updated. If the new user is already present in the collaboration team, then the application updates the user as owner and gives the user full access. Otherwise the application inserts a new record and provides the user the creator role and full access to the negotiation. The old user still present in the collaboration team can perform all the activities a team member can do (if they are still active members). If the old person is an approver (negotiation approval or award approval) the application forwards the notification of the old person to the new person. Also, the application updates the workflow attributes so the new person receives the approval notifications.

To mass update sourcing document

  1. In the Submit Requests window, enter Mass Update of Sourcing Documents in the Name field.

  2. In the Parameters window, enter the following details:

    • Old Person - The name of the buyer to be replaced.

    • New Person - The name of the new buyer. The person entered here should a valid buyer with Create Negotiation (function PON_CREATE_NEW_NEG) privileges.

    • Document number From - The starting document number (inclusive).

    • Document Number To - The ending document number (inclusive).

    • Date From - The from creation date.

    • Date To - The to creation date.

    • Commit Interval - Enter the number to indicate after how many records the program should write the data to the database. If this is null, the program writes the data to the db at the end of the program.

    • Simulate - Use this as a dry run of the program. If this flag is yes while running the concurrent program, then no records are updated. But the report displays the negotiations selected for update with the filter conditions specified. It is advised to run the program with Simulate as Yes first after specifying the other filter paramaters and verify the data selected for update, before the actual run of the program.

  3. Click OK and Submit.

Notification Reminder for Negotiation Response

The Notification Reminder for Negotiation Response concurrent program send reminder notification to suppliers who have not responded to a negotiation. The program allows you to specify the timing of the reminder based on key negotiation dates. The parameters are as follows:

This concurrent program is useful when suppliers within a negotiation have not yet responded. Set these parameters to send the timely reminders to suppliers and encourage supplier participation in the negotiation process.

To run the concurrent request

  1. From the Negotiations Home page, click the Administration tab.

  2. On the Administration page, click Concurrent Requests. You are taken to the System Administration feature of Oracle e-Business Suite and placed on the Find Requests form.

  3. Click Submit a New Request. The Submit Request window opens.

  4. In the Name field, find and enter the Negotiation Response Reminder Notification from the Reports window.

  5. Select the appropriate parameters.

    • Notification to be sent

      • After open date

      • After preview date

      • Before close date

    • Enter days

  6. Click OK.

Applications Setup

Periodically review other setup options that you initially performed. For example:

See instructions in previous chapters for how to perform these tasks.