This chapter discusses the functional advantages of Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus and the business entities that enable procurement teams, procurement managers, and buyers to plan and process procurement actions.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus enables procurement professionals to develop purchasing strategies while empowering cross-document actions. It is a key component of the Oracle Advanced Procurement suite. Procurement teams across industries must transform from a support function to an assuming value creation function. Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus equips procurement teams, procurement managers, and buyers with tools to support this transformation within their enterprise.
The following are the key features of Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus:
360 Degree View into the Procure-to-Pay Process
To implement a focused approach towards workload management and prioritization, the application provides comprehensive information about procurement documents, their lifecycle, and exceptions. The Procurement Operations Dashboard pulls in data from across the Procure-to-Pay cycle to enable the buyer to make timely decisions on requisitions, negotiations, contracts, purchase orders, change requests, deliverables, invoices, catalogs, suppliers etc. By automating, streamlining and simplifying key operational decisions, procurement teams and buyers can spend more of their day's time working on spend analysis, supplier relationship, and contract optimization rather than getting bogged down with non-value added routine operational decisions. They can utilize their time interacting with their customers and understanding their needs better.
Metrics and Charts
Using the power of Endeca, Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus provides procurement teams and buyers with relevant charts, graphs, and metrics that help them to coordinate execution of the procurement processes. For example, with graphs, buyers can visualize agreement utilization status and take action to terminate, renegotiate, or extend documents as needed.
Insight into Requester and Spend Behavior
Procurement Command Center's Indirect Procurement helps buyers monitor and understand requester and spend behavior and to ensure catalogs made available in Oracle iProcurement are relevant to the business needs. Requesters can offer feedback for better sources of supply that helps buyers to gain insight into the catalog usage and refine catalog content. The procurement team can review off-contract spend including Oracle iExpense and identify cost saving opportunities.
Insight into Supplier Performance
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus's integration with Oracle Supplier Life Cycle Management enables buyers to make better supplier selection decisions and to monitor performance of suppliers. Supplier Analysis Dashboard displays catalog review ratings from Oracle iProcurement and supplier performance evaluation ratings from Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management.
Conduct Effective Negotiations and Deliver Strategic Objectives
The Strategic Sourcing Dashboard aggregates information from Sourcing negotiations, initiatives, and objectives, and helps buyers and procurement managers to gain improved visibility into the status of all strategic objectives and initiatives.
Analysis Portals
The Item Analysis and Supplier Analysis portals bring together traditionally segregated data from both structured and unstructured sources that empower buyers with the insight to ensure that the items and suppliers selected are the best choices to meet the procurement needs of the business. When there are multiple viable alternatives, use the portals to find and compare most appropriate items and suppliers that best fulfill the procurement strategy based on historical and future demand.
Notes
Notes enable collaboration and help organize the workload within the procurement team. For example, a certain requisition in the pool might require a series of tasks such as estimating overall demand, performing market research, checking price or availability, and evaluating viable alternatives. Buyers may specialize in one of those areas. Notes enable a buyer to assign tasks to others in the procurement team with a target completion date, to create visibility into ownership, and to track tasks to completion. The buyer can track differences between forecasted completion dates and planned completion dates. Any difference between the forecasted and planned dates may constitute a delay, and this information provides an early warning to the buyer about delay in the delivery of the item or service.
Document Builder
The Document Builder is a tool that enables procurement team, procurement managers, and buyers to match open demand with available agreements and suppliers, and then determine whether a purchase order with linked agreements should be created, or if a negotiation is to be created.
Integration with Oracle Advanced Procurement
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus integrates with Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Sourcing, Oracle Procurement Contracts, Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management, Oracle iProcurement Information Discovery Plus, Oracle Payables, and Oracle iExpenses, so that procurements teams and buyers have access to information to gain insights for decision-making and drive key procurement actions directly from the dashboards, without having to access individual applications separately.
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus provides the following dashboards, application pages, and other application components that enable procurement managers and buyers to plan and process procurement actions.
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus provides the following dashboards:
The Procurement Operations Dashboard helps buyers gain end-to-end visibility of the status of procurement. For example, a buyer can view the backing requisition for a purchase order line, the agreement line from which the PO line was sourced, the RFX award from which the agreement line was created, and open supplier deliverables.
Full Procurement Lifecycle
Using this dashboard, buyers can filter and see relationships across all the following documents:
Requisitions
Purchase Orders
Global Blanket Agreements and Contract Agreements
Negotiations
Deliverables
By viewing related documents, buyers can quickly assess individual document flows end-to-end as well as evaluate important related documents. The buyer can quickly review all procurement activities pertaining to them, discover issues and resolve them before business is affected. With graphs, buyers can visualize agreement utilization status and take action to terminate, renegotiate, or extend documents as needed.
Requisition Management
A critical customer service area is requisition management. Buyers review requisitions and prioritize requisitions based on business needs. Depending on your business needs, buyers can also manage requisitions and other documents using notes.
Integrated Payables Information
Procurement Command Center enables buyers to respond quickly to purchase order and agreement performance by monitoring purchasing documents beyond the walls of procurement. Buyers track information on ordered, shipped, received, and invoiced quantities and amounts available through the Procurement Operations dashboard. Buyers are able to identify invoice holds, overdue payments, and procurement contract deliverables.
The Indirect Procurement Dashboard enables buyers to analyze buying behaviors of internal requesters by analyzing requisitions and expense reports. If included on the requisition, buyers are able to view feedback from the requisition, update the purchasing documents, and refine the catalog as needed to meet business needs.
Buyers can:
Analyze reviews and ratings provided by requester on the catalog items available in Oracle iProcurement, and initiate necessary corrective actions.
Gain insights into catalog usage and refine catalog content.
Act on specific feedback coming in from requesters.
Review off-contract spend behavior (including spend from Oracle Internet Expenses) and identify cost-saving opportunities.
See: Analyzing the Buying Behavior of Requesters
The Strategic Sourcing Dashboard provides Sourcing buyers with end-to-end visibility on all negotiation activities.
Negotiations, lines, and offers or bids
Initiatives and tasks
Objectives
Important: The Strategic Sourcing Dashboard is accessible only to buyers in the application. When non-buyers access this dashboard, the application displays an error message.
See: Using the Strategic Sourcing Dashboard
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus provides the following application pages:
Buyers can use the Item Analysis page to explore the history of items used in the organization including on-time delivery, quality, and item suitability. Items requested in the requisition can be compared to other item performance measures to ensure the best item fit for the business need.
See: Using the Item Analysis Page
The Supplier Analysis page provides supplier history for goods or services used in your organization. Past performance, including on-time delivery, quality, and supplier capabilities can be evaluated or compared to the items requested in the requisition to ensure the best suppliers and agreements are selected.
See: Using the Supplier Analysis Page
Oracle Procurement Command Center Plus provides an Oracle Web ADI integrator and Web ADI layouts to enable buyers and procurement managers to update data for multiple orders and agreements at a time.
The predefined Purchasing Documents Dashboard Integrator enables you to import and export orders and agreements data. You can view this integrator using the Desktop Integration Manager, Manage Integrators navigation.
Oracle Procurement Command Center Pluss delivers the following predefined layouts for the import and export of orders and agreements data:
Purchasing Documents Order Header Layout
Purchasing Documents Lines Layout
Purchasing Documents Agreement Header Layout