Prerequisites
You must have a bid URL and a Bid Manager Account defined on the General tab of the company properties page.
To create a new Requests for Bid record
- Go to your project. Ensure that you are in the User mode.
- Expand the Financial Transactions node and expand the Commitment node.
- Select Requests for Bid.
- From the BP log page, click Create.
- Complete the Upper form according to the Upper form table below. You must enter a value in all required fields before you can send the record to the next step in the workflow. If you save the form before you send it, Unifier will save it in the Drafts folder.
- In the Line Items section click Add or Grid. The Line Items form opens.
- Line items provide a granular scope by cost codes.
- The bid initiator creates line items which are the items the bidder is to bid on.
- Complete the Line Items list according to the Line Items table below. You must complete all required fields before you can save the Line Items form.
- Click OK (if using the Line Item form), or Save (if using the grid) to save the form. The Line Items form closes.
If you are using the grid and do not click Save before closing it, you will lose your line item changes.
- In Workflow Actions select the workflow action to take. In this case, your selection is Submit. This selection activates Action Details.
- In Action Details, select who should receive the record.
- Click To... The User/Groups picker opens that shows a list of available task recipients.
- Select the user or group who will receive the task on the Approval step.
- Click Add.
- Click OK. The User/Group picker closes and the selection appears in the To field. Upon sending, the record will appear in the recipients Tasks log.
- (Optional) Click Cc... and follow steps a - d. The record will appear in the recipients Notifications log.
- Click Send to route the record to the Approval step.
As soon as you send the first invite, Unifier captures the date and the time stamp of the invite under Invite Date column of the Vendors tab log.
The same date and time would be automatically updated in the uuu_date type data element: RFB Initiate Date (uuu_rfb_initiate_date). If the DE is added on the upper form, the captured value should be visible to the requestor.
The date and time of the first invite that was sent is captured on the requester upper form (where the uuu_date_type data element is added), go to Create New Requests for Bid window > Request for Bid tab > Bid Package Details block > RFB Initiate Date.
Once the public bids are sent to the "Invite" step, and the task is accepted, the Invite option is enabled for the bid package. In the Workflow Action Details window, the Workflow Actions drop-down, click Invite Bids.
Once the user clicks Invite, the upper form is locked and disabled, and the user cannot make any changes. When the user clicks Yes, Unifier informs the user that the bid is now open for all the vendors to start the bidding process. The date and time stamp, when the user clicks Invite for public bidding, can be used for populating the value on the upper form field, the RFB Initiate Date. The bid invitation is automatically sent to the vendors in the system.