Understanding BOMs and Engineering Changes for Suppliers
This topic lists prerequisites for BOM inquiries and engineering changes for suppliers and discusses:
Capabilities to share PeopleSoft Engineering information.
Attachments and email capability.
Functionality reflected in PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering.
Before your suppliers can access specific inquiries, you must:
Set up secured external access for suppliers.
To give access to PeopleSoft Engineering information for suppliers, you must establish appropriate external facing internet access. Implementations for this vary by customer site depending on firewall configurations. However, the basic setup provides external supplier access to only the SUPPLIER registry—by way of a uniform resource locator (URL)—within your PeopleSoft system.
Define suppliers by using the Supplier Information component in PeopleSoft Purchasing.
Enable suppliers to log in.
Set up supplier profiles by associating suppliers with a user ID. Use the Supplier User Setup component in PeopleSoft Purchasing to associate each user ID with one or multiple supplier codes. Then when a supplier user logs in to PeopleSoft Engineering, the system determines to which supplier the user is associated. If a user is associated with multiple suppliers, the Select Supplier page enables the user to select from a list which supplier the user is interested in viewing. If no supplier code is assigned to the user, then the system administrator must assign a supplier code to a user ID.
If you have installed PeopleSoft eSupplier Connection, you can also enable suppliers to allow their own employees access to PeopleSoft Engineering. Providing this direct access relieves your own employees of the task of administering access permissions. You always retain control of the type of access that each supplier's users are allowed.
See Supplier Profiles.
See Select Supplier Page.
Define BOM, ECR, and ECO access privileges by supplier.
Before your suppliers can access the ECR, ECO, and BOM data that you want them to view and, in the case of ECRs, possibly create or update, you must give the suppliers, from within the PeopleSoft system, access to the data at the item level. With the BOM Access by Supplier page, you can associate business unit items with suppliers, thereby granting suppliers item access by supplier code. Specify the business unit items (including BOM type and BOM code) to which each supplier has access, and specify whether suppliers can view the associated BOMs, ECRs, and ECOs.
Set up supplier BOMs, attachments, and email capability.
Set up supplier-related BOMs and engineering changes functionality with Documentum.
If you have installed Documentum, the suppliers view documents associated with BOMs, ECOs, and ECRs within PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering.
See Understanding Document Management in PeopleSoft Engineering.
Be aware of the ways in which supplier-related BOMs and engineering changes are reflected in PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering.
See Attachments and Email Capability, Functionality Reflected in PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering.
Determine whether you'll implement workflow and whether the supplier is included as an approval step in workflows defined by ECO type.
(Recommended) Define procedures regarding timing of supplier access (controlled for each ECO).
Because today's business world often requires more outsourcing, there's a need to share information more effectively between customers and their suppliers. With PeopleSoft Engineering, you can:
Collaborate with suppliers regarding engineering information that you control as a customer.
Provide internet access to suppliers so that they can access BOM structures and documents through the internet.
Provide suppliers with the ability to view, create, or update ECRs, as well as review and approve ECOs and any supplier-related ECO workflow steps.
Send workflow-generated notifications or specific email notifications (or both) containing links to quickly direct suppliers to pertinent information.
Establish which BOMs, ECRs, and ECOs can be viewed and accessed by specific suppliers.
Attach any documents that support new product introductions or the change process.
Suppliers can view, upload, and delete attachments in PeopleSoft Engineering. Following is a summary of the functionality and what you must know before starting to use attachments:
Using links, suppliers can view attachments for BOMs at both the header and component level.
Suppliers can't, however, add or delete attachments to BOMs.
Using links, suppliers can view attachments for ECOs at both the header and item level.
Suppliers can add attachments for ECOs (if you grant them add ECO attachment privileges on the BOM Access by Supplier page). The system adds the attachment to the file server and creates an attachment row. The supplier can only change the description. While in the same session, suppliers can, prior to saving, delete any ECO attachments that they've added. This is because suppliers do not "own" the ECO, thus preventing suppliers from deleting attachments added internally.
Using links, suppliers can view attachments for ECRs at both the header and item level.
Suppliers can also add attachments for ECRs (if you grant them add ECR attachment privileges on the BOM Access by Supplier page). Unlike for ECOs, suppliers can delete attachment rows that are added in the same session, as well as delete existing rows (allowed because the supplier "owns" the ECR).
In cases where suppliers are allowed to delete attachments (such as ECRs), they are actually deleting attachment rows only from the page; the file itself isn't deleted from the file server.
This helps prevent suppliers from deleting files (by file name) that you own.
As is the case for all PeopleSoft applications, in PeopleSoft Engineering, file extensions of documents uploaded by suppliers must be already defined within general options.
For each ECR or ECO attachment format that you accept from suppliers, you must define an extension on the File Locations page in the Define General Options navigation.
Note: File extensions are case-sensitive on the File Locations page. Therefore, you may need to define both .DOC and .doc extensions on the File Locations page to accept uppercase and lowercase attachments from suppliers.
You can maintain the ATTACHMENT URL identifier by using the URL Maintenance page in PeopleTools.
You must set up this URL to point to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) location where you'll store secured supplier attachments. Define this URL to point to the same location as attachments defined in file locations and file executables, because PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering ECR or ECO or BOM attachments must point to the same location to share the same documents. If, for security reasons, you do not want to do this, then you can store attachments in a separate location. If PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering ECOs or ECRs or BOMs must share attachments, then you must replicate files (outside of the PeopleSoft system) in both locations.
Note: In setting up the ATTACHMENT URL identifier, the URL string syntax must be defined as an FTP location. In contrast, "file attachments" doesn't utilize FTP.
The supplier-related BOM inquiry and engineering change functionality is reflected in PeopleSoft Manufacturing and PeopleSoft Engineering. Following is a list describing how to use the pages in each application:
Use the BOM Access by Supplier page in PeopleSoft Manufacturing to define privileges for viewing ECO and BOM data and, in the case of ECRs, to add information.
Send email to suppliers from these pages: ECO Maintenance - Header, ECR Maintenance - Header, Approve ECO, and Engineering BOM Maintenance - Header: Supplier Access List in PeopleSoft Engineering, and BOM Maintenance - Header: Supplier Access List in PeopleSoft Manufacturing.
Note: Each email message contains two URLs.
Access the supplier access list from these pages to display a list of suppliers who have access to a specific item: EBOM Maintenance Header, ECR Header - Header, and ECO Header - Header in PeopleSoft Engineering, and BOM Maintenance Header in PeopleSoft Manufacturing.
On both the PeopleSoft Engineering ECO Header - Header and ECR Header - Header pages, use the Not Accessible by Suppliers field to block access to a specific ECO or ECR.
Therefore, even if suppliers have been granted access on the BOM Access by Supplier page in PeopleSoft Manufacturing, you can deny them access to a specific ECO.