Understanding Bidders

Bidders must register, create their profile, and review terms and conditions before submitting bids.

There are two main groups bidding on events:

• Bidders you invite to view an event or who choose to view a public event; that is, people and organizations with whom you have not done business before.

  These users must become registered bidders before they can bid on any event.

• Suppliers and customers; that is, people and organizations with whom you do business now.

  These people are not only registered bidders, they have advanced to the status of supplier or customer.

PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing enables you to provide bidders with an online self-registration process.

For information about online registration setup, see Defining Online Registration Options. For information about the registration process, see Registering Online.

For users who do not already exist in the database, the registration process collects pertinent information about them such as name, email, address, and organization information if they represent one. Registering enables them to create a user ID and password, and assigns them the role of Event Bidder. Now, the user is valid in the system and can see and bid on both public events and events to which you have invited him or her.

When bidders register, they inherit the roles assigned to a default bidder. You define a default bidder user ID on the User Profiles - Roles page and assign that user ID to the default bidder ID on the Bidder Registration Setup page.

Bidders are stored separately from suppliers and customers. The recipient must be either a supplier or a customer before an event can be awarded. Because, by definition, a bidder has not yet sold to or bought from your business, the bidder tables act as a holding place until the bidder is awarded an event. Once an event is awarded to a registered bidder, PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing updates their user ID to the correct type: supplier or customer. You would search under supplier or customer to invite this bidder to future events.

For those suppliers and customers who did not start out as bidders, add the role of either Event Supplier or Event Customer to their user profile. Suppliers who did not start out as bidders can answer bidder profile questions by accessing their Sourcing Profile page (Manage Events and Place Bids, My Sourcing Profile) to complete their bidder registration.

Suppliers and customers can manually activate their categorizations, instant messaging settings, and user contact mappings.

If a bidder has the same standard ID (such as tax ID) or VAT ID as an existing supplier, customer, or bidder, the system transfers the bidder to a page to resolve the issue. On that page, the system displays a summary of the duplicates, what company they relate to, and some options for resolving them.

All customers' user IDs must be of the type Customer (as opposed to Customer Contact), so that they can view events to which they have been invited.

Bidder Registration Approvals

If approvals are required for bidder registrations, the bidder is informed after registering that their registration is pending approval. The approval request is then submitted to the user with the Event Administrator role. The Event Administrator can either approve or reject the registration request. If approved, the bidder receives an email with his or her user ID and assigned password. If rejected, the Event Administrator selects a reason for rejecting the registration, and bidders receive an email indicating that their request was rejected, and optionally the reason why it was rejected.

See Managing Online Registration Approvals and PeopleTools: Security Administration.