Understanding PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing Project Plans

By using the sourcing project plans feature, you can capture an entire procurement project plan within PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing. Here are some of the tasks that you can perform:

• Assign duration days for each task.

• Document instructions.

• Define requirements for completion of each task.

• Assign a resource to the task.

• Optionally mark a task as a milestone.

• Define predecessor tasks, which must be completed before the current task can start.

The start and end dates for a task can either be defined by the user or calculated by the system. You can also link a task with a sourcing event transaction, and enable the task to be automatically updated by a change to the related transaction.

In addition, you can save the plan as a template and use the template as a foundation for future procurement activities. You can route sourcing plans for approval using email notifications. When you post the plan, users who are assigned tasks receive notification and can work the tasks. The plan owner can monitor the progress of the plan as well as the workloads for each resource. This enables the entire sourcing process to be tracked and monitored. Plan owners can view how the expected task dates compare to the actual task dates to determine where potential issues exist in the sourcing process. You can define key tasks as milestones during the creation of a sourcing plan. When these milestones are defined, you can review the status of the milestones to determine whether the project is on schedule.