Understanding Supplier Assignment to Areas

Before you run the Lot Start process, you must set up supplier assignments. When assigning a supplier to an area, you assign the supplier to a trade code, such as framing, labor, plumbing, or electrical. Within an area, you also can assign a supplier to a specific community, phase, lot, and option. You can specify when a supplier is available through the use of effective and expiration dates. You can also use these date fields to perform historical analysis on supplier assignment records. You can also specify whether a supplier belongs to a national purchasing area, community, and phase. The National Purchasing functionality enables you to group suppliers into a higher purchasing level to facilitate a national commodity-based approach to procurement.

For bids that do not have preferred subcontractor, the Lot Start process first retrieves the trade code that is attached to the cost code. The Lot Start process uses this trade code to select the best-matched supplier and uses that supplier's price. If you enter 1 in the Assignment Status field, the supplier TBD functionality is eligible.

For takeoffs, the Lot Start process also retrieves the trade code that is attached to the cost code. When the system processes the cost code, it stores the trade code as category code 1. The Lot Start process selects the supplier that is associated with that trade code and uses that supplier's price. If you enter 2 in the Assignment Status field, the supplier TBD functionality is enabled for takeoffs.

If the assignment status 2 is assigned to more than one supplier in a trade code community combination for takeoffs, then the system issues an error message.

If you assign multiple suppliers with the same trade code to the same community, phase, lot, and so on, the Lot Start process selects all bids and takeoffs from all of the suppliers.

The system stores supplier assignment information in the Vendor Assignment table (F44H604) and Vendor Assignment Workfile (F44H604W).