Understanding Global Policies and Constraints

PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing enables you to define award constraints and set up defaulting rules so that the constraints can automatically default onto events. When awards are posted, the system checks the awards to ensure adherence to the constraints.

For example, your organization may have a policy to give a certain amount of business to minority and woman-owned businesses. This could be a global constraint that applies to all events created across all Sourcing business units. You can specify that 10 percent of all business must be awarded to minority and woman owned businesses. You can then tie the constraint to a bid factor that asks whether the bidder is qualified as a minority or woman-owned business. In some cases, more than 10 percent may be awarded to a minority or woman-owned business, based on other constraints that were defined and the bidder's actual responses. Therefore, you can track the progress throughout the year to ensure that the 10 percent objective is being met.

The system verifies the award to ensure that it adheres to the constraints. If an award violates any constraints, the user will either receive an error or a warning depending on the user's constraint permissions on the Strategic Sourcing User Preferences page.

For constraints that are tracked across events, a progress to date amount is maintained and relayed so that you can track the target goal to the actual results to date. The progress to date is based on the calendar selected during the creation of the business constraint.

By using this functionality, you can:

• Define constraints based on global, business unit, event, and line levels.

• Base constraints on bid factors, the number of awarded bidders, or the quantity or amount that must be awarded.

• Associate defaulting rules to the constraints so that the constraints are automatically attached to the applicable events.

• Add, remove, and modify constraints during event creation, analysis, and award processing.