Document Life Cycle
This topic discusses components of the document life cycle that include events for its review, collaboration, and approval, as well as its dispatch, execution, and amendments. After you define the building blocks for the document, you are ready to use a purchasing contract or an ad hoc document configurator type to generate a draft Microsoft Word document. This is the first event in a document's life cycle. As a document goes through its life cycle, the document authoring system tracks the events and saves detailed accounts of changes made to the document in the document library.
You can also import legacy contract documents into the system and use life-cycle features to manage the documents. Most contract functions apply to the legacy contracts except for limitations for refreshing and re-creating documents, the document modification summary, and the generation log. Imported documents are not parsed and stored as plain text.
See Understanding Document Life Cycles.
Document Version and Status Control
Supplier Contract Management provides a means to manage document versions when you are checking in, refreshing, or re-creating documents. Along with defining minor and major versions, you can set up the system to provide the option of leaving the version the same when you check in the document. Life cycle statuses are included to manage documents in statuses of Draft, Collaboration, Approval, Dispatched, Executed, and Inactivated.
See Refreshing and Re-creating Documents.
If you use installation options to require document approvals, Approval Framework processes control the statuses of documents. If you use the PeopleSoft Approval Framework, an application administrator must set up the process, steps, and users that make up the approval process.
When you are not using workflow, you can manually update the approval status.
Document Creation
The beginning of the document life cycle is the generation of the document. During document generation, the system uses the document configurator to generate either an ad hoc or a purchasing contract document.
When you click the Create Document button for either type of document, the system begins to generate the Microsoft Word document. If a wizard is present on the document configurator, the system invokes it before contract generation. Upon completion of the generation process, the system provides a generation message if problems were experienced during the generation. You can resolve the issues and re-create the document. After you generate a document, you use the Document Management page to manage documents through their life cycles. The system provides a series of buttons that you can use to select events and actions in managing document life cycles.
For additional information about document creation, see Understanding Microsoft Word Document Generation.
Document Edits, Previews, and Views
Along with editing and viewing documents using PeopleSoft classic desktop browser UI pages, you can edit, preview, and view documents in Microsoft Word. You can preview documents when working with clauses, sections, and configurators. Previewing documents enables you to review the Microsoft Word version of the document element as you build it. At the clause and section level, you can also validate variables as you create and edit the element before using them in configurators.
View Document and Edit Document buttons are available on the Document Management page, where you can edit and view the complete document. The system provides additional document controls for protecting the document when it is checked out, controlling versions, and enabling you to cancel the check out.
See Setting Up Clauses and Setting Up Sections.
Attachments/Related Documents
Attachments are additional files that provide more details about the document and that support agreement verification steps. You can upload and view a variety of documents, including Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader documents, that contain sophisticated graphics, such as a company logo or complex Microsoft Visio files. You can also upload Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Access files. You can edit these files and load them again to make changes. The system does not manage attachments through the document authoring system like it does other document elements. It stores attachments for use with documents. You can also upload file attachments to document verification step results.
When you link a document to another document, then the document you link to another document is considered a related document. Related documents are other document-authoring system documents, such as a generated contract summary or a reference to a generated parent contract. Related documents can also include reference to imported documents. After you link a document to another, then you can perform where-used searches to view the other documents to which the related document has been linked.
See Uploading Attachments for Agreement Steps, and Viewing and Uploading Attachments and Related Documents.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a process that brings in other internal users to review the content of the document. Collaborators are users, other than the primary owner of the contract, who can change or review documents. Their access depends on the access you give them for the collaboration cycle. The system supports internal and external collaboration process for authored or imported documents. When collaborating on authored documents externally, you can make the document accessible on the supplier-side portal for review and modification by the supplier. Supplier changes can be uploaded by the supplier, and are then staged for internal specialist review and edit prior to formally checking in the document into the system.
Note:
To maintain the integrity of an authored document, when a supplier checks the document directly back into the system, it's important that the supplier uses a compatible version of Microsoft Word that supports the Microsoft Office Open XML format. For example, if the supplier uses Microsoft Word 2003 instead of Microsoft Word 2007, or later version, then any changes that the supplier makes must be manually incorporated into the master authored document within the system.
Internal Contacts
Internal contacts are users who collaborate on documents or who can have view access to the document as interested parties. You can define default internal collaborators within document management and provide a default list of collaborators and internal contacts for yourself.
Collaboration is an optional step for all contracts, and you do not have to move a contract into the approval process.
External Contacts
You can define external contacts so that you can collaborate on documents. Collaboration is when you send versions of contracts and amended contracts to suppliers. Using external contacts, you can also enable external updates to specific contract agreement steps (deliverables) for transactional purchasing contracts. You cannot make external updates for contract agreement steps using purchase order contracts.
You can use the Document Management page to set up external contacts for each contract for document collaboration. For purchasing contract documents, you can automatically copy in contact information from the supplier contact information related to the transactional purchasing contract. When sending a version to the supplier, you can optionally mark the document as checked out to prevent users from modifying the contract while the supplier is reviewing it. To enable workflow notifications and supplier-side portal access to agreement steps, you setup external users for access within the transactional contract agreement (Contract Entry) pages.
Approvals
When workflow approvals are enabled for documents, you can submit the document for final approval. You can design workflow approvals to meet the organization's needs. You can route a document to specific roles to review clause use or change clauses, contract amounts, categories, and so on based on the approval definition for the user. You can also establish approval statuses through document types where you can set a document to be at either a Draft or Approved status after you create it.
For additional information about document approvals, see Understanding Document Approvals.
Digital Signatures
Using PeopleSoft Supplier Contract Management, you can optionally configure the system to prepare a read-only (signable) version of the approved Microsoft Word document for signing it digitally. The contract specialist can determine when it is appropriate to prepare a PDF version of the Microsoft Word contract. The Microsoft Word contract is then locked along with the needed signature fields in the read-only document. You can access the PDF document for signature as part of the approval process for internal signatures before or after the internal approval process. The same PDF document can then be routed to the supplier for signature and return using email or, optionally, online using supplier portal access.
Note:
When using Adobe Digital signature capability, the system requires that the contract administrator uses Adobe Acrobat Version 8 Professional. This enables signing rights for other users who use the Adobe reader only.
Note:
The requirement for using the .docx format is that all signers, both internal users and external suppliers, must use Microsoft Word 2007, or later version. Unlike the PDF format the .docx format is still a Microsoft Word document and in certain statuses can be edited. After the first signature, for example, the contract specialist, is placed on the document and the .docx file can no longer be modified itself unless all signatures are cleared. Therefore, you should take care when using a .docx format to ensure that the contract specialist signs the document as part of the prepare process, and as a follow-up ensure that the document signatures have not been cleared by other users.
Send/Dispatch to Contacts
The system enables you to send the contract, amendments, and any attachments to external contacts for review at any point in time. After the contract is approved, you use a similar action, called dispatch to contacts, to send a final contract for the purpose of executing the contract. The system provides multiple options when you send amendments. The options depend on whether you maintain the amendment in one file with the main contract, or you use separate amendment files for each amendment as it occurs.
Execute
An executed contract means that the document or amendment has been dispatched to contacts for final signature and has been signed by all parties. When a document is executed, the next version of the document must be an amendment. When you are using digital signatures, the system stores the signed PDF file as part of the executed document history and you can no longer update it.
See Executing Documents.
Amendments
Supplier Contract Management provides a formal contract amendment process with the same life-cycle features, change control, and history tracking as the original document. After you execute a document, you can update it with amendments. The amendment process uses many of the life-cycle features that are used by the original document, but the process itself involves additional features that include maintaining separate amendment files for each amendment or creating the amendment as a fully amended contract version. You can also import legacy contract documents along with their amendments.
For additional information about amendments, see Understanding Contract Document Amendments.
Comparisons
You can generate a document comparison based on the current authored version of the document and a temporary, re-created version of the document or on the current version of the document and a refreshed version of the current document. The purpose of this feature is to highlight the effect from any changes in bind variables, such as an item change on the transactional contract, and to aid in the creation of new amendments by identifying differences
Additionally, you can compare staged inbound edits coming from the supplier when allowing suppliers to review and edit documents through the supplier portal. You can also do general version comparisons by selecting any two documents that exist in document history to compare them for changes. The compare feature enables you to go back in time to identify specific changes made during a particular check in of the document.
Note:
You can only compare authored Microsoft Word documents, not imported documents. The compare feature requires server side configuration.
See Comparing Documents and Setting Up Servers and Directories.
Re-create/Refresh
Re-creating and refreshing documents enables you to rebuild or update existing documents. Use re-create to completely rebuild the document as if you are starting a new draft. Re-create is the same as creating a new document. Use refresh to update the document based on changes to rules and bind variables. For example, you might want to change responses to wizard questions for a contract, but several edits have been made in the document that you want to keep. Using refresh, you can change answers to the wizard questions and keep the edits to the document.
Document History and Logging
In addition to tracking approvals and collaboration, the system provides other tracking features for documents. You use the Document Management page to review changes and actions taken against a contract. The system provides the following tracking methods:
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A document version history in which you can review who made changes to a document, when the changes were made, and the version at which the change was made.
You can also use this feature to review history for attachments, dispatches, collaboration, and generation.
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A document modifications summary that tracks clause updates, additions, and deletions in documents.
Here, the document administrator can get a quick summary of clauses that have been modified within a specific document that might, in turn, require workflow control.
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A generation log that provides details about the document generation process.
This log provides you an indication about how the system processed a document. The log provides these options:
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Detail option.
The detail log tracks details you can use to identify bind variable resolution, a log of how the configurator expanded during document generation, and a detailed wizard log. The detailed log is useful for debugging purposes when you are creating a complex configurator that makes extensive use of wizards, binds, and rules.
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Log Warnings and Wizard option.
You use this summary option to audit for any generation warnings and responses to wizard values.
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For additional information about document history and logging, see Viewing Document Version History.
Deactivate/Reactivate
You can remove, but not delete, a document from use by deactivating it. This action is useful for older contracts that might be closed now and that you want to exclude from everyday searches in the system. To bring the document back into service, you can reactivate it.