Using Sourcing Negotiations with Project Management Project Plans

A strategic sourcing initiative can contain multiple stages from spend analysis to contract award to contract creation. Many organizations manage these stages as a project with numerous project team members, tasks and deliverables.

Project management is often necessary to coordinate and execute on sourcing initiatives including managing tasks, allocating resources, and reporting on actual savings. Managing sourcing initiatives often requires coordination among various stakeholders, including category managers, project managers, and suppliers.

You can associate a negotiation created in Oracle Sourcing with the project plan created in Oracle Project Management. You can also associate a project task to a specific event in the negotiation life cycle, so when the negotiation event occurs, it automatically completes the project task. When the negotiation event occurs, the project task progress is updated to complete automatically.

You have the flexibility to associate a project task to multiple negotiations and also associate a negotiation to multiple project tasks.You must associate a negotiation at the project task level. Associating a negotiation at the project task level gives you the flexibility to link a single project plan to multiple negotiations or a single negotiation to multiple project plans, but it also associates the progress of a project task to a specific sourcing event that can occur in the negotiation life cycle.

Associate Negotiations with Oracle Fusion Project Management Project Plans

You can create the association between a negotiation and a project plan in two ways. You can create and associate the negotiation while you're defining the project tasks. Otherwise, you can create and associate project tasks when you define your negotiation. You must be a project manager to create a project plan.

Manage Project Task Progress

Project tasks can be associated to negotiation events that occur throughout the life cycle of a negotiation, and you can view a task's status while in Sourcing. You can only see the tasks associated with the negotiation when you view task from the context of the negotiation. When you associate a project task to a negotiation, you can optionally select a Task Completion Event for that association. This enables you to associate a project task's progress to negotiation events that occur in the life cycle of a negotiation. When the event occurs the project task progress is updated to complete automatically. These task completion negotiation events are predefined and they're of 2 types - Manual and Automatic. When a task is tied to an automatic event, the task progress is automatically updated when the negotiation event occurs. When a task is tied to a manual event, then you need to manually perform the complete task action in Sourcing to mark the event as complete.

Note the following points:

• You can remove existing tasks tied to task completion events only if the existing tasks aren't completed, which means percent complete isn't 100%. But you can always remove existing project tasks that aren't tied to any task completion events.

• If you amend a negotiation, then all the project tasks that aren't yet completed and pointing to the old negotiation automatically point to the new amendment. If a project task is completed, then it's not updated, and it still points to the old negotiation.

  Any changes to project plan tasks in an amendment aren't displayed on the Review Changes page.

• No project plan information is carried over if a negotiation is duplicated or used to create a template.