Supplier Products and Services Category Hierarchy
The Manage Supplier Products and Services Category Hierarchy page enables the buying organization to define a category hierarchy for identifying the products and services categories that suppliers and prospective suppliers can provide.
The category hierarchy can be defined with as many levels as needed to capture granular supplier category classifications. The hierarchy navigation allows supplier users to quickly drill down and select their applicable categories. When a parent category is selected, the buying organization assumes that the supplier can provide all the products and services represented as child categories under that parent category.
The two types of categories that are used in the hierarchy are browsing categories and item categories.
Browsing Categories
Browsing categories, also known as navigation categories, are created to structure the hierarchy and organize the underlying item categories so that users can navigate and select the most appropriate categories applicable to the supplier organization. A browsing category can either be a parent category, or a child to another browsing category.
Item Categories
Item categories are categories from the Purchasing Catalog used during sourcing activities by the buying organization to find all suppliers that can provide a given item category. Item categories cannot be added as a parent category in the hierarchy, they can only be added as the last level in a branch, also referred to as the leaf level.
You can develop your own method of categorizing products and services, or you can use standard coding systems such as UNSPSC.
If the categories seem too granular to display to end users, you can control whether or not to show the leaf level item categories with the Display in Supplier Profile check box, which is available at the category level in the purchasing catalog.
The Display in Supplier Profile check box determines whether the category will be displayed in the category hierarchy presented to the end users (prospective suppliers and supplier administrators). If the check box is unchecked, the category would only be used internally by downstream flows, such as Oracle Sourcing. However, it would not be displayed in the category hierarchy presented to the users. Browsing categories are not controlled by this check box. Any browsing category created in the hierarchy is always displayed.