Line Attribute Properties and Their Acceptable Values

Line attributes identify additional information about an item or service requested by the category manager. Use the following properties to describe your line attribute when defining it.

You use a line attribute's properties to control its behavior and how the supplier should respond.

Response

You can control the supplier's interaction with the attribute by specifying the response type. Optional responses don't require a supplier to offer a response. Suppliers must however provide a value for a required response. Suppliers can view attributes which are display only, but they can't respond to them.

Value Type

Value type specifies the data type for the attribute value. There are four value types available. A text value accepts characters and numbers. A number value accepts only numbers and the decimal point. Date values accept dates that you select using the calendar picker. A URL value type accepts a URL in the format http://url.name.here. URLs also accept https:

Target

For each attribute, you can define a target value. This is the value which is most desirable for this attribute. You can also display the value to the supplier or keep it hidden.

Acceptable Values

For text values, you can specify a list of values from which the supplier can select. Any value not defined to the list isn't accepted. For number and date values, you can define value ranges in terms of From Value and To Value. If you omit a From Value, that range includes everything up to the To value. Likewise, if you omit a To value, the range includes all values starting at the From value and above. Ranges can't overlap. You can specify a single number by defining it as both the From and To values. Dates are defined similar to numbers.

Line Attributes and Multi-Attribute Scoring Negotiations

In a multi-attribute scored negotiation, you can have the application include the response values from the supplier along with the price offered when calculating the rank of that supplier's response. To perform this calculation, you give each possible response value a numeric score and then weight the attribute among the other attributes for the line. Note that while each value's score can be between 0 and 100, the weights for all the attributes defined for a line must add up to 100.

If a negotiation has ranking method set as price only, which is the default value, then the buyer can't define acceptable values for the negotiation line attributes and the supplier won’t see acceptable values for the negotiation line attributes.

If the buyer intends to add acceptable values for the negotiation line attributes, then buyer can select the Ranking Method as Multi-attribute Scoring.

Also, the ranking method - multiattribute scoring is applicable if the document type is an auction or RFQ. For the document type RFI, the value must be price only.