Supplier Agreement Order Automation Controls

You can set up supplier agreements so that approved requisitions automatically create purchase orders that are sent to suppliers. You can configure the degree of order automation required for each agreement.

Enabling Order Automation

To enable the automated order process, complete these steps:

In the Purchase Orders or Purchase Agreements work area, use the Create Agreement task to set up an agreement for frequently purchased items.
On the agreement's Controls tab, Business Unit Access region, enable the agreement for the appropriate requisitioning business units and supplier sites.
In the Order Creation Options region, indicate on the agreement that requisitions for these items must automatically create purchase orders.

Configuring the Level of Order Creation Automation

In an agreement's Order Creation Options region, you can configure the level of order creation automation for an agreement as follows:

Select the Automatically generate orders check box to create orders automatically.
Select the Automatically submit for approval check box to also submit the orders automatically for approval.

Select both options to provide complete automation for repeat orders of goods and services. For high-value items, you may prefer to select the first option only, so the generated orders can be manually reviewed and submitted for approval.

When you select the Automatically generate orders option, the automatic conversion of purchase requisitions into purchase orders is subject to eligibility checks. For example, the agreement must be valid, the agreement must not be expired, and so on.

Grouping Requisitions

You can also control how requisitions and requisition lines are combined on order lines in the purchase order.

When the application is configured to copy descriptive flexfields from requisition headers or lines to corresponding purchase order headers or lines, you can't group requisition lines.

When the application is configured to copy only descriptive flexfields from requisition headers and not from lines, requisition grouping is allowed. If you manually enter multiple lines in the Edit Document Builder page, line grouping options are disabled in the Actions drop-down list.

Allow Ordering From Unassigned Sites

Select the Allow ordering from unassigned sites check box to indicate that the agreement can be used to source requisitions for supplier sites not listed as purchasing sites in the agreement's business unit assignments. This option doesn't apply to purchase orders created without a backing requisition or when the agreement isn't specified at the time of creating or processing the requisition into a purchase order.

Automatic Order Generation and Requisition Grouping

You can optionally set up the purchase agreement to automatically do these two tasks:

Create purchase orders from requisitions
Submit them for approval

If this automation is set up and you want to group requisitions, the purchase orders are created on approval before you can do any requisition grouping. When you enable the Consolidate Online Requisitions into Fewer Purchase Orders feature, orders from online requisitions won't be created automatically and requisitions will be processed the grouping options.

Here's the list of outcomes based on the features you have enabled.

Use Case	Consolidate Online Requisitions into Fewer Purchase Orders Feature Enabled	CPA/BPA is Set Up for Automatic Creation of POs	Outcome
Grouping of multiple online requisitions into single PO isn't needed	No	Yes	POs will be created automatically upon approval
Grouping of multiple online requisitions into single PO isn't needed	No	No	Requisitions will go into pool for manual processing
Grouping of multiple online requisitions into single PO is needed	Yes	Yes	Requisitions will be processed into orders and grouped based on the grouping options when Generate Orders is executed
Grouping of multiple online requisitions into single PO is needed	Yes	Yes	Requisitions will go into pool for manual processing when Generate Orders is executed