Considerations for Creating Approved Supplier List Entry

An approved supplier list (ASL) entry controls what item or set of items can be procured from which suppliers (or restrict from procuring). You can create an ASL entry to match just how granular your organization wants to approve and track authorized supply sources.

Each entry can have supplier-item or supplier-category ordering attributes specified on the procurement BU or ship-to organization levels.

Procurement BU

Procurement business units are responsible for procurement business function related activities including supplier management, contract negotiation and administration, order issuance and administration. Approved supplier list entries can be created at a procurement BU level or for a specific ship-to organization within a procurement BU.

Scope

Scope is primarily about what level in the buying organization you're tracking authorized suppliers. A scope of Global allows the ASL entry to be used or enforced by all ship-to organizations that roll up to the requisitioning BU or BUs for which the procurement BU is a service provider.

Scope also has to do with how you define multiple attribute sets for different ship-to organizations. When an approved supplier list entry is defined as Global, all ship-to organizations that roll up to the requisitioning BU or BUs for which the procurement BU is a service provider will reference the global attribute set. When an approved supplier list entry is defined as Ship-to Organization, you create an attribute set for one specific ship-to organization.

Ship-to Organization

As indicated above, the included ship-to organizations define the scope or domain of your approved supplier list entry. That is, the supplier relationship status maintained on the ASL is only applicable for orders which are for shipment to that specific ship-to organization. For global ASLs different ordering attribute sets can be defined for specific ship-to organizations.

Type

You can associate the supplier or supplier site to an item or a category for an approved supplier list entry by specifying the type. When an approved supplier list entry is defined as Item, you're associating the entry to a particular catalog item. When an approved supplier list entry is defined as Category, you're associating the entry to a particular procurement category. Using category type lets you manage the supplier relationship for whole a set of items that roll up to the category.

Status

Status identifies whether the supplier is authorized to supply the item or set of items defined on the ASL. Another key point about status is that it determines whether purchase orders can be sourced and approved. These processing controls can be associated to the status in the Manage Approved Supplier List Statuses page.

Supplier-Item Attributes

You can define the following additional ordering attributes for each supplier-item combination:

• Purchasing UOM

• Country of Origin

• Minimum Order Quantity

• Fixed Lot Multiple

Source Documents

You can specify blanket purchase agreements and contract purchase agreements as source documents for an ASL entry. The application then automatically defaults source document information such as the buyer, supplier contact, and supplier item number, for the item or category during automated creation of requisition lines.