Examples of Negotiation Controls

Schedule Controls

You have several settings that control the negotiation time line.

Preview Dates

You can choose to set a preview date for your negotiation. Suppliers can submit their prebids when the negotiation (auction or RFQ) is in the preview status.
Open Dates

You can choose to open the negotiation immediately, as soon as you publish it, or you can choose a future date on which the negotiation opens for responding.

If approvals are enabled for your procurement BU, then you could choose Open upon approval or a specific date as open date. For open date, you can't set the number of days after the approval date.
Close Date

You must specify a close date. After the close date is reached, the supplier can't submit more responses from the Oracle Supplier Portal, but the buyer can still create surrogate responses for the suppliers. If the negotiation is an auction, you can optionally choose to enable the autoextend or staggered closing feature.

If approvals are enabled for your procurement BU, you can select a specific date as close date, or a set number of days after the open date.
Award Date

You can specify an award date for the information of the suppliers. Award dates are not enforced by the application. You can award the negotiation at any time after closing it.

Negotiation Controls

You have three controls that control the visibility of supplier responses and the general appearance of the negotiation document.

Response visibility

Response visibility controls when suppliers can see information from competing responses.
- Open - in an open negotiation, suppliers can see competing response information while the negotiation is active.
- Blind - in a blind negotiation, suppliers can only see the best bid value (if allowed).
- Sealed - in a sealed negotiation, buyers cannot see any responses until they are unlocked, and suppliers cannot see any competing response information until the responses are unlocked.
- When the response visibility control is set to blind, even supplier contacts from the same supplier won’t be able to see each other's responses. It’ll be displayed as blind.
- However, if you want other supplier contacts to see the responses, the response visibility can be chosen as open or sealed. Unseal the negotiation so that other contacts can see the responses.
- Consider these when you’re working with RFQs:
  - RFQs enable buyers to collect quotes from suppliers for complex and hard to define items or services, such as made-to-order manufacturing or construction projects. The RFQ process is generally the longest of the negotiation processes.
  - After the suppliers have submitted an initial round of proposals (quotes), the buyer can fine tune the RFQ and initiate detailed negotiations, as necessary. This process may go through multiple rounds of negotiations and quotes.
  - RFQs can be blind (buyer can see the quotes during the RFQ, but suppliers can’t) or sealed (neither buyer nor suppliers can see the quotes until the RFQ is closed and the quotes are unsealed), so suppliers can never see each other’s quotes while the negotiation is in progress.
Negotiation layout, response layout, contract terms layout - you can select from predefined document layouts for printing.

Requirements Controls

Requirements are questions presented to participating suppliers to elicit high-level information. Supplier responses to requirements can be assigned scores for use when evaluating among competing responses.

Enable weights

If you enable this control, you can weight the negotiation requirements to reflect their relative importance.
Display scoring criteria to suppliers

If you enable this control, the scoring criteria specified by the negotiation author is displayed to the suppliers.
Default maximum score

The default maximum score sets a default value for the highest value you can enter when scoring supplier responses. You can override this value when creating the actual requirement. However, if many of the requirements you create share the same maximum value, you can simply specify it here as the default to automatically appear.

Line Controls

You use the line control section to specify whether price tiering is available for the negotiation lines. You also specify how line rank is calculated and indicated.

Price tiers

The kind of price tiers you have available depends on the negotiation outcome. If the outcome is a standard purchase order, you can only use quantity-based price tiers. If the outcome is a blanket purchase agreement, you can use either price breaks or quantity-based price tiers. If you select none, you cannot create any price tier information.
Rank indicator

You can select whether the top responses are ranked using a numeric ranking (1-3), or whether only the best response is indicated. You can also choose to have no ranking shown.
Ranking method

You can select whether a supplier response is ranked using the price alone, or whether responses to any line attributes are also used when evaluating response rank. If you do not select Multiattribute scoring, you can define line attributes, but you cannot score them.

RFIs allow buyers to solicit information from suppliers on the goods and services the suppliers provide. This allows buyers to qualify a group of suppliers and identify the suppliers to be included later in the negotiation. As the ranking method can't be applied to an RFI, you can't use the acceptable values in multi-attribute scoring. But, you can create an RFQ for multiattribute scoring.

Response Controls

You have several settings that control which application features are available to the supplier, and how supplier responses are handled.

You can restrict the participants only to suppliers which were included in the invitation list you specify for the negotiation. If you do not restrict the participants, suppliers could find the negotiation by searching the open negotiations visible in their system. They could access the negotiation and place a response.
You can allow suppliers to see the notes, attachments, or contract terms of other suppliers' responses. This control is only available with sealed negotiations.
You can allow suppliers to choose which lines to respond to. With this setting enables, suppliers can choose to not respond to certain lines. If you do not enable this setting, suppliers must respond to every line in the negotiation.
You can allow suppliers to place multiple responses to a line. If you do not enable this setting, a supplier can only place a single response per round of responding.
You can choose to display the current best price to suppliers in a blind negotiation. This allows the suppliers to see what price they should beat if they submit a subsequent response. This setting is only available with blind negotiations.
If you allow multiple responses, you can choose to force the supplier to submit a response that is

Lower than the supplier's last response
Lower than the current best price