How You Create Large Negotiations

As a category manager, you can create large negotiation lines in Oracle Sourcing.

Customers across industries, such as construction, distribution, retail, manufacturing, and the public sector who use Sourcing might have the need to process very large negotiations. These negotiations can have very high line volumes. You can conduct these large line volume negotiations using the file-based data import and background processing.

Do these tasks to work with large negotiations.

1. Create a draft negotiation with a negotiation style that allows large negotiations. Include all the necessary information in the draft negotiation.
2. Use the FBDI process to import the negotiation lines into the large negotiation. For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement: File-Based Data Import (FBDI) for Procurement guide.
3. Include the suppliers whom you want to participate in the negotiation.
4. Assess the supplier responses and award the negotiation.

More on Large Negotiations

When you’re working with large negotiations, you can do these tasks:

• Import a large number of negotiation lines with or without backing requisitions using the file-based data import process (FBDI).
• Search lines in the UI.
• Generate scalable, light-weight negotiation, and response documents.
• Notify all the contacts for an invited supplier.
• Send negotiation documents as notification attachments to approvers and suppliers.
• Monitor the status of scheduled background processes through the negotiation lifecycle. Events such as publish negotiation, create amendment, import award lines spreadsheet trigger background processes. Notifications alert you after a background process is complete.
• Suppliers can import responses using a background process.
• Award large line volumes, and export using a background process.
• Automate large negotiation creation using web services.
• Suppliers can enter a zero price when responding to large negotiations. This allows suppliers to offer items for free or offer services for products that are still under warranty.

About Creating a Large Negotiation

Large negotiations can be created using a negotiation template that copies all the template information except lines to the large negotiation.

A new MS Excel template (.XLSM) is available to import lines in the FBDI process. You must use this template to add, update, or delete negotiation lines and line entities such as external cost factors, quantity-based price tiers, or price breaks. Web services are available to automate this FBDI process.

The import lines template has separate worksheets to add lines, external cost factors, and quantity-based price tiers or price breaks based on negotiation outcome. To add line attributes, you need to specify an attribute list at line level.

You can import lines with backing requisitions by updating the requisitioning BU, requisition, and requisition line columns in the LinesOrderOutcome or LinesAgreementOutcome sheets.

After all the lines are imported successfully, you’re notified, and you will be able to review them in the application.

After adding suppliers, to control their line access, you can use an Excel spreadsheet with Visual Builder Add-in or use the Supplier Negotiations REST web services.

Two new negotiation header approval attributes are introduced, which you can use to create negotiation approval rules specific too large negotiations – Large negotiation and Count of lines.

Actions such as validate negotiation and publish negotiation, will trigger a background process. You can monitor their status in the Monitor Processes page and you’re notified once the job is completed.

Supplier bidders can provide new supplier items when creating responses to both inventory and description-based line items.

Consider These When You’re Working with Large Negotiations

• When you add huge number of lines to a large negotiation, you can split them into multiple batches using the Batch ID attribute and import them one batch at a time.
• The number of large negotiation lines that can be processed efficiently will vary based on several factors, such as the number of line details (cost factors, price tiers, line attributes, lot lines, or group lines), or number of supplier responses when exporting award. We recommend that you benchmark for your common high line volume cases to establish thresholds and guidance when you work with large negotiations.
  • For example, you may be able to use large negotiations to process more than 50,000 lines easily if the lines have about 5 cost factors, 5 price tiers, and 5 attributes. Or, you may want to use large negotiations even for lower line ranges of 200 to 400 lines, if each line has tens of cost factors, attributes or price tiers.

How You Create Purchasing Documents from a Large Negotiation

You can create purchasing documents for large negotiations in Oracle Purchasing using background processes. You need to run two processes to create purchasing documents in Purchasing – Create Purchasing Documents and Submit Purchasing Documents.

After award is completed, click the Create Purchasing Documents action to trigger a background process. If the negotiation has backing requisitions, then the award quantity is automatically allocated to satisfy the requisition demand. You will be notified after this process completes. Next, click the Review and Submit Purchasing Documents action to navigate to the page where you can review the purchasing documents.

You now have the ability to search the lines in each purchasing document using multiple filtering criteria. You also have the option to retrigger purchasing document creation by clicking the Reset Purchasing Documents button. After review, you can click Submit. If the negotiation has backing requisitions, then you can review the requisition line quantity allocations in the view line allocations UI, before creating purchasing documents in Purchasing. This action triggers the Submit Purchasing Documents background process, which creates the purchasing documents in Purchasing.

After the process is successfully completed, you will be notified. Now you can view the purchasing documents created from the negotiation and can even drill down to the purchasing documents to view their details.

You can use the profile option, Maximum Lines in a Large Negotiation Outcome Document, ORA_PON_CREATE_PO_MAX_LINES_LIMIT to set the upper limit for lines in a purchasing document created from the large negotiation award. If this limit is reached, another purchasing document is created for additional lines. The profile option value must not exceed 10,000.