How You Invite Suppliers to Negotiations

You can notify all the contacts for an invited supplier. Supplier contacts with and without supplier portal user accounts will receive the notification email and PDF.

You can now invite all suppliers as needed to meet regulatory requirements and provide a fair market opportunity. You can see these suppliers in the UI and in spreadsheets. You can view and add more than 500 suppliers.

You can identify the supplier contacts that have an active user account to add to the negotiation invitation list.

You can also invite supplier contacts who may not have a supplier portal user account as they may be new and not yet onboarded to supplier portal. The negotiation invitation and PDF is emailed to the selected supplier contact. But, when these suppliers submit their quotes offline, the category manager must use the surrogate response functionality to record their responses, or if the supplier contacts receive their user accounts, they can submit their quotes directly in the supplier portal.

For those suppliers you identify, notifications are sent containing information on the negotiation. If you select a supplier site, then for that supplier, only contacts registered with that site receive invitations. If you enable the response control: Restrict to invited suppliers, only suppliers in the invitation list can participate. Otherwise, any supplier Who's registered with the application can view the negotiation and participate. You can only invite a supplier once, but you can invite multiple sites for that supplier. There are several methods you can use when inviting suppliers.

If the supplier has only one site, and one contact associated with the site, then the supplier site and supplier contact is set as default for the invite.

If you know all the supplier contact information, you can enter it directly into the negotiation. This is the quickest way to invite suppliers.

You can use the supplier search capabilities to identify and invite suppliers based on multiple search criteria such as the supplier's business classification, Approved Supplier List status, transaction history, or qualification and assessment status.

You can configure the From and Reply To email address as category manager’s email, or a generic email if you don’t wish to expose category manager’s details, so they're recognized as coming from your organization. You can then monitor out-of-office emails and bounce back emails from suppliers by receiving auto replies. As a category manager, you can then take follow-up action for time-sensitive supplier notifications like Supplier Invitation or Negotiation Award.

You can register a new supplier while creating the negotiation. Selecting the Register and Add option from the Actions menu on the Edit Negotiation: Suppliers page takes you to the Register and Add Supplier page where you can enter information about the new company, its sites, and create a company contact.

You can choose to register the new supplier as a prospective supplier or a spend authorized. If you register the company as a prospective supplier, the supplier can participate as soon as its registration is approved. A prospective supplier can receive invitations, view a negotiation and respond. You can award the supplier business, but you can't issue a purchase document for the supplier until it's approved for conducting financial transactions with your buying organization.

If you choose to register the company as spend authorized, supplier can't participate until its registration request is approved and it's also approved to conduct financial transactions with the buying organization.