Invite Suppliers to a Negotiation

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.

Once notified, contacts who don't have a user account may initiate user account creation, or submit offline responses for buyers to record as surrogate responses. You can create a list of suppliers and supplier contacts that you want to invite to a negotiation. You can identify the supplier contacts that have an active user account to add to the negotiation invitation list.

Many organizations, especially in the public sector, invite suppliers to participate in sourcing negotiations based on the products and services they have registered for. Some products and services categories have 500 or more suppliers registered. Category managers need to ensure that all suppliers registered for these categories are invited to the negotiation.

You can view and add more than 500 suppliers, but limit to not more than 2000 suppliers in the negotiation. You can now invite 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 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.

Supplier contacts on your invitation list are sent an email notification when you publish the negotiation. The invitation notification contains a link the supplier contacts can use to obtain more information on the negotiation. If the response control Restrict to invited suppliers is selected, only suppliers identified in the invitation list can participate in the negotiation. If this control isn't enabled for the negotiation, any supplier with access to the business unit for which the negotiation is defined can view the negotiation and participate.

Based on the negotiation style setting, either the invitation notification attachment will be a single PDF file or a compressed file containing a PDF and negotiation lines CSV spreadsheet. Note that the compressed file attachment will be sent despite supplier control line access where as PDF attachment is only sent when there is no control line access.

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.

In the example, Sue Ellis, a category manager is defining a negotiation. She has come to the step where suppliers are invited.

Invite Suppliers to a Negotiation

1. After creating the Overview and specifying any requirements and the negotiation lines, Sue clicks the Suppliers train stop.

2. On the Edit Negotiation: Suppliers page, she clicks Search and Add.

3. On the Suppliers: Add Suppliers page, she can use many search combinations to identify the suppliers she wants to invite to the negotiation. At least one of the fields must be included in the search. The check boxes can be used to restrict the search. After she specifies how she wants to search for suppliers, she clicks Search.

4. The search matches are displayed in the Search Results table. She can identify the supplier contacts that have an active user account to add to the negotiation invitation list.

   She 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 any selected supplier contact.

   She selects the suppliers she wants to add and clicks Add to Selection.

5. The suppliers she identified appear in the Supplier Selection region. She continues adding suppliers as needed. When she is finished, she clicks Continue and returns to the Edit Negotiation: Suppliers page.

6. If the invited supplier has multiple sites registered, she can select a site. In this case, for that supplier, only contacts for that site can participate in the negotiation. For each supplier, she specifies a contact. This is the main contact to whom notifications are sent. She can optionally select an additional contact for the same supplier.

   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.

7. When she returns to the Edit Negotiation: Suppliers page, she can see the list of suppliers she invited. For each supplier invited, she selects a main contact. She can continue to the Review or Publish step.