1. Using Procurement
  2. Oracle Supplier Negotiations

Oracle Supplier Negotiations

Your negotiation document specifies the details of the negotiation for potential suppliers. While being developed, your document can be stored as a draft until you're ready to publish it.

There are several ways by which you can create a negotiation document. There are also tools to help simplify the creation process.

  • You can use a negotiation style to control the look of the document and the features available. A style is a good way to create a streamlined negotiation.

  • You can use a negotiation template to create a base negotiation document containing much of the line and supplier-related information. You can have a default negotiation template when you create a negotiation. Having a default template will ensure that negotiations are created with the correct information, improve efficiency, maintain accuracy, and save time. Once you have a template defined, you can reuse it without having to reenter negotiation information. You must have access to the Procurement Business Unit for this the template was defined to access it. You can enforce the usage of the negotiation template by requiring that category managers must select the template.

  • You can use requisitions in Purchasing to create a negotiation document. When you use this method, the requisition information is used to create the negotiation lines.

If you create your negotiation from scratch, as you create your negotiation, a series of train stops appear. These identify major sections of the negotiation document for which you may need to enter information, depending on the goal of the negotiation. The following descriptions describe the purpose for each negotiation section. Note that depending on which negotiation style you're using, one or more of the sections may not be available for use and so may not appear among the train stops.

How You Write a Cover Page and Specify Overview Information

You can create a cover page to associate with your negotiation document. Overview information specifies negotiation level controls.

Your cover page can include standard company text as well as document specific details. You can use variables to represent values that are used throughout the document and which may be updated often. An example could be important dates for deadlines in the document timeline. Using variables ensures that values are always synchronized. A cover page is optional.

On the Overview page, you specify many negotiation controls such as preview, open and close dates. For multilingual negotiation, you can define allowable currencies and exchange rates. You can specify many ranking and response controls.

  • Header information, including

    The negotiation title, number, description, and Procurement BU

  • Schedule controls, including

    Preview date, open date, close date, and award date

  • Negotiation controls, including

    Response visibility, display and print formats

  • Requirements controls, including

    weighting and scoring information.

  • Line controls, including

    Price tier/break information, ranking method and display, alternate response/line flags

  • Response controls, including

    rules about using multiple responses

If you have enabled the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), then you can leverage the generative AI to author the cover page text for your negotiation. Simply enter the key details like the title, synopsis, item categories, and significant dates, and then use the AI Assist to generate the cover page text.

AI will use the information from the draft negotiation and suggest content to include for you to get started. If you like a suggestion, you can review and accept it. If not, you can always edit it before or after accepting it. You also have the option to regenerate and explore different contents and formats until you find the one that fits your needs.

Consider these when you're creating a negotiation cover page with Generative AI.

  • The cover page text suggestions generated by artificial intelligence may contain inaccuracies and should be reviewed before adding to the negotiation.
  • The cover page text suggestions may be addressed to suppliers, featuring a placeholder for your contact details at the end, which you can modify as necessary.

Requirements

Requirements solicit company level information. You can use a supplier's answers to requirement questions in addition to the other response information to help evaluate the supplier's response. You can have the application score responses automatically, or you can score them yourself. Requirement scores can also be weighted to more accurately reflect their importance within the negotiation. You can use questions and qualification areas that have been defined in Oracle Supplier Qualification as requirements and requirement sections.

Collaboration Team Members

You can introduce collaboration team members with access only to scoring, where the scoring-only assigned team member will only enter scores for the requirements assigned to that person.

Negotiation Lines

Your lines are the heart of your negotiation. They identify the items and services which you're sourcing. You can add individual lines or lots or line groups. You can specify quantity details such as price breaks and line details such as line attributes for use in response ranking. You can use cost factors to identify additional line costs such as shipping or insurance. You can use retainage to withhold funds from payment to ensure that the supplier finishes work as agreed.

Contract Terms

If Oracle Procurement Contracts is installed and configured, you can access contract information created and stored in Procurement Contracts and associate it with your negotiation document. Such information could identify important deliverables or contract clauses suppliers must provide along with the timeline governing the deliverable management. See help information on Procurement Contracts for details on contract terms and clauses.

Create Contracts

You can create a base contract to negotiate terms with all suppliers. The base contract doesn't contain any primary parties. Suppliers can review the negotiation contract terms as part of the response process, share their acceptance with the contract terms or suppliers can share their concerns by redlining the contract terms document. You can either create an enterprise class contract or an agreement class contract based on your requirement.

You can either choose a structured terms template or a simplified terms template for the base contract. If you want to author contract terms later or if you want to choose attached document as contract source, you can leave the contract terms template field blank. After creating the base contract, you can edit the contract and change the contract source to attached document.

Supplier Contacts

The Suppliers train stop gives you access to the Supplier-related pages. Using these pages, you can specify the suppliers based on their eligibility, their sites and contacts whom you want to notify about the negotiation. You can use the search capabilities of the Supplier pages to find and identify eligible incumbent suppliers, suppliers who are approved sources for a particular item or service, and suppliers to whom the negotiation is of particular interest. You can identify the supplier contacts that have an active user account to add to the negotiation invitation list. This way, you can ensure that the invitation is sent to contacts who have access to supplier portal to create and submit their responses. Supplier contacts you identify are sent notifications with information about the negotiation and are invited to participate. If the response control: Restrict to invited suppliers is enabled, only suppliers on the invitation list can participate. If you select a supplier site, then for that supplier, only contacts registered for that site can view and participate in the negotiation.

Due to mergers or acquisitions, the supplier contact of the parent company may have increased responsibility to respond to the negotiations of their subsidiaries. Supplier contact can negotiate on behalf of multiple supplier companies as long as they have appropriate data access for these subsidiaries. This ensures that the supplier contacts of the parent company can only respond to the negotiations of the subsidiaries to which they have access to.

The invited contact of the parent company will now receive the negotiation terms and conditions of its subsidiaries in a notification email. After the parent supplier contact accepts the terms, they receive the negotiation invitation email with the negotiation details intended for its subsidiary. They can now review negotiation details and acknowledge the intent to participate in the negotiation. It is possible a parent supplier contact can be invited on behalf of multiple suppliers. They can see the supplier company for which the negotiation is intended.

The activity of the parent supplier contacts is also recorded in the supplier activity log and can be tracked when monitoring supplier activities. When award is completed and shared with suppliers, the parent supplier contact is notified. When purchasing documents are created, you must select an active contact of the child supplier company on the purchase order or agreement.

You can select a specific supplier contact to invite in a negotiation, and also specify an additional email to send the invitation notification and PDF. But often it isn't known which person is the right sourcing contact. There can be several supplier contacts at the company who need to be notified about the negotiation opportunity in order to maximize the chances of the supplier's participation.

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 also notify all contacts when you invite additional suppliers after publishing the negotiation. When you choose to notify all contacts, selecting a primary supplier contact is optional.

When you send an online message to all participants, all the contacts of the invited supplier having active user accounts receive the online message notification. Similarly, all the contacts of the invited supplier having active user accounts are notified when an amendment is published, or if the negotiation is paused, resumed, extended, or closed.

How You Review and Publish a Negotiation Document

The application validates your work as you create a negotiation document. As you move from one page to another, the application checks your work and displays any error messages applicable to the work you have completed so far. Additionally, you can use the Validate option from the Actions menu at any time. You can also use the Review train stop to review your work at a higher and more complete level. The review display presents a column of links you can use to access a particular section of the document. If you want to update a section, you can click the train stop.

Once you're finished creating the negotiation document, you publish it to make it visible and accessible within the application. Suppliers can view the negotiation during the preview period (if any) and can create draft responses, but they can't submit the response to the negotiation until its open date is reached. You can always modify the negotiation internally, for example, by inviting additional suppliers or updating the collaboration team, however, once you publish a document, create an amendment to make any changes the suppliers see.

If document approval rules are defined for your environment, your document may be automatically approved and published, or it may be submitted to approvers for review. Then once all approvals have been obtained, the negotiation document is automatically published. In the Negotiations work area, the Messages infolet shows messages on ongoing negotiations in which you're participating.

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