Supplier Registration Process

Companies and internal users on behalf of companies can use the supplier registration process to submit requests to become suppliers of the buying organization.

The supplier registration is extremely easy and intuitive for suppliers. The key highlights of the supplier registration are as follows:

Guided process optimized for easy capture of profile details and other requirements
Improved extensibility, such as customer-defined validations and default logic, and
Geographically responsive data entry

Suppliers can potentially enter into a relationship with the buying organization through:

Self service or external supplier registrations
Internal supplier registrations
- Internal supplier registration allows employees to request new suppliers through Oracle Sourcing, Suppliers work area, and through Oracle Self Service Procurement.

Suppliers can be registered with one of the two business relationships, prospective and spend authorized. Prospective suppliers can only participate in negotiation and qualification activities i.e. that do not involve financials, whereas spend authorized suppliers are used for all the transactions including financials.

Regardless of how a supplier is introduced, the buying organization reviews the registration request using a collaborative review process and determines if it wants to consider this company as a new source of supply.

Supplier Registration Flow

Here's how the supplier registration process works:

For the external registration:
- The buying organization provides a supplier registration URL to the potential suppliers. These URLs comprise of encrypted values of business relationship and the inviting procurement business unit.
  You can find the registration URL for each business relationship type on the Configure Procurement Business Function page, in the Prospective Supplier Registration and Spend Authorized Supplier Registration URL fields. To access the page, in Setup and Maintenance work area, go to the Configure Procurement Business Function task:
  Offering: Procurement
  Functional Area: Procurement Foundation
- This start page for the external registration can be personalized to communicate information about supplier’s registration and onboarding process. You can also add information or corporate branding to tailor the email notification that sends the one-time access code.
- As the requester, you can begin by entering your email on the start page of the registration request to receive a one-time access code, which is used to start the supplier registration. This is a security feature and prevents bots from submitting registration requests. This also ensures a valid email is associated with each registration. You can return later to finish the registration by providing the email again to get a new access code, which will retrieve the saved registration. The supplier registration URL is always the same for all users, even for users returning to finish their registration, which simplifies supplier support.
- After providing the email, you will get an access code that you need to provide for your email verification.
- After email verification, you are guided to provide the company information, contacts, addresses, business classifications, bank accounts, products and services categories, and questionnaire responses.
- After providing all information, you can submit the request on the final page. On submission, guidance is provided if any corrections or missing information requires attention, if no, a success confirmation is presented with a registration request number for reference in any follow-up communications. You can personalize this page to include information such as contact details the requester can use for further communication.
For the internal registration:
- As a self-service procurement user or a supplier administrator can navigate to the responsive self-service procurement or the suppliers work areas respectively to submit a registration request on behalf of the supplier.
- In case you do not have all the required information to submit the registration request, you can save and return with the missing information and submit your request after completing all the information.
- Category managers can also submit registration requests on behalf of suppliers through the sourcing workarea while creating a negotiation.
  
  Note:
  The internal supplier registration submitted by a category manager during the negotiation process is the classic supplier registration flow.
On submission of a registration request, the buying organization receives the request, which goes through a collaborative review process. The Approval Management Service facilitates the approval routing of the registration. To maintain registration approval rules, in the Setup and Maintenance work area, go to the following:
- Offering: Procurement
- Functional Area: Approval Management
- Task (for external registration requests): Manage Supplier Registration Approvals
- Task (for internal registration requests): Manage Internal Supplier Registration Approvals
During the review process, the company name, D-U-N-S number if provided and tax identifiers are verified against the existing supplier master to prevent duplicate suppliers from being created.
Approvers who have the required privileges can edit the registration, except for supplier’s bank accounts, during approval. The default approvers for supplier registrations are defined in the procurement agents table in the Manage Suppliers function for the request’s inviting Procurement BU. The approval routing looks for such procurement agents having supplier administrator roles for the prospective supplier registration requests or supplier manager role for the spend authorized supplier registration requests and routes the requests for approval.
The outcome of the review is either approved or rejected. A notification with the registration request outcome is sent to the user who submitted the supplier registration requestfor both the external and internal registration requests. Additionally, for external registration requests, this notification is sent to contacts marked as administrative contact on the registration.
- Approved: Automatically starts a process to create a supplier record from the registration. If user accounts were requested for contacts on the registration, then user provisioning requests are sent to the identity management system for processing. If a prospective supplier is approved, then that supplier is available for transactions on sourcing and qualifications. If a spend authorized supplier is approved, then a spend authorization approval request is raisedfor next level approval process.
- Rejected: Rejects the request and sends a notification to the requester.

This figure shows the registration flow described previously. It shows the actions performed by:Procurement Application Administrator, Potential Supplier, Supplier Administrator, Internal User, Supplier Administrator, or Procurement Requester.

The registration document contains the following:

Company Details: captures the company details like name, country, tax identifiers, organization, and supplier types and so on. On company details, the country is required to drive defaulting on subsequent pages which also enables you to configure UI rule conditions based on country. Here are some examples:
- Hide fields, such as taxpayer ID when the country is not USA.
- Display country-specific attachment instructions to provide guidance on the types of documents you require. Besides country, there are several other attributes that support configurable conditions to enable similar dynamic UI behavior.
- If your business requirement is to not have country as required, you can personalize the page to remove the required property for country.
Contacts: captures the details of all the contacts who will engage with the buyer for various business activities. On Contacts, in the external registration, the verified email is defaulted for the first contact. The mobile, phone and fax country codes are defaulted based on the country selected on company details page.
Contact User Account: captures the user account information for the contact. You can personalize to default a selection for requesting a user account for contacts.
Addresses: captures details of all the supplier addresses and their purposes from where their business activities are going to take place. On Addresses, the country is used to default the address country as well as the phone and fax country codes. You can also personalize this page to have the address purposes selected by default.

The Loqate Smart Address service is an integrated service in registration and is a highly recommended feature to opt in to. The service manages detailed address locations for over 240 countries and provides a superior user experience with an automatically suggested address search that eliminates the data entry and input errors.

Business Classifications: Captures the certification details of any applicable supplier diversity classifications (for example, minority owned, small business, LGBTQ+ owned, person with disability owned, and so on).
Bank Accounts: captures details of all the supplier bank accounts where they receive payments against their supplies. Supplier bank account follows a country-driven logic to provide bank account attributes unique to the country. The default country layout presented is based on the supplier's country. A seeded configuration is delivered for most countries out of the box.

For example, the routing number is presented for a United States bank account, whereas sort code is used in the United Kingdom layout. You can modify or add country-specific rules to show or hide attributes, make them required or relabel them. Using the country-specific layouts, you need to provide information only for the necessary fields.

Products and Services: select from the summarized categories the types of goods and services that the supplier can provide.
Questionnaire: Captures responses to additional registration questions for the external supplier registrations and the internal supplier registrations from the suppliers and the responsive self service procurement workareas.
Attachments: Company details, business classifications and bank accounts supports uploading documents as proof for the information captured on these pages. For example, for company details attachments, you can capture suppliers tax certificates and for bank accounts, their scanned checks.

If configured, Supplier registration approvers can view auto-generated attachment summaries on the approval notification for file type attachments added in the Company Details section of the supplier registration.

You can configure the company details and bank accounts attachments as required to implement a stringent policy with respect to the company and bank account verification. Bank account attachments is not available in the classic internal supplier registration submitted by category managers from sourcing workarea during the negotiation process.

Descriptive Flexfields: Captures additional information for the company, the contacts and addresses during the supplier registration process. You can configure these additional information attributes as descriptive flexfields and then enable through personalization to capture their values during registration.

Supplier Registration Business Relationships

To begin a business relationship with a supplier, the supplier usually has a provisional status. For a provisional supplier, the amount of information you need is typically minimal. You need more information for suppliers with whom you conduct financial transaction.

The level of review and oversight needed for a potential supplier is also typically less than that required by a contracted supplier.

An efficient way of addressing the need for different levels of supplier information is to provide two statuses for the suppliers. The provisional status allows a restricted level of access to the application capabilities. The full status allows access to a more complete range of capabilities.

Prospective Suppliers

Suppliers can ask to be registered with the application either independently by accessing the buying company's registration web page, or they can be registered internally. In either case, the registration requests go to the supplier manager for review. Once the supplier manager approves the registration request, the supplier becomes a prospective supplier in the application. Prospective suppliers have a restricted level of access. They can participate in supplier qualification initiatives, and they can view and respond to negotiations. Prospective suppliers are identified within the application by an icon that indicates their prospective status.

Spend Authorized Suppliers

If the category manager decides to award business to a prospective supplier who responded to a negotiation, that supplier needs to be authorized in the application to conduct spend transactions with the buying organization before a purchase document can be created for that supplier. Similarly, a contracted supplier who is ready to be engaged in spend transactions, is registered with spend authorized business relationship.

Spend authorization requires a more complete level of information about the supplier and is subject to approval by the supplier manager. Once the supplier is approved for spend operations, they have access to all the normal capabilities of the application.

Manage Supplier Registration Requests

Use the Manage Supplier Registration Requests page to search for any registration, monitor the pending registrations, view all registration data including approval history, and follow up on the aging registrations.

You can access this task as a supplier administrator or supplier manager from suppliers workarea to access registration requests that you have access to. The access to the registration request is determined based on procurement agent access with manage suppliers function for the request’s inviting procurement BU.

A registration request’s view page provides the complete information of the registration request including the status of the request and it’s approval history. Using the view page, you can restart the approval process for a pending approval requests if you have the privilege Resubmit Supplier Registration Request.

On this page, you can also search for errored requests that can eventually be fixed to complete the supplier creation or to cancel the supplier creation.

As requesters can save their registration requests, it often could be possible that they do not submit their requests. Such requests will have status as draft and you can be searched on this page. You can then follow-up with the requesters for completion or delete the requests in case of no interest from requesters.

The Approval action can be performed only through the approval request notification, accessed in the Worklist application. Also, the delete action is allowed only for abandoned requests that have been saved but not submitted, other requests that are pending approval, approved or rejected cannot be deleted.