Redwood: Monitor Negotiation as a Category Manager

You can now monitor the auctions and RFQs in real time using an enhanced Redwood experience to view competitive bidding and take action. The redesigned Monitor Negotiation page offers a streamlined overview of supplier participation, response trends, and potential savings enabling quicker evaluation and informed decision-making during active negotiations.

You can access this page from the Negotiations (New) workbench or the View Negotiation page.

Monitor Negotiation

Here are some of the key enhancements in the Redwood experience compared to the classic application:

• Negotiation summary metrics - Get quick insights at a glance with key metrics such as current value, potential savings, and active responses with the KPI scorecard. You can configure and add your own metrics and visualizations on this page.
• Inline Supplier Lock out or Unlock - When necessary, you can Lock out or unlock a supplier directly from the Suppliers table in the Overview tab, without having to navigate to a different page. You can take instant action when monitoring the responses to ensure a fair and compliant supplier activity.
• New Lines Summary tab - View the best response and pricing for each line across all participating suppliers.

Lines Summary in Monitor Negotiation

• New line search capability - Quickly find and select a line in the Lines tab by searching with a keyword that matches either the line number or part of the description.
• Line-level summary - View key metrics like best response, price, and savings for a selected line directly in the Lines tab, making line-level evaluation faster and more focused.
• New responses by supplier visualization - Leverage the Responses by Supplier chart in the Lines tab to visually compare response line amounts across suppliers, distinguish between full and partial responses, enabling quicker assessment of competitiveness.

Lines in Monitor Negotiation

• Automatic refresh with real-time bidding updates - You don't need to set a refresh interval. The page automatically detects new or revised responses during active negotiations and refreshes instantly to keep you up to date.
• Flexible page layout control - Administrators can configure the page layout for all users, while end users can further personalize their own view by swapping charts and visualizations to suit their analysis needs.

Here’s a closer look at some of the key capabilities:

Automatic Refresh

The Monitor Negotiation page uses automatic refresh to keep you up to date with the latest bidding activity in real time. Unlike the classic application, there’s no need to set a refresh interval in the Redwood, because the application automatically checks for new responses or revisions to existing revisions and refreshes the page only when changes are detected.

The frequency of these checks is based on how close the negotiation is to closing:

• Less than 1 hour remaining: Checks every 5 seconds
• Less than 24 hours remaining: Checks every 1 minute
• More than 24 hours remaining: Checks every 5 minutes

You can also refresh the page at any time by clicking the Refresh action to see the latest supplier positions.

Upon refresh, you can quickly spot favorable or unfavorable shifts in supplier ranks, response prices, amounts, and potential savings with the arrow indicators. These visual cues appear on rows where changes have occurred since the last refresh.

Visual Cues Showing Changes After Refresh

Personalize Layout

You can personalize the layout to replace the default visualizations with other charts available in the library. The options available are

• Overview Tab
  • Savings by Supplier 
• Lines Tab
  • Unit Prices by Time
  • Unit Price Savings by Supplier
  • Savings by Supplier
  • Price by Score

For example, in the Lines tab, you can replace the default responses by supplier and responses by time charts with unit prices by time and unit price savings by supplier to better suit your analysis needs.

Replace Charts Using Personalize Layout

NOTE: Personalization changes made using the Personalize Layout action are temporary and will be reset once you navigate away from the page.

Edit Page Layout

If you're an administrator, you can use the Edit Page Layout button to modify the tabs, or create your own tabs by adding either seeded or OTBI-based KPIs and data visualizations that best represent your business and are critical for your category managers to monitor regularly.

For example, you can create a new tab with a 2-panel side-by-side layout, assign it a name, and drag and drop the following line-level negotiation charts from the content library:

• Savings by Supplier
• Unit Price Savings by Supplier

Add New Tab with a Layout and Add Content Using Edit Page Layout

NOTE: Layout changes made using the Edit Page Layout action are applied globally and will be visible to all category managers.

Depending on the negotiation’s status, you can take the following actions directly from the Monitor Negotiation page:

• Messages
• Extend
• Close
• Pause
• Cancel
• Manage Suppliers
• View Lifecycle Activities
• Download Negotiation PDF
• Download Supplier PDF

The redesigned Monitor Negotiation page empowers category managers with real-time insights, customizable layouts, and intuitive visualizations to track supplier activity and bidding performance more effectively. This leads to faster, data-driven decisions, improved negotiation outcomes, and increased cost savings.

Steps to Enable

To use this feature, you must enable the profile option Redwood Page for Sourcing Overview Enabled (ORA_PON_SOURCING_REDWOOD_ENABLED). By default, this profile option is disabled. If this profile option was already enabled in a prior release, you don't need to enable it again. 

To enable the profile option, follow these steps:

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search and select the Manage Administrator Profile Values task.
2. On the Manage Administrator Profile Values page, search for and select the profile option name or code.
3. Set the Profile Value to Y.
4. Click Save and Close. Changes in the profile value will affect users the next time they sign in.

Tips And Considerations

• Using Personalize Layout, you can remove KPIs, charts, and tables to streamline your view. However, these changes are temporary and will revert to the default layout after you leave the page.
• It’s not recommended to remove the default (seeded) tabs. If any of the three tabs are removed, you can restore them by clicking the New Page (Tab) and selecting them from the Open an Existing Page section.

Open an Existing Page Using Edit Page Layout

• When you add KPIs, visualizations, or collections related to negotiation lines in a new tab using Edit Page Layout, the content displayed will correspond to the line selected in the Lines tab. You can't view data for multiple lines simultaneously.
• You can view a specific supplier’s response by clicking the corresponding bar or marker in the charts.
• You can zoom and scroll within the chart to view responses more easily when dealing with many responses.

Key Resources

• For information about using Oracle Visual Builder Studio to extend your Redwood application pages, see Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM and SCM: Extending Redwood Applications for HCM and SCM Using Visual Builder Studio.
• Refer to Overview of Guided Journeys in the Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Resources: Implementing and Using Journeys guide, available on the Oracle Help Center.
• For details about how to add your own key performance indicators (KPIs) and visualizations to your page, see: Flexible Reporting in Redwood Dashboards.

Access Requirements

Users who are assigned a configured job role that contains this privilege can access this feature:

• Monitor Supplier Negotiation (PON_MONITOR_SUPPLIER_NEGOTIATION)

This privilege was available prior to this update.

Users who are assigned a configured job role that contains these privileges can drill down to pages or perform actions:

• View Supplier Negotiation Response (PON_VIEW_SUPPLIER_NEGOTIATION_RESPONSE_PRIV)  to view the response.
• Lock Negotiation Supplier Out (PON_LOCK_NEGOTIATION_SUPPLIER_OUT_PRIV) – to lock out or unlock a supplier. 

These privileges were available prior to this update.

Users who are assigned a configured job role that contains this privilege can Edit the page layout to add custom KPI and visualizations.

• Edit Page Layout of the Sourcing Page (PON_EDIT_SOURCING_LANDING_PAGE_LAYOUT_PRIV)

This privilege was available prior to this update.