Sourcing Overview

Oracle Transportation Sourcing enables you to:

• Simplify the bid process for transportation providers via a well-defined, web-supported collaborative process.
• Leverage historical shipping volume and cost data.
• Evaluate multiple award scenarios based on cost, service, and other factors.
• Automate the uploading of sourcing transportation rates into Oracle Transportation Management.

Oracle Transportation Sourcing can be used either with or without the rest of the Oracle Transportation Management software.

Process Description

Following are the general steps which must be followed to perform the sourcing process.

1. Load shipment history into Oracle Transportation Sourcing and create an incoming shipment set. The shipment set criteria defines what shipments to load (or assign).
2. Build an outgoing shipment set. Building the shipment set loads and transforms Oracle Transportation Management shipments into sourcing shipments. If you already have sourcing shipments, there is a parallel action that assigns existing sourcing shipments to the shipment set. To view sourcing shipments, go to Sourcing > Historical Shipments > Shipments.
3. Aggregate history into lanes for bidding by assigning an outgoing shipment set to a lane summary. Use the Build Lane Summary action and then you can view the resulting lane summary using the View Lane Summary action.
4. Create constraints and rules for exactly what costs can be sourced using constraint sets and rule sets.
5. Define the costs that you want carriers to bid on using a sub-set of Oracle Transportation Management rates.
   1. Create rate offering and specify it as a sourcing template.
   2. Create associated sourcing rate record template.
6. Configure how you want these elements to look in the bid document that is sent to the carriers using the CRT configuration. This bid document is called a carrier response template or CRT.
7. Create a project and bid round.
8. Generate the document into which the carriers will enter their bids. This is the carrier response template or CRT.
9. Send the bid to participants.
10. The carriers upload the completed bid response (CRT) into Oracle Transportation Sourcing.
11. The buyer then analyzes bid responses and saves or commits the bids.
12. The buyer then solves the scenario. Or, you can manually adds bids to the scenario.
13. Publishes the awarded bids.
14. Build rates.

For steps detailing the sourcing process for the different transportation modes supported by Oracle Transportation Sourcing, see the following topics:

• Truckload (TL) Flow Overview
• LTL Flow Overview
• Ocean Flow Overview

Other Features

Oracle Transportation Sourcing includes setup capabilities that enable you to configure virtually every step of the sourcing process. Use rule sets, constraints sets, sourcing attributes, and CRT configurations to enable forecasting, application of accessorial costs for special services, and meet other requirements unique to your situation.