Oracle EBS RCD with Major features

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE RELEASE CONTENT DOCUMENT Procurement Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Prepared by Oracle E-Business Suite Product Development Last Updated: April 10, 2015

Copyright © 2011, 2015 Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

1. Disclaimer 1

2. Introduction 2

2.1. Purpose of Document 2

3. New and Changed Features in Procurement 3

3.1. Oracle iProcurement 3 3.1.1. Overview 3 3.1.2. Release 12.1.1 3

3.1.2.1. Change Management for Internal Requisitions 3 3.1.3. Release 12.1.2 3

3.1.3.1. In-line Commodity Classification 3 3.1.4. Release 12.1.3+ 4

3.1.4.1. Information Template Enhancements 4 3.1.4.2. Primary Favorite Charge Account can take Precedence over Employee Charge Account 4 3.1.4.3. Dual Budgetary Control Support 4 3.1.4.4. Attachment Support in Change Order Process 4 3.1.4.5. Account Generator Support in Requisition Import 4 3.1.4.6. Requisition Update PL/SQL API 4 3.1.4.7. Approve Requisitions On-the-Go 4 3.1.4.8. Attachment Support in Desktop Receipts 5 3.1.4.9. Requisition Change Order Enhancements 5 3.1.4.10. Return Selected Requisition lines 5 3.1.4.11. Internal and External Descriptors 5 3.1.4.12. Add Additional Attributes for Direct Punchout 5 3.1.4.13. Search Capability for Smart forms 5

3.1.5. Release 12.2 6 3.1.5.1. Automatic Updates to Encumbrance (GL) Date 6 3.1.5.2. Visibility of Item Master Attachments in Item Search and Detail Pages 6 3.1.5.3. iProcurement One-Step Check Out 6 3.1.5.4. Re-Use Smart Forms across OUs 6 3.1.5.5. Retention of One-time Addresses 6 3.1.5.6. Generation of Default Requisition Need-by Date 6

3.2. Oracle iProcurement Extensions for Oracle Endeca 7 3.2.1. Overview 7 3.2.2. Release 12.1.3+ 7

3.2.2.1. Search All Catalogs 7 3.2.2.2. Advanced Filtering 7 3.2.2.3. Item Comparison 7 3.2.2.4. Easy to Implement and Configure 7

3.2.3. Release V6 8 3.2.3.1. Ratings and Reviews for Items and Services 8 3.2.3.2. Improved Homepage for iProcurement Extensions for Oracle Endeca 8 3.2.3.3. Price Break on Endeca Search Page 8 3.2.3.4. Multi Supplier Catalog Upload 8

3.3. Oracle Mobile iProcurement for Oracle E-Business Suite 9

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document ii

3.3.1. Version 1.1.0 9 3.3.1.1. Mobile Foundation Release 2.1 Updates 9 3.3.1.2. Accessibility Improvements 9

3.3.2. Version 1.2.0 9 3.3.2.1. Android Support 9 3.3.2.2. Mobile Foundation Release 3.0 Updates 9

3.4. Oracle iSupplier Portal 10 3.4.1. Overview 10 3.4.2. Release 12.0.3 (RUP3) 10

3.4.2.1. Forward Port of JFMIP/FSIO from 11.5.10 to R12 for Federal Customers 10 3.4.3. Release 12.1.1 11

3.4.3.1. Dispute Resolution for G-Log Invoices 11 3.4.3.2. AP/AR Netting 11 3.4.3.3. Products and Services Search 11 3.4.3.4. Business Classification Recertification 11 3.4.3.5. Third Party Payments 11

3.4.4. Release 12.1.3 12 3.4.4.1. Work Confirmation Correction 12

3.4.5. Release 12.1.3+ 12 3.4.5.1. Support for Backdated Work Confirmation 12 3.4.5.2. Simplification of the Acknowledgement & Change Request Flow 12

3.4.6. Release 12.2 12 3.4.6.1. Integrate with Oracle Flow Manufacturing to View and Edit E-Kanbans 12 3.4.6.2. Capture Additional Supplier Contact details 12

3.5. Oracle Procurement Contracts 13 3.5.1. Overview 13 3.5.2. Release 12.0.2 (RUP2) 13

3.5.2.1. User-Defined Variables with PL/SQL Procedures as Source 13 3.5.3. Release 12.1.1 13

3.5.3.1. Structured Terms Authoring in Repository Contracts 13 3.5.3.2. Secure Enterprise Search 13 3.5.3.3. Deliverable Payment Holds 14

3.5.4. Release 12.1.2 15 3.5.4.1. Author Individual Clauses in Microsoft Word 15 3.5.4.2. Project Manager Dashboard for Maintenance of Procurement Deliverables 15

3.5.5. Release 12.1.3+ 16 3.5.5.1. Apply Multiple Templates to a Sourcing or Purchasing Document 16 3.5.5.2. APIs for Importing Templates, Rules, Questions and Constants 16 3.5.5.3. New Clause Descriptor Field 16 3.5.5.4. Clause Mandatory Attribute at Rule Level 16 3.5.5.5. Clause Section Placement by Contract Expert 16 3.5.5.6. Deletion of Provisional Sections from Solicitation to Award 17 3.5.5.7. Instruction Text 17 3.5.5.8. Multi-Row Variables 17 3.5.5.9. Display Clause Number and Sort by Clause Number 17 3.5.5.10. Contract Expert History 18 3.5.5.11. Delete Multiple Clauses, Sections and Deliverables 18 3.5.5.12. Defaulting Rules for Contract Administrator 18 3.5.5.13. Purge Process for Repository Contracts 18 3.5.5.14. Rule-based Application of Multiple Templates 18

3.5.6. Release 12.2 18 3.5.6.1. Repository Contracts Configurability Enhancements 18 3.5.6.2. UDA support for Deliverables 19 3.5.6.3. MS Word 2010 Certification 19 3.5.6.4. Contract Expert Performance Improvements 19 3.5.6.5. Repository Contracts Printing Enhancement 19 3.5.6.6. Updating UDA on Approved Contracts 19

3.6. Oracle Purchasing 20 3.6.1. Overview 20

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document iii

3.6.2. Release 12.0.2 (RUP2) 20 3.6.2.1. Integration with Oracle Transportation Management 20 3.6.2.2. iSetup APIs 20

3.6.3. Release 12.0.6 (RUP6) 20 3.6.3.1. Contract Commitments Integration with Self Service Purchasing (Oracle Public Sector Financials International) 20

3.6.4. Release 12.1.1 20 3.6.4.1. PO and Requisition Mass Update 20 3.6.4.2. Enable All Sites for Global Contract Purchase Agreements 21 3.6.4.3. FPDS-NG Integration 21

3.6.5. Release 12.1.2 21 3.6.5.1. Purchase Order Pricing Enhancement 21 3.6.5.2. Project Security within Oracle Purchasing 21 3.6.5.3. Procurement Web Services – Purchasing 22

3.6.6. Release 12.1.3 22 3.6.6.1. Landed Cost Management (LCM) Integration 22 3.6.6.2. Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) Integration 22

3.6.7. Release 12.1.3+ 23 3.6.7.1. Encumbered Document Revisions without Un-reserving Funds 23 3.6.7.2. Approvals Management Engine (AME) for PO Approvals 23 3.6.7.3. Current and Pending Approvers in Action History Region 23 3.6.7.4. Withdrawing Purchase Order after Submitted for Approval 23 3.6.7.5. Configurable Notification in Purchase Order 23 3.6.7.6. Outside Processing Lines in Global Blanket Agreements (GBPAs) 24 3.6.7.7. Support for Importing Complex Purchase Orders 24 3.6.7.8. New ASL APIs 24 3.6.7.9. Buyer Work Center Session Preferences 24 3.6.7.10. Purchasing Document Open Interface (PDOI) Enhancements 24 3.6.7.11. PO Business Service Object (BSO) Webservices 24 3.6.7.12. Lead-Time based Promised Date calculation 24 3.6.7.13. Approve Purchase Orders On-the-Go 25 3.6.7.14. Support for Firm Orders Referencing GBPA in Supplier Scheduling 25

3.6.8. Release 12.2 25 3.6.8.1. Automatic Updates to Encumbrance (GL) Date 25 3.6.8.2. Support for Additional Extension Hooks 25 3.6.8.3. Spreadsheet based authoring of PO Lines 25 3.6.8.4. Support for Oracle Process Manufacturing Outside Processing Items 26 3.6.8.5. Enhancements to PO Business Service Object (BSO) Webservices 26

3.7. Oracle Mobile Procurement for Oracle E-Business Suite 27 3.7.1. Version 1.1.0 27

3.7.1.1. Mobile Foundation Updates 27 3.7.1.2. Accessibility Improvements 27

3.7.2. Version 1.2.0 27 3.7.2.1. Android Support 27 3.7.2.2. Mobile Foundation Release 3.0 Updates 27

3.8. Oracle Services Procurement 28 3.8.1. Overview 28 3.8.2. Release 12.1.1 28

3.8.2.1. Time Reporting and Contractor Assignment Flexibility 28 3.8.3. Release 12.1.2 28

3.8.3.1. Oracle Projects – Work Confirmations 28 3.8.4. Release 12.2 29

3.8.4.1. Advances, Recoupment and Retainage for Standard Purchase Orders 29 3.8.4.2. Support for Inventory Destinations in Complex Purchase Orders 29 3.8.4.3. Support for Job Standardization and Benchmarking 29

3.9. Oracle Sourcing 30 3.9.1. Overview 30 3.9.2. Release 12.1.1 30

3.9.2.1. Two Stage Evaluation of RFP 30 Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document iv

3.9.2.2. Two Stage RFQ – Surrogate Bids 30 3.9.2.3. Supplier Response PDF 30 3.9.2.4. Enhanced Spreadsheet Support 31 3.9.2.5. Countdown Clock 32 3.9.2.6. Price Tier Enhancements 32 3.9.2.7. Cost Factor Enhancements 32

3.9.3. Release 12.1.2 32 3.9.3.1. Earnest Money Deposit 32

3.9.4. Release 12.1.3 33 3.9.4.1. Requester Field in the Sourcing Header 33 3.9.4.2. Descriptive Flex Field (DFF) in Oracle Sourcing Header 34 3.9.4.3. Landed Cost Management (LCM) Integration 34

3.9.5. Release 12.1.3+ 35 3.9.5.1. Online Discussions Attachments 35 3.9.5.2. Terms and Conditions Controls 35 3.9.5.3. Lot Price Summation 35 3.9.5.4. Delete Supervisor from Collaboration Team 35 3.9.5.5. Sort and Delete Suppliers from Invited Suppliers Page 35

3.9.6. Release 12.2 36 3.9.6.1. Add Requisition lines to a Draft Negotiation (RFx & Auction) 36 3.9.6.2. Response Withdrawal 36 3.9.6.3. Track Amendment Acknowledgements 36 3.9.6.4. Staggered Awards 36 3.9.6.5. Import of Price Breaks 36 3.9.6.6. Negative Cost Factors 36 3.9.6.7. Sourcing APIs 37 3.9.6.8. Mass Update of Buyers 37 3.9.6.9. Surrogate Quotes for Suppliers without an User Account 37 3.9.6.10. Multiple Active Offers 37 3.9.6.11. Alternate Lines 37 3.9.6.12. Sourcing Initiatives 37

3.10. Oracle Sourcing Optimization 39 3.10.1. Overview 39 3.10.2. Release 12.1.1 39

3.10.2.1. Sourcing Optimization Enhancements 39 3.10.2.2. Price Tier Optimization 39 3.10.2.3. Supplier Incentives 40

3.11. Oracle Spend Classification 41 3.11.1. Overview 41 3.11.2. Release 12.1.2 42

3.11.2.1. Integration with Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics 7.9.6 42 3.11.2.2. Knowledge Base Creation and Incremental Updates 42 3.11.2.3. Multiple Knowledge Bases 42 3.11.2.4. Easy to Use User Interface 42 3.11.2.5. Export and Import to Excel 43 3.11.2.6. Ability to Classify Data into Multiple Taxonomies 43 3.11.2.7. In-line Commodity Classification 43

3.11.3. Release 12.2 43 3.11.3.1. Reclassify Historical Data 43 3.11.3.2. Asynchronous Approval Flow 43 3.11.3.3. Enhanced Training Data Upload 43 3.11.3.4. Enhanced Tracking Capabilities 44 3.11.3.5. Improvements in Analyzing Batches and Excel to Export 44 3.11.3.6. Increased Flexibility in Resetting Data 44 3.11.3.7. Delete Classification Batch 44 3.11.3.8. Run Classification on Selected Transactions 44 3.11.3.9. Simplified User Interface 45 3.11.3.10. Prevent Reset of Transactions in Classified, Unapproved Batches 45

3.12. Oracle Supplier Hub 46 Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document v

3.12.1. Overview 46 3.12.2. Release 12.1.3 46

3.13. Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management 47 3.13.1. Overview 47 3.13.2. Release 12.1.1+ 47

3.13.2.1. 360° Supplier View 47 3.13.2.2. Supplier Search 47 3.13.2.3. Supplier Profile Management (including Self-Service) 48 3.13.2.4. Extended Supplier Profile 48 3.13.2.5. Registration and On-Boarding of New Suppliers 48 3.13.2.6. Qualification Management 49 3.13.2.7. Compliance and Profile Audits 49 3.13.2.8. Performance Evaluation 49 3.13.2.9. Supplier Notifications 50

3.13.3. Release 12.1.3+ 50 3.13.3.1. Mandatory Internal Requirements 50 3.13.3.2. Associate Address to Contacts 50 3.13.3.3. Keyword Search 50 3.13.3.4. Default User Creation 50 3.13.3.5. Reinstate a Rejected Supplier Request 51 3.13.3.6. Registration Approval Workflow Enhancements 51 3.13.3.7. Streamlined Prospective Supplier Registration Process 51 3.13.3.8. View Prospective Supplier Registration Status 51 3.13.3.9. Pre-Qualification Template & Dependent Questions 51

3.13.4. Release 12.2 52 3.13.4.1. Registration Approval Workflow Enhancements 52 3.13.4.2. Approval History on Supplier Profile 52 3.13.4.3. Automated Assessment Process 52 3.13.4.4. Dynamic Invitation List 52 3.13.4.5. Sequential and Parallel Routing of Scoring 53 3.13.4.6. Update Evaluation after Submission 53

3.14. Oracle Supplier Network 54 3.14.1. Overview 54 3.14.2. Version 5.0 54

3.14.2.1. Consolidated Hub Administration 54 3.14.2.2. Production Routing Controls 54 3.14.2.3. UTF-8 Support 54

3.15. Oracle Supply Command Center 55 3.15.1. Overview 55 3.15.2. Release V6 55

3.15.2.1. Procurement Operations Dashboard 55 3.15.2.2. Indirect Procurement Dashboard 56 3.15.2.3. Action Items 56 3.15.2.4. Item Analysis 56 3.15.2.5. Supplier Analysis 56

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document vi

1. Disclaimer This Release Content Document (RCD) describes product features that are proposed for the specified releases of the Oracle E-Business Suite. This document describes new or changed functionality only. Existing functionality from prior releases is not described. It is intended solely to help you assess the business benefits of upgrading to the specified release of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information that is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential material is subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle Software License and Service Agreement, which has been executed and with which you agree to comply. This document and information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or distributed to anyone outside Oracle without prior written consent of Oracle. This document is not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.

This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all features described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the code.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document 1

2. Introduction

2.1. Purpose of Document This Release Content Document (RCD) communicates information about new or changed functionality introduced in Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2, and in subsequent Release Update Packs (RUPs) and off-cycle patches. For your convenience, it also includes new or changed functionality introduced in the RUPs for Release 12, including 12.0.2 through 12.0.7.

The features and enhancements described in this document are grouped by product, and then by the release in which they first became available, for example, “Release 12.1.1”. Features released in an off-cycle patch have a special designation – for example, a feature released after 12.1.3, but before 12.2, is designated as “Release 12.1.3+”.


3. New and Changed Features in Procurement

3.1. Oracle iProcurement 3.1.1. Overview

Oracle iProcurement is the self-service requisitioning application that controls employee spending. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts all supply management costs.

3.1.2. Release 12.1.1

3.1.2.1. Change Management for Internal Requisitions

In Release 12.1.1, processing for internal orders has been enhanced to offer additional and better-coordinated change management capabilities. Now, quantity or date information can be updated by either the Requesting or Fulfillment organization and the updates will be accurately reflected on both the internal requisition and the internal sales order. In addition, support is now provided for the cancellation of internal transfer requests. All of these changes will now be visible throughout the planning, purchasing and order fulfillment workbenches.

A requester can update Quantity and Need-By Date of an approved internal requisition. If desired, tolerances can be set for automatic approval of updates made to the internal requisition.

Many new synchronization features are provided. Quantity and Need-By Date changes on the internal requisition line are automatically propagated to the internal sales order and vice versa. Cascading of an internal sales order Schedule Ship/Arrival date with the internal requisition is may be controlled through a profile option. Cancellation of an internal requisition/line will automatically cancel the corresponding internal sales order/line and vice versa. And finally, the urgent flag on the internal requisition line will flow onto the internal sales order line as the shipment priority, based on a profile option setting.

3.1.3. Release 12.1.2

3.1.3.1. In-line Commodity Classification

At times, requesters may need to order off catalog and create a Non-Catalog Request. When requesters describe the purchase, there is a high likelihood of it not being classified into an existing commodity hierarchy. This increases misclassification of spend information, contract leakage, lower compliance and internal controls.

In R12.1.1 onwards, requesters creating Non-Catalog Requests will have the option of category being predicted for the purchase being made. After the requester clicks on “Add to Cart” they will be able to view a “suggested best fit” category with a list of categories that could be alternate possibilities. The same window can also be used to parse the complete Category hierarchy. This approach uses the Oracle Spend Classification in real-time to assess the category of what the requester is ordering. The requester merely picks the purchasing category and continues checking out. This capability allows even unstructured requests to be categorized appropriately, aiding downstream spend analysis.

This feature has a prerequisite of Oracle Spend Classification.


3.1.4. Release 12.1.3+

3.1.4.1. Information Template Enhancements

Oracle iProcurement now stores eligible information template information (of size 4000 bytes or less) as long-text attachments and offers a preview display for data stored through information templates. The Attachment icon in the Requisition Summary and Buyer Work Center pages displays a preview pop-up upon mouse-over for requesters and buyers.

3.1.4.2. Primary Favorite Charge Account can take Precedence over Employee Charge Account

Employees can define Favorite Charge Accounts in iProcurement Preferences, and can mark one of those accounts as the Primary Favorite. iProcurement uses a series of rules to generate charge accounts during the checkout process. Under certain circumstances, iProcurement gets the charge account from the employee record in HR. But if that is not specified, it defaults to the Primary Favorite. However, if an employee needs the Primary Favorite to override the charge account on their HR record, they can now do so with the ‘Override Employee Charge Account’ preference in iProcurement.

3.1.4.3. Dual Budgetary Control Support

An enabled dual budgetary control allows iProcurement users to specify the accounting date on which they want to encumber funds. This gives users more flexibility in creating documents involving transactions that spawn multiple fiscal years.

3.1.4.4. Attachment Support in Change Order Process

iProcurement users can now add an attachment when requesting a change on a Requisition that has been converted to a Purchase Order. Approvers and buyers will be able to view the attachment. Attachments marked with the category “To Supplier” will also be visible to suppliers after the revised Purchase Order is approved.

3.1.4.5. Account Generator Support in Requisition Import

Requisition Import Process now calls Account Generator Workflow to generate charge accounts for requisitions that are being created. When inserting requisitions into the Requisitions Interface, users can leave the charge account columns blank, and the system will then trigger account generator workflow to default these fields.

3.1.4.6. Requisition Update PL/SQL API

Using a new public API, third-party systems can now update an incomplete or an approved requisition that has not yet been placed on a Purchase Order. The Requisition Update API allows for the addition or update of requisition lines and distributions. The API can also submit the requisition for approval once the updates have been made.

This feature is forward ported to 12.2.4.

3.1.4.7. Approve Requisitions On-the-Go

Oracle Mobile Approvals for Oracle E-Business Suite is a smartphone application that lets employees and managers respond on-the-go to pending approval requests. From their phone, anywhere and anytime, employees and managers can take quick action on approval requests for expenses, requisitions, purchase orders, recruitment vacancies and offers, and more.


Employees can quickly filter approval requests by sender or subject, review header and line details, action history and comments, and respond back with their approval or rejection, right from their smartphone.


For a full description, refer to the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Release Content Document.

3.1.4.8. Attachment Support in Desktop Receipts

iProcurement users can now add attachments during receipt, return and correction of created receipts for items/services. Receiver and Payables in-charge will be able to view the attachments added to the created receipts. Attachments created with the category “To Payables” will be visible to the Payables in-charge during invoice matching.


3.1.4.9. Requisition Change Order Enhancements

Oracle iProcurement users will be informed if the buyer on the Purchase Order is inactive during change request submission. Further, Buyer’s Manager will be notified if the requester proceeds and submits a change request where in the buyer is inactive. Also buyers will be notified if a PO exception exists (like Supplier Site Inactive, Supplier is on hold, etc) during change request acceptance.


3.1.4.10. Return Selected Requisition lines

At times, several buyers may work on the same requisition but different requisition lines based on their specialties or categories. With this enhancement, buyers can select one or more requisition lines and return them to the requesters mentioning the reason. Requesters will be notified about the returned requisition lines so that they can take the appropriate action.


3.1.4.11. Internal and External Descriptors

Organizations can now define descriptors as an Internal or External. While Buyers would have access to both the Internal and External Descriptors, a Supplier will get visibility only to the External Descriptors. Suppliers cannot view or update Internal Descriptors even though they may have access to BPAs (Enable Supplier Authoring for BPAs).


3.1.4.12. Add Additional Attributes for Direct Punchout

Oracle iProcurement provides a custom hook that can provide additional user details like user id, location, cost center etc during a Punchout to the supplier site. This helps the Supplier to show the relevant content to the user based on user credentials.


3.1.4.13. Search Capability for Smart forms

A capability to search for smart forms across Operating Units using the Smart Form Name, Operating Unit, Item Type, Item Category, Template or additional conditions is now provided with Oracle iProcurement.



3.1.5. Release 12.2

3.1.5.1. Automatic Updates to Encumbrance (GL) Date

Requesters specify an Encumbrance Date for each distribution against a line at the time of creating requisitions. If this date is within a closed period, and is hence invalid, then the application can automatically update the date to the current date. This feature requires a profile value setting to be activated.

3.1.5.2. Visibility of Item Master Attachments in Item Search and Detail Pages

While viewing the details of the item after having searched for them in the store, iProcurement users will now be able to see attachments associated with the Item Master for those items. This will enable users to gain access to item attachments like design specifications etc, and thus better equip them to choose the right product to order.

3.1.5.3. iProcurement One-Step Check Out

iProcurement now offers a simplified shopping experience by reducing the number of steps needed for the creation of a requisition.

Users can easily view the contents in their shopping cart and submit the requisition with a single click. Power users, interested in a detailed review of the Requisition or needing to make changes, can now do so in a single requisition detail page before submitting for approval.

3.1.5.4. Re-Use Smart Forms across OUs

Oracle iProcurement allows catalog administrators to configure smart forms once and enable them to be available to requesters in multiple operating units, or requesters having access to specific responsibilities. If the Smart Form format is similar across multiple OUs, then it is no longer required to create a Smart Form for each OU. Users can just create the Smart Form once and assign it to multiple OUs, which would then share same template for the specific information.

3.1.5.5. Retention of One-time Addresses

Oracle iProcurement now has the provision to save ‘one-time addresses for re-use later. Once an address is saved, user has the option to pick one of these previously saved addresses or create a new one when the user needs to enter a one-time address in Oracle iProcurement. A provision is provided to manage the saved “one-time addresses” thru the iProcurement Preference.

3.1.5.6. Generation of Default Requisition Need-by Date

Oracle iProcurement now provides the Requestor a default Need-by Date at the time of creating a requisition which is based on lead time derived either from the BPA lead time or Item Lead time. This provides the Requester a reliable and realistic need by date for priority shipping, which the user can change to one of their choice. Application provides a warning to the Requestor if the selected Need-By Date is earlier than the System recommended one.


3.2. Oracle iProcurement Extensions for Oracle Endeca 3.2.1. Overview

Employee search against catalogs is one of the most critical activities in iProcurement, influencing adoption, user satisfaction, and the amount of buying activity that can be automated. Endeca technology used in conjunction with iProcurement provides a powerful new approach to search, while retaining the robust policies, controls, and integrations built into iProcurement.

Expanded catalogs can be loaded to capture contract savings without adding complexity to the shopping experience. Maverick spending is reduced, and non-catalog requisitions for catalog items are minimized, further streamlining the process and reducing procurement involvement.

Endeca functionality replaces the iProcurement home page while the shopping cart and subsequent checkout with integration, accounting, and approvals remain unchanged. Key product features are described below.

3.2.2. Release 12.1.3+

3.2.2.1. Search All Catalogs

Universal Search allows employees to immediately search for their desired item without having to first choose the appropriate catalog. All catalog content is queried including catalogs hosted by punch-out suppliers. Search displays results from every eligible source regardless of where data is hosted, and search results are displayed with remarkable speed.

3.2.2.2. Advanced Filtering

Filters allow employees to target desired choices. Default filters include supplier name, source contract, and shopping category. Guided Navigation filters display for items that share similar category attributes. For example, Display Size may appear as a filter when shopping for computer monitors.

3.2.2.3. Item Comparison

With a few clicks employees can evaluate items and detailed item attributes side-by- side. Just as with the search engine, item comparison also enables comparison between items from different catalogs or suppliers. Item comparison allows employees to feel confident they have identified the best product at the best price.

3.2.2.4. Easy to Implement and Configure

Items from Supplier punch-out catalogs may be refreshed in the “search catalog” as often as needed. If desired, items that originate in supplier punch-out catalogs can require the user to navigate to the supplier’s item page for further information. Requiring navigation to the supplier’s item page may be required for items that have add-on configuration, volatile availability, calculated pricing, or specification sheets that employees must reference prior to making a purchase decision.


3.2.3. Release V6

3.2.3.1. Ratings and Reviews for Items and Services

Oracle iProcurement Extensions for Endeca provides capability to provide ratings and reviews for catalog items and services. This ratings and review helps the users to get recommendations on the best products or services to buy that match requester’s need. In addition, the ratings and reviews will be accessed by buyers as well. Hence the ratings and reviews are not only to help the requesters to help each other with well-rated items or services; it is about enabling the user community to provide feedback about the purchased item or service to the buyer. Ratings and review feature provides tremendous value for organizations where item and supplier ratings will be monitored and addresses any problems that are brought up in a review.

In addition to this feature, now requesters can provide feedback or suggestions to buyer. Buyer can access the feedback or suggestions given by requester and provide comments. Buyers can also take necessary steps to address the requester’s feedback or suggestions. This improves the communication between requesters and buyers.

3.2.3.2. Improved Homepage for iProcurement Extensions for Oracle Endeca

Oracle iProcurement Extensions for Endeca now offers an enhanced homepage to get a better look and feel. Further, it helps the requesters to look or perform their regular activities from the home page itself without much navigating into the application. The intention is to help users to complete task even more quickly and easily.

Key features include:

• The search box is expanded to enter multi-word keyword search without hiding any text.

• Frequently Requested Items or Services are shown up front so that requesters can select the item or service and add to cart from homepage itself.

• Requesters can find the recent requisitions which are created in the homepage itself. • Organizations can show the purchasing policies to the requesters in the homepage.

3.2.3.3. Price Break on Endeca Search Page

Requesters now have the visibility to determine whether Price Break is available for the searched item or service, along with additional details, directly in the search results.

3.2.3.4. Multi Supplier Catalog Upload

Oracle iProcurement now supports multi supplier catalog upload allowing a catalog administrator to upload catalogs from multiple supplier at same time, thus increasing the efficiency of the Catalog Upload process.


3.3. Oracle Mobile iProcurement for Oracle E-Business Suite With Oracle Mobile iProcurement for Oracle E-Business Suite, employees can monitor their requisitions and take actions on the go.

• Track my requisitions for approval and delivery status

• View requisition, approvers, lines and shipments

• Monitor alerts for approval rejections, returns and shipment delays

• Collaborate in transaction context using device features such as email, phone and text

Oracle Mobile iProcurement for Oracle E-Business Suite is compatible with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 and 12.2.3 and above. To use this app, you must be a user of Oracle iProcurement, with mobile services configured on the server side by your administrator.

3.3.1. Version 1.1.0

3.3.1.1. Mobile Foundation Release 2.1 Updates

• Improvements in login and configuration flow

• Ability to change the URL without having to reinstall the app

• Diagnostics Improvements

3.3.1.2. Accessibility Improvements

Improvements were made in the requisition details page, related information item card, contextual tab bar and person contact card.

3.3.2. Version 1.2.0

3.3.2.1. Android Support

In previous versions, Oracle Mobile iProcurement for Oracle E-Business Suite was available only for iOS devices. Starting with version 1.2.0, the app is now available for Android devices as well.


• Changes to support both iOS and Android on the same client-code

• Ability to update server URL from Connection Details page


3.4. Oracle iSupplier Portal 3.4.1. Overview

Oracle iSupplier Portal is the enterprise application that structures all supplier communication through a secure, Internet-based portal. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts all supply management costs.

3.4.2. Release 12.0.3 (RUP3)

3.4.2.1. Forward Port of JFMIP/FSIO from 11.5.10 to R12 for Federal Customers

This feature addresses the delta between 11.5.10 functionality and R12 functionality, related to meeting the requirements given by JFMIP in 2004 for iSupplier Portal. The following iSupplier Portal pages are impacted:

3.4.2.1.1. Supplier Search Page

The DUNS number is available at the supplier site level for CCR Suppliers. A user can retrieve distinct supplier records while performing the search using the DUNS Number.

3.4.2.1.2. Organization Page

A CCR Supplier indicator was provided on the Organization page. If the supplier is a CCR Supplier, then the Taxpayer ID, DUNS Number and SIC attributes, and Bank Account tab are rendered view-only.

3.4.2.1.3. Manage Sites Page / Update Address Page

In the Update Address page for CCR Suppliers, the attributes Country, Address Lines, City, State, Postal Code, Province, DUNS Number, and Pay Site are view-only.

A new attribute, DUNS Number, was added and displayed in the Identification tab within the Manage Sites page, for Federal Financials installations. If the supplier site is a CCR supplier site, the user cannot update this field.

The newly added icon “View CCR Supplier” allows the user to access the General Information page from the federal application, to view CCR supplier site-specific data.

3.4.2.1.4. Tax Details Page

An indicative comment was provided on the tax details page; it identifies the Tax Details of a CCR vendor.

3.4.2.1.5. Bank Details Page

A CCR indicator appears when the assignment level is Supplier Site, and if the site is a CCR site. For a CCR Site, adding new bank accounts, modifying any bank, branch or account information, changing the priority of bank accounts and update bank account number is not possible.

3.4.2.1.6. Invoice Management page

A descriptive comment “CCR Site” was added to the Invoice Management page.


3.4.3. Release 12.1.1

3.4.3.1. Dispute Resolution for G-Log Invoices

In situations where suppliers include sundry charges on a G-Log invoice, it is not uncommon for the buying organization to hold the invoice in order that the buyer can review any discrepancies between the invoice and the original Purchase Order. Depending on the nature of the additional charges, the buyer and supplier may negotiate a compromise and adjust the invoice accordingly.

When such disputes occur, it is important that the supplier is able to log and track all activities for a particular invoice. To better help suppliers in these situations, new fields have been added to the View Invoice page so that the supplier can see the original value for their invoice and the reason for the discrepancy.

3.4.3.2. AP/AR Netting

It is a common business practice in many industries to both purchase products or services from a trading partner and sell products or services to the same trading partner. In cases like this companies often offset payable and receivable invoices so that only the net difference is paid or received. This saves you and your trading partners the expenses associated with making multiple payments.

The new feature will give iSupplier Portal users visibility into the AP/AR netting activity, so they can easily see which invoices will be paid standalone, which invoices will be offset against receivable transactions, and which groups of invoices will be paid by a single payment. On the View Invoices and Payments pages, if a particular invoice has been netted, the users will be able to see the Netted Amount and the Reckoning Currency. Furthermore, the users will be able to drill down to the Netting Report, which will show all transactions that are a part of the netting batch.

3.4.3.3. Products and Services Search

A new search tool has been added to the Products and Services section of the Supplier Profile to make it much easier for suppliers and administrators to find and select the goods or services categories that identify a supplier's capabilities. This is especially useful for those customers that have an extensive Products and Services hierarchy with many thousands of individual categories from which to choose.

The new feature is available within both the Profile Management pages for existing suppliers and the prospective supplier registration flow.

3.4.3.4. Business Classification Recertification

For those businesses required to track the business classification details of their suppliers, it has always been a challenge to keep this information up to date to the satisfaction of auditors. Now, a recertification tool has been added to the Business Classification section of the Supplier Profile that tracks the "Last Update" date for the supplier's classification details and allows administrators to schedule reminder notifications to be sent to each supplier as this information becomes due.

This feature significantly reduces risk and administrative burden for buying organizations because they will no longer need to manage the recertification process manually.

3.4.3.5. Third Party Payments

Third party payments help parties engaged in business set off their liabilities without directly paying them. This reduces the direct funds movements and enables transactions to be settled easily. When customers are making payments from their Payables system,


there might be instructions from the supplier to make payment to a different party (Third Party). In that case the remittance of the payment has to be made to the Third Party.

Establishing Third Party Payment relationship can be done from iSupplier Portal. Suppliers can add a new relationship and find and update existing relationships.

3.4.4. Release 12.1.3

3.4.4.1. Work Confirmation Correction

At times, there may be a need to correct a previously approved work confirmation in order to adjust a payment to a supplier. This capability enables a buyer to reduce the scope of the original work confirmation, when an error is made during data entry for the work confirmation. Work Confirmation Correction is possible via Purchasing Professional Buyers Work Center and iSupplier Portal internal view. Buyers can be granted the additional authority to make corrections as needed. Buyers that are granted this authority will be able to make corrections to approved Work Confirmation.

3.4.5. Release 12.1.3+

3.4.5.1. Support for Backdated Work Confirmation

Often Suppliers and Buyers are required to create work confirmation for inspection of work that had been requested in the past and now has been completed. System now allows the Buying organization and Suppliers to create Work confirmations with the Request date being in the past.


3.4.5.2. Simplification of the Acknowledgement & Change Request Flow

The Acknowledgement and Change Request flow within iSupplier Portal has been simplified to streamline the entire flow by getting rid of unwarranted steps or actions on the part of the user. This has resulted in simplifying the Actions a user is able to perform on Change Requests as well as has made the PO Status more intuitive when a Buyer rejects a Change Request. Now Suppliers will be able to view the Buyer’s reasons for cancellation of a shipment while partially acknowledged Orders will not be made available to Buyers for responding.

This feature will be forward ported to 12.2.5.

3.4.6. Release 12.2

3.4.6.1. Integrate with Oracle Flow Manufacturing to View and Edit E-Kanbans

Oracle iSupplier Portal integrates with the E-Kanban feature of Oracle Flow Manufacturing. Suppliers can now use iSupplier Portal to view a summary of their E-Kanbans and update the status on their E-Kanbans.

For more information, consult the Manufacturing RCD.

3.4.6.2. Capture Additional Supplier Contact details

Oracle iSupplier Portal now offers the following set of additional fields to capture Supplier Contact Information: URL, Alternate Contact Name, Alternate Area Code, and Alternate Phone Extension. Prospective suppliers will now be able to use these fields during registration. Buyers will be able to enter / update these fields for each contact on the Supplier Profile. Supplier users will also be able to update these fields while submitting a profile change request.


3.5. Oracle Procurement Contracts 3.5.1. Overview

Oracle Procurement Contracts is the enterprise application that creates and enforces better purchasing contracts. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts supply management costs.

3.5.2. Release 12.0.2 (RUP2)

3.5.2.1. User-Defined Variables with PL/SQL Procedures as Source

Procurement Contracts supports the concept of system and user-defined variables that can be embedded in clause text or used in Contract Expert rules. System variables are defined by the application and the values are sourced from attributes on the Oracle Purchasing and Sourcing documents (e.g. payment terms). User-defined variables are defined in Contract Terms Library and the values are provided by users when they author contract terms and conditions.

Contracts customers have requested the ability to create user-defined variables whose values can be sourced from descriptive flex fields, custom tables, or even a Purchase Agreement or RFQ that are not supported as system variables. With RUP2, user-defined variable values can now be sourced from any data source. The data source is encapsulated as a custom PL/SQL procedure that is associated to the user-defined variable definition. As a user authors contract terms and conditions, the system will automatically obtain the values from the data source eliminating the need for users to manually enter them.

3.5.3. Release 12.1.1

3.5.3.1. Structured Terms Authoring in Repository Contracts

The Contracts Repository module enables customers to easily manage all their contracts online. It provides basic contract management capabilities and global, secure visibility to key stakeholders. Users can create Repository contracts by capturing key attributes about the contract such as contract party, dates, amount, etc., and managing the document files associated with the contract. Users can also track key deliverables and contract expiration.

With Release 12.1.1, users can now author structured terms and conditions while creating a Repository contract. These terms are based on standard templates, clauses and policies defined in the contract terms library. Users can also use the Contract Expert feature to bring in additional clauses that may be required based on the business terms of the particular contract. The contract can then be printed for signature, or exported to Microsoft Word for redlining/collaboration with the external party. The deviations report functionality will provide a quick overview of all policy violations in the contract.

Structured terms authoring promotes standards based contract authoring and reduces the overall time-to-contract. Risks associated with non-standard contracts are mitigated by ensuring approvers have visibility to all policy violations.

3.5.3.2. Secure Enterprise Search

Business and legal users sometimes wish to locate contracts containing a certain word or phrase. Oracle Procurement Contracts now leverages Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search to better search against procurement, sales, and repository contracts. Business and legal users can perform full-text queries in conjunction with structured data queries.


Secure Enterprise Search provides flexibility to match user-entered keywords to search both structured text, such as contract terms, and unstructured text, such as text contained in attached documents. Additional structured contract attributes may be used to further refine the search, and include: contract number, contract name, supplier/customer/party name, contract status, start date, and end date.

This feature requires licensing of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES).

3.5.3.3. Deliverable Payment Holds

Engineering and Construction (E&C) firms have unique requirements regarding subcontractor management, subcontractor payment, and customer billing. “Pay When Paid” is a payment term common in this industry, where sub-contractors are not paid until the customer pays the general contractor. In addition, it is sometimes necessary to require subcontractors to maintain specified insurance coverage and other work related certifications. The general contractor frequently reserves the right to withhold payments to subcontractors until proof of insurance or proof of certifications has been provided. The following features enable users to track such requirements and to automate the payment hold process.

This feature requires additional products to be licensed for full functionality described below, including Financials and Services Procurement.

3.5.3.3.1. Payment Hold Deliverables

Tracking insurance and certification requirements is often a cumbersome and manual process. Deliverables will be used to track these requirements. Initiate Payment Holds functionality will provide users the ability to initiate payment holds on all future invoices when a deliverable approaches its due date or when a deliverable becomes overdue. For example, a subcontractor may be required to be licensed yearly. To ensure that licensing happens, the buyer or project manager can define a deliverable to hold all payments if the subcontractor fails to renew his license.

3.5.3.3.2. Payables Integration

In Release 12.1.1, new hold and release reasons are seeded in Oracle Payables. A “PO Deliverable” hold can be placed on all supplier invoices that are matched to a purchase order that has a deliverable with payment hold terms and is nearly due or is overdue.

Releases may be automatic or manual. A concurrent process automates the release of PO Deliverable Payment holds. The process is submitted automatically when the user updates the Due Date for a deliverable that is within the defined payment hold terms. Project managers can also use the Subcontractor Payment Management Workbench to manage Deliverables. A Payment Hold Status and Payment Indicator allow users to quickly see whether all deliverables have been met and determine whether payments can be made to the subcontractor. Project managers can override the automatic payment holds caused by overdue purchase order deliverables.

3.5.3.3.3. Support for Pay When Paid Scenarios

Many construction firms adhere to a “Pay when Paid” policy for subcontract agreements, in order to manage cash flow for a project. Specifically, construction companies will hold the payment of subcontractor bills until the construction firm has been paid by the owner. Now, a Pay when Paid payment term may be specified for a subcontract to automatically result in the placing of holds on all subcontractor invoices under that subcontract until the corresponding customer payment is received.


A new Subcontract Payment Controls workbench allows the project manager to manage these holds, with visibility into both the customer invoices and the associated subcontractor invoices. Alerted by workflow notifications once the customer payment is received, the project manager can then choose to automatically or manually release the corresponding subcontractor invoices. The associations between the customer invoices and the subcontractor invoices may be automatically maintained based on the billing of project expenditures in the case of a cost-plus contract, or manually maintained for fixed price contract scenarios.

3.5.4. Release 12.1.2

3.5.4.1. Author Individual Clauses in Microsoft Word

Legal clauses are typically managed in Word documents. Organizations using Oracle E-Business Suite for their enterprise contract management need to be able to create and update clauses using a rich text editor such as Microsoft Word.

With 12.1.2, users can directly create and edit the clauses in Microsoft Word leveraging additional formatting features. Importing clause text from Microsoft Word and exporting clause text to Microsoft Word for edit have been incorporated into both the Contract Terms Library and the Contract Authoring Flow. The following formats will be preserved as defined in Microsoft Word:

• Bold, italic, text color, and underlines • Standard bullets available in Word • Numbering schemes (roman numerals, alphabets, numbers) and their indents

including hanging indents • List items with non-numbered text between them • Indent and tabs (Tab spacing/width is determined based on style sheet

information) • Line spacing • Text alignment (left, right, and center justification) • Table formatting • Hyperlinks, page breaks, and symbols defined in Unicode

This feature requires Microsoft Word Professional 2003 or later.

3.5.4.2. Project Manager Dashboard for Maintenance of Procurement Deliverables

A new feature in Release 12.1.1 provided support for the tracking and monitoring of subcontract deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case of non-compliance. For example, if a subcontractor fails to provide their insurance certificate in a timely fashion per the subcontract terms, holds are automatically placed on incoming invoices based on the contractual deliverable. Upon complying, the hold is released.

Also in 12.1.1, a new Payment Controls Workbench in Oracle Projects allows the project manager to view a checklist of all subcontract deliverables to assist in evaluating the subcontractor status prior to releasing monthly progress payments.

Project managers are frequently responsible for subcontractor management. In 12.1.2, the Payment Controls Workbench has been enhanced to allow project managers to directly update subcontract deliverables. A project manager with proper security privileges can update existing deliverables or define new deliverables to track future subcontractor obligations. A project manager can also apply payment holds even when the “Pay when Paid” attribute has not been checked.


This feature has a prerequisite of Oracle Projects.

3.5.5. Release 12.1.3+

3.5.5.1. Apply Multiple Templates to a Sourcing or Purchasing Document

A buyer or contract administrator may apply a contract template to quickly draft a compliant legal contract as part of a Sourcing or Purchasing document. A contract template may include internal and supplier deliverables to encourage execution of a standardized and complete process. Now the buyer may add multiple templates to these contracts. All clauses and deliverables from new templates flow into the document. Each template that has been applied can be viewed as part of the contract record, for easy identification by a buyer or contract administrator.

Contract Expert rules specified in the original template continue to govern exclusively. For instance, if a new template is added that contains Contract Expert rules these rules will not be retained as part of the contract.

3.5.5.2. APIs for Importing Templates, Rules, Questions and Constants

Migrating elements from the Contract Terms Library from one environment to another is sometimes necessary, for instance to graduate templates and rules created in a test instance into production. Once created in a test instance, it can be time-consuming to reproduce these rules in production.

Now, interfaces (APIs) can be used by technical staff to efficiently upload and create new entities. New APIs include:

• Templates • Rules, and • Questions and Constants

APIs can be used to create new entities and update existing templates and rules. These APIs return error and warning messages to simplify troubleshooting.

3.5.5.3. New Clause Descriptor Field

A clause descriptor field displays on the Contract Template, Rules Definition and Contract Terms pages. This field can be updated from Contract template and Rules definitions page. This field is hidden by default, and references a user-defined lookup for the list of values.

3.5.5.4. Clause Mandatory Attribute at Rule Level

Now it is possible to specify if a clause suggested by the Contract Expert is mandatory or optional when defining a rule.

If undefined at the clause level, the template level setup will be used to determine whether a Contract Expert suggested clause should be added as mandatory or optional.

3.5.5.5. Clause Section Placement by Contract Expert

Today when a clause is added to a contract via Contract Expert, it is added to the default section. Now, contract administrators have the flexibility to add the clause to different sections based on attributes of the contract.

When creating a clause, the contract administrator may insert a variable such as the contract printing format (see image below). The user can now define the appropriate section for a clause based on variable values. When the clause is added to the document


by the Contract Expert, the clause will get added to the section based on the value of the variable of the document.

Fig.1: Buyer Analysis of Bid Responses from Suppliers

3.5.5.6. Deletion of Provisional Sections from Solicitation to Award

There are a number of clauses which are specific to a sourcing (Solicitation) document and should not move onto the final contract. These are called Provisional Clauses.

Now, the user can indicate that certain sections are provisional. Provisional Sections and their clauses do not flow to the award document when the award contract is created from the solicitation document.

3.5.5.7. Instruction Text

The clauses in a document may contain URLs of external websites where additional information is available. One can add the destination URL in the instruction text of the clause with the appropriate HTML tags. This will now make the URL available as a hyperlink which will be available for the user to click from the clause details page.

3.5.5.8. Multi-Row Variables

Currently the variable field in a contract clause only accepts single values. However, there is a need to provide multiple values for a single variable in the form of an n X n matrix. For example, the variable contact number can have 3 columns – Country, City and Number with multiple rows. Users can now leverage the UDA (User Defined Attribute) framework to set up attributes groups and refer these groups in Multi-Row Variables.

The variable creation page will allow the user to designate the variable as multi-row and associate attributes and printing RTF templates to them. These variables when available in a contract for a Sourcing or Purchasing document will allow the user to enter multiple rows for a given variable and this will be printed in the PDF document as per the defined RTF template. This is available for buyer updateable variables and does not support PL/SQL values.

3.5.5.9. Display Clause Number and Sort by Clause Number

The clause number may be used by contracting professionals for many purposes. Now, the clause number may be used for searching, updating or adding clauses. The clause number has been added to the Contract Terms page, the Search results page for clauses, and the summary page after Contract Expert in run.

It is also required to sort the clauses in a section by the clause number. There will be a button available which will sort all the clauses in a section by the clause number. This is currently optimized for the Federal clause numbering scheme as follows:

<NUMBER 1>.<NUMBER 2>-<NUMBER 3><Some text>


Search is an alphanumeric sort on the clause number. A code hook is provided, enabling customers to embed desired sorting logic (for example, the numbering schema is different) which will be called when sorting occurs.

3.5.5.10. Contract Expert History

Contract Expert History allows buyers to view the Contract Expert questions, the responses provided, and the resultant policy deviations and net clause additions. For revisions in orders or amendments in a Sourcing document, the user will also be able to enter the amendment description and also view it in the Contract Expert summary page. This capability will simplify audit requirements and will provide details around the responses provided and changes in different revisions and amendments.

This feature is forward-ported to 12.2.4.

3.5.5.11. Delete Multiple Clauses, Sections and Deliverables

A delete function on the Contract Terms page allows users to delete multiple clauses, sections and deliverables from a draft document. Clauses marked as mandatory will not be allowed to be deleted.


3.5.5.12. Defaulting Rules for Contract Administrator

The Check Contract Administrator Warning is displayed today when the user validates the Contract terms or tries to publish / submit for approval a Sourcing or Purchasing document that has contract terms added to the document. For purchasing documents, users can now provide the default value for the contract administrator using the profile option OKC: Default Contract Administrator for Contract Terms. We will not display the warning message for a Sourcing document, though the feature will still be available.


3.5.5.13. Purge Process for Repository Contracts

The contract administrator can purge selected contracts using the Purge Repository Contracts concurrent program. Users can purge a contract only if the status of the contract is terminated, cancelled or rejected, or if the contract has expired. This concurrent program deletes the selected contracts and all related entities.


3.5.5.14. Rule-based Application of Multiple Templates

A Contract Administrator now has the ability to define a set of rules, which would allow the automatic assignment of Contract Templates to a business document like a RFQ, Agreement and Orders. If the business document meets the conditions set in the rules, then the template is auto-assigned to the document.


3.5.6. Release 12.2

3.5.6.1. Repository Contracts Configurability Enhancements

Repository Contracts now provides greater flexibility and improved capabilities to the contracting professional. The contract administrator can now control the different entities that are available for each contract type. Custom signature and approval workflows may


be defined individually for each contract type, which enhances the applicability of repository contracts in different business scenarios. Customers can leverage repository contracts to integrate them within their existing business flows in different application modules. Repository contracts also support UDA (User Defined Attributes) pages. So, each contract can contain multiple additional pages to capture specific business information. This will allow the repository contracts to be used as a solution for modeling different document management requirements along with their own process lifecycle.

3.5.6.2. UDA support for Deliverables

Deliverables in both Procurement and Repository Contracts also support UDA (User Defined j

3.5.6.3. MS Word 2010 Certification

The clause and contract terms sync process is now certified for Microsoft Word 2010. Users can now download and view clauses and contract terms in MS Word 2010 and also upload documents edited in MS Word 2010

3.5.6.4. Contract Expert Performance Improvements

The Contract Expert engine now has improved performance of the complete flow. Impacts include faster UI and better formatting of the question and answer fields. There is no change to the Contract Expert process itself.

3.5.6.5. Repository Contracts Printing Enhancement

UDA (User Defined Attributes) fields may be used to capture additional data for each contract type. The Contract Type setup page now allows the contract administrator to specify the manner in which UDA attributes are printed by selecting appropriate data and layout templates.

3.5.6.6. Updating UDA on Approved Contracts

Repository Contract users will be able to add information or update existing values of user-defined attributes of the contract even after the contract is approved. Users can configure whether these user defined attribute groups are read only or can be updated based on the Status of the Contract. The different statuses for which this can be configured are “Pending Approval”, “Approved”, “Pending Signature”, “Signed”, “Terminated” and “Cancelled”.


3.6. Oracle Purchasing 3.6.1. Overview

Oracle Purchasing is the application for procurement professionals that streamlines purchase order processing while strengthening policy compliance. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts supply management costs.

3.6.2. Release 12.0.2 (RUP2)

3.6.2.1. Integration with Oracle Transportation Management

Oracle E-Business Suite integrates with Oracle Transportation Management to enable transportation features and functionality in existing products, including Oracle Order Management, Oracle Shipping Execution, Oracle Payables, Oracle Warehouse Management, and Oracle Purchasing. Oracle Transportation Management combines transportation planning and execution with freight payment, inbound freight logistics, and freight rating and routing. Oracle Transportation Management adds the following features and enhancements to Oracle Purchasing:

Carrier selection and tender Freight rating and routing Actual ship quantities update and re-rate Freight payment, freight payment audit, and approval Visible in-transit statuses Inbound carrier selection Inbound in-transit statuses

3.6.2.2. iSetup APIs This feature makes it easier for customers to move Setup data between EBS instances. iSetup automates the setup and management of setup data for Oracle EBS. The iSetup migrator moves setup data across multiple EBS instances. Each business entity supported by iSetup requires an API created by the owning product team to handle export and import of setup data.

3.6.3. Release 12.0.6 (RUP6)

3.6.3.1. Contract Commitments Integration with Self Service Purchasing (Oracle Public Sector Financials International)

Contract Commitments with Dual Budgetary Control is now integrated with Self Service Purchasing. Users can now create purchase orders and perform funds check and funds reserve using the self service version of Purchasing, when using Contract Commitments with the Dual Budgetary Control feature enabled.

3.6.4. Release 12.1.1

3.6.4.1. PO and Requisition Mass Update

Oracle Purchasing includes a new capability to mass update buyer, approver, and deliver-to person information in Purchase Orders (PO) and preparer, requester and approver information on requisitions to streamline the process of maintaining organizational changes.


A new program, Mass Close of Purchase Document, allows users to mass close Purchase documents. The Mass Close functionality applies to Purchase Orders that have been fully processed i.e. batch processing has completed, but are not in the closed status as well as for Purchase Orders that the user needs to manually close. The program is applicable to Standard Purchase Orders, Blanket Purchase Agreements, Planned Purchase Orders and Contract Agreement and Blanket Releases

3.6.4.2. Enable All Sites for Global Contract Purchase Agreements

Contracts may be referenced from any of the valid supplier sites while creating standard PO and requisitions. This allows broader use of GCPA, such as for suppliers with many valid sites in a single master agreement.

Additionally, a profile option has been added to allow a Requisition or Standard Purchase Order to reference a GCPA from any of the Supplier Sites while the GCPA is being amended. By default, the profile option is set to “No” to preserve current behavior.

3.6.4.3. FPDS-NG Integration

Most U.S. Federal Government agencies must track and report their contract activity in a variety of ways, including publishing certain contract activity to the Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG). Oracle Purchasing Release 12.1.1 provides support for integration with FPDS-NG by ensuring that required contract and vendor data elements are captured in the system and that submission data passes all required FPDS-NG validations.

3.6.5. Release 12.1.2

3.6.5.1. Purchase Order Pricing Enhancement

Oracle Purchasing has extended its integration with Advanced Pricing to provide greater granularity and flexibility in pricing orders and agreements. The extended integration also provides greater transparency to the means by which a price has been determined for orders and agreements. Oracle Purchasing users can now:

• View the pricing modifier information for a purchase order and/or Global Blanket Purchase Agreement line and view the pre-calculated price adjustments applied by the price engine.

• Manually enter a price modifier, change modifier rate, and recalculate the price. • Query existing manual modifiers and apply them to a Purchase Order and Global

Blanket Purchase Agreement unit price. • Change the modifier rate and apply changes to PO or Global Blanket Purchase

Agreement Line.

These new features provide an accurate view of pricing information to the buyer, increased flexibility for buyers to price an order, and streamlined supplier communication on prices.

3.6.5.2. Project Security within Oracle Purchasing

It is common in project-centric industries like Engineering and Construction for buyers to be assigned to projects rather than to commodities or item categories. Buyers only have authority to transact on behalf of the projects to which they are assigned. To help enforce this business rule, project level security is being introduced in Oracle Purchasing. When the new security option is enabled, procurement users will only be allowed to view and update procurement documents that are related to a project on which the user has an active role.


This feature has a prerequisite of Oracle Projects.

3.6.5.3. Procurement Web Services – Purchasing

This feature exposes business logic contained within user forms through Java APIs. These web services are cataloged in the Oracle Integration Repository and can be browsed though Oracle Integration Repository Browser Interface under the respective product family node. By clicking on the Business Entity in the Integration Repository, you can view a full description, a list of web services for that business entity along with the description of the web service. The description of parameters can be viewed from the xsd definition of the service available via the generated wsdl.

As part of 12.1.2, the following web services are provided for Purchasing: • Purchase Order (PO): Cancel PO, Create PO, Delete PO, Approve PO, Query PO,

and Update PO • Requisition: Create Requisition, Delete Requisition, Query Requisition, and Update

Requisition.

Note that these support requisitions in iProcurement as well as Purchasing.

3.6.6. Release 12.1.3

3.6.6.1. Landed Cost Management (LCM) Integration Oracle Landed Cost Management gives organizations financial visibility into their extended supply chain costs including transportation, handling fees, regulatory duties and taxes and helps them to determine the landed cost of the material for transactional purposes. This allows organizations to have better control over procurement costs, maximize profits, increase competitiveness, and ensures that complex trade activities are compliant with regulatory mandates. This integration allows purchasing users to simulate the Landed Costs at the creation time of purchase orders, allowing better procurement decisions based on the estimated Landed Cost of the items.

3.6.6.2. Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) Integration In EBS Release 12.1.2, the implementation of encumbrance reversal for SCM was limited to Inventory and Expense Receiving transactions. Now in Release 12.1.3, this functionality has been extended to ‘Shop Floor’ destination Purchase Orders, where the distributions will be created under WIP transactions. Purchasing will support encumbering funds for Purchase Orders generated from eAM (with a ‘Shop Floor’ destination) during the approval process.

All public sector organizations, such as municipal, state, provincial and federal government organizations are required to encumber or reserve funds that have been committed to a supply purchase order. Therefore, prior to approval of any purchasing document, the available funds must be checked and reserved against the available budget for the specified account code combination. Enhancement is key for budgetary control.


3.6.7. Release 12.1.3+

3.6.7.1. Encumbered Document Revisions without Un-reserving Funds

Users may now create revisions for approved and reserved purchasing documents without first un-reserving funds. Permitted changes include changes to quantities and tax attributes. When the revision is approved, the system automatically adjusts the amount reserved by calculating the difference between the reserved amount and the document amount. Users may also manually reserve an increase or decrease in the document amounts as well as view encumbrance-related accounting entries for a Purchase Order or Global Blanket Purchase Agreement document. This feature is supported in OAF pages only and not in the Forms interface.


3.6.7.2. Approvals Management Engine (AME) for PO Approvals

Oracle Purchasing users now have the option of using the Approvals Management Engine (AME) for approving PO documents. Approvers can be defined either in parallel or sequential manner using AME. AME also brings in multiple voting methods for approving the PO documents. Enterprises can use the predefined AME transaction type and PO workflow process or they can create custom transaction type and workflow process based on their business requirements. Buyers can add ad hoc Approvers and Electronic Signatories using the Approval Options screen. The AME process can also be used to add multiple reviewers and electronic signatories to the approval hierarchy.


3.6.7.3. Current and Pending Approvers in Action History Region

The application will allow users to view current and pending approvers if the order document is undergoing an AME approval process. Approver details and approval sequence are available in the Action History. The system also tracks reminders sent to the Approver. If there is no response from an Approver after two reminders, the Approval process times-out and a Timeout action is recorded plus the Supervisor of the Approver is notified.


3.6.7.4. Withdrawing Purchase Order after Submitted for Approval

Buyers using the Professional Buyers Work Center may now withdraw a Purchase Order that is in the approval queue in In Process or Pre-Approved status. Based on control options, Approvers may receive an FYI notification giving reasons for withdrawal when the Buyer withdraws the purchasing document. This feature is supported in OAF pages only and not in the Forms interface.


3.6.7.5. Configurable Notification in Purchase Order

The PO Approval Notification Region can be configured to enable enterprises to personalize the notification page according to their business requirements. The notification region can be personalized to add or remove columns in header as well as in lines region according to their business needs. In addition this region can be configured to control what approvers can or cannot view in the notification. This feature is also available to modify the notification text sent via email.



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3.6.7.6. Outside Processing Lines in Global Blanket Agreements (GBPAs)

Oracle Purchasing now allows Global Blanket Purchase Agreement (GBPA) lines to have items that are defined as “Outside Processing Items”. When standard POs are created against these GBPAs, these items can be ordered and delivered to “Shop Floor” destination.


3.6.7.7. Support for Importing Complex Purchase Orders Purchasing Users can now import complex purchase orders using the PDOI (Purchasing Document Open Interface).

3.6.7.8. New ASL APIs

Purchasing now comes with APIs for ASL creation through direct data upload. Users can use this API to create new ASLs as well as update the existing ones. This API comes with error and warning messages to simplify troubleshooting.


3.6.7.9. Buyer Work Center Session Preferences

Purchasing now provides user preferences for setting default values in the Buyer Work Center. Default values for various attributes can be specified using the Preferences page of Buyer Work Center for quick and easy creation of Purchase Orders. These values are defaulted when a new Purchase Order is created, thereby reducing repeated data entry.


3.6.7.10. Purchasing Document Open Interface (PDOI) Enhancements

Several enhancements are now offered with the Purchasing Document Open Interface (PDOI). Features include:

1. Import the requisition reference number of purchase documents.

2. Import the global blanket purchase agreement and global contract purchase agreement reference number in purchase documents.

3. Utilize Advance Pricing setup when importing purchase documents.

4. The “Import Contract Purchase Agreements” concurrent program enables users to import contract agreements

Users can also provide Contract Purchase Agreement references while using the Autocreate process to create their Purchase Orders.


3.6.7.11. PO Business Service Object (BSO) Webservices

Purchasing now comes with Business Service Object (BSO) web service for creating and updating in bulk all types of orders and agreements. You can use this web service to create and update orders and agreements during integration with third party systems.


3.6.7.12. Lead-Time based Promised Date calculation

At times the promised date is not provided by the user for new Purchase Order lines. In these cases, Purchasing now references the lead time specified in the Blanket Purchase


Agreement line to automatically populate the promised date on the corresponding Purchase Order Lines.


3.6.7.13. Approve Purchase Orders On-the-Go

Oracle Mobile Approvals for Oracle E-Business Suite is a smartphone application that lets employees and managers respond on-the-go to pending approval requests. From their phone, anywhere and anytime, employees and managers can take quick action on approval requests for expenses, requisitions, purchase orders, recruitment vacancies and offers, and more.

Buyers and Managers can quickly filter approval requests by sender or subject, review header and line details, action history and comments, and respond back with their approval or rejection, right from their smartphone.


For a full description, refer to the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Release Content Document.

3.6.7.14. Support for Firm Orders Referencing GBPA in Supplier Scheduling

Purchasing provides users with the ability to view expected delivery based on the shipping schedule and the planning schedule for standard purchase orders referencing Global Blanket Purchase Agreements (GBPAs). Key features include:

• Populating Supplier Schedules with Firm orders (Standard Purchase orders created referencing Global Blanket Purchase Agreements) during shipping schedule generation

• Standard Purchase orders (Firm Orders) that reference Global Blanket Purchase Agreements are taken into consideration while calculating CUM Quantity

• Viewing supplier schedules in iSupplier Portal for Firm orders created referencing Global Blanket Purchase Agreements


3.6.8. Release 12.2

3.6.8.1. Automatic Updates to Encumbrance (GL) Date

Buyers can specify an Encumbrance Date for each distribution against a line at the time of creating purchase orders. If this date is within a closed period, and is hence invalid, then the application automatically updates the date as the system date. This feature requires a profile value setting to be activated.

3.6.8.2. Support for Additional Extension Hooks Oracle Purchasing provides additional extension hooks that enable usage of custom validations for the Purchase Order submission process. Buyers now have the ability to make changes to the target document during the Autocreate flow.

3.6.8.3. Spreadsheet based authoring of PO Lines

Purchasing users can now use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to create or modify Purchase Order Lines, Schedules and Distributions. At the PO Header level, users can author lines, schedules and distributions in Excel and import these additions into the document. This feature may also be used at the line, schedule, pay item and distribution levels. This


spreadsheet based authoring uses WebADI setup for users to specify the columns and their order sequence of display for authoring the PO.

3.6.8.4. Support for Oracle Process Manufacturing Outside Processing Items

Oracle Purchasing supports outside processing in that it enables users to create, approve and receive Outside Processing items that are then placed on requisitions and purchase orders associated to the batches that are created in Oracle Process Manufacturing. Users can specify or view outside processing batch related details in requisitions and also in purchase orders.

3.6.8.5. Enhancements to PO Business Service Object (BSO) Webservices

The PO Business Service Object (BSO) Webservices has been enhanced to include:

• Query of a Purchase Order document through webservices.

• Perform various control actions on a given purchasing document thru the PO BSO webservices. The control actions supported are Cancel, Close, Open, Close for Invoice/Open for Invoice, Close for Receiving / Open for Receiving, Finally Close, Freeze / Unfreeze, Place on Hold / Release and Delete.

• The update of a value to NULL with help of special constants.

In addition the following Services Procurement features added in 12.2.4 are also now supported through web services as well:

o Creating PO with both schedules and pay items

o Linking Schedules to pay items

o Giving Advance as percentage


3.7. Oracle Mobile Procurement for Oracle E-Business Suite With Oracle Mobile Procurement for Oracle E-Business Suite, buyers and purchasing users can monitor purchase orders and take actions on the go.

• Track purchase orders requiring attention (on hold, rejected, delayed, pending approval) and drill into details

• Search purchase orders based on key attributes (supplier, item, requestor, buyer, dates etc.)

• Monitor alerts for shipment delays

• Collaborate in transaction context using device features like email, phone and text.

Oracle Mobile Procurement for Oracle E-Business Suite is compatible with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 and 12.2.3 and above. To use this app, you must be a user of Oracle Purchasing, with mobile services configured on the server side by your administrator.

3.7.1. Version 1.1.0

3.7.1.1. Mobile Foundation Updates

• Improvements in login and configuration flow

• Ability to change the URL without having to reinstall the app

• Diagnostics Improvements

3.7.1.2. Accessibility Improvements

Improvements were made in the Purchase Order details page, related information messages, contextual tab bar and person contact card.

3.7.2. Version 1.2.0

3.7.2.1. Android Support

In previous versions, Oracle Mobile Procurement for Oracle E-Business Suite was available only for iOS devices. Starting with version 1.2.0, the app is now available for Android devices as well.


• Changes to support both iOS and Android on the same client-code

• Ability to update server URL from Connection Details page


3.8. Oracle Services Procurement 3.8.1. Overview

Oracle Services Procurement is the application that enables complete control and oversight for services spending. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts all supply management costs.

Oracle Services Procurement further streamlines all aspects of the acquisition process for complex services including:

• Negotiation of service contracts with emphasis on terms related to contract financing and progress payment arrangements

• Tracking of work progress against agreed schedule in the contract

• Processing of payment requests

By supporting real time online collaboration involving key stakeholders throughout the lifecycle, organizations can significantly improve the acquisition process of services spend.

3.8.2. Release 12.1.1

3.8.2.1. Time Reporting and Contractor Assignment Flexibility

For Services Procurement, Release 12.1.1 is focused on customer driven enhancements delivering greater flexibility for time reporting and contractor assignment. Key capabilities included maximizing preferred supplier savings, cutting processing costs, eliminating over-billing and providing visibility into services spending. Oracle continues to enhance and streamline the workflow for Contingent Workers by:

• Allowing multiple PO and PO lines to be associated with each assignment so that when workers are extended and a new requisition is added to an existing PO, a new PO line is automatically created.

• Enabling workers to charge time to multiple projects referenced on a PO line associated to the workers HR assignment.

3.8.3. Release 12.1.2

3.8.3.1. Oracle Projects – Work Confirmations

The workflow for work confirmations, in Release 12.1.2, is more flexible and supports additional ways to record and display progress. Key benefits include:

• On a work confirmation for a PO, users now have the ability to enter incremental or cumulative progress values, as absolute amount or percentage

• Users now have the complete visibility to the progress as they can view the absolute and percentage values for both incremental and cumulative progress.


3.8.4. Release 12.2

3.8.4.1. Advances, Recoupment and Retainage for Standard Purchase Orders

Users of Standard Purchase Orders can now specify advance amounts against Purchase Order lines. Prepayment invoices can be created and matched against these Advance amounts.

Users can also specify recoupment rates for the advances which can be used to recoup the advances paid while matching invoices against these PO lines.

The standard Purchase Orders has also been enhanced to support the Retainage functionality. Users can specify Retainage as an amount or percentage, which will be retained for later release when Invoices are matched against these shipments.

3.8.4.2. Support for Inventory Destinations in Complex Purchase Orders

Users can now specify whether a Complex PO line requires a Pay Item or Schedule in a Complex PO. With this capability in Complex Purchase Orders, inventory items in Purchase Order lines can be made delivered to Inventory Destinations.

Users can also mark the Complex PO lines as “Not Separately Priced” or “No charge” which allows such lines to have zero price. Pay Items can be mapped to one or multiple Schedules within a Complex PO. While approving Work Confirmations, the application ensures that all the related schedule items are received before Work Confirmation can be approved.

3.8.4.3. Support for Job Standardization and Benchmarking

Hiring managers and purchasing users will now have the ability to view the rate card that provides the details of the job and the standard rate that they should be paying for the job. The users will also be able to view the differential rates based on rate uplifts, offshore / onshore rates, markup driven rates and location driven rates. Key benefits include:

• Job Standardization through support for rate card and standard rates for each job

• Benchmarking of job rates for specific jobs

• Ability to automatically identify preferred suppliers based on the hiring needs


3.9. Oracle Sourcing 3.9.1. Overview

Oracle Sourcing is the enterprise application that improves the effectiveness and efficiency of strategic sourcing. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts all supply management costs.

Oracle Sourcing enables buyers to source more of the organization’s spend at lower total cost. Oracle Sourcing creates immediate savings through rapid deployment and ensures long-term savings with consistent execution and compliance.

3.9.2. Release 12.1.1

3.9.2.1. Two Stage Evaluation of RFP

In certain global markets, government organizations and some private sector enterprises often follow a formal two stage negotiation process. The two stage negotiation process requires the submission of bids from suppliers that can be evaluated based on technical and commercial aspects separately to help ensure fair evaluation of supplier bids. In Oracle Sourcing, organizations can now evaluate suppliers’ bids in two independent stages based on the technical and commercial parts of the bids.

The first stage includes the technical evaluation of all responses to questions and parameters pertaining to the technical aspects that are used by the sourcing organization to evaluate the technical feasibility and capabilities of the suppliers. During this stage, commercial aspects remain sealed so that they do not influence the decision making process. For bids that fail the technical evaluation, the commercial part will remain sealed. Evaluators can then analyze the commercial aspects (such as price and delivery terms) for only those bids passing the technical stage.

By adding support for two-stage RFP in Oracle Sourcing, organizations can help ensure a more impartial evaluation of supplier bids based on the independent evaluation of the technical capabilities and then the commercial terms of a supplier’s bid.

3.9.2.2. Two Stage RFQ – Surrogate Bids

The new two stage RFQ process also includes Surrogate Bidding support, allowing a buyer to enter, in stages, bid details on behalf of a supplier(s). During the first stage, the buyer is able to enter the surrogate quote with all the required technical details but without price information. Once all of the supplier bids have been received, technical scoring is done against the requirements and attributes in RFQ. For those suppliers that score well in the technical round, their bids will be short listed for the commercial round.

During the commercial round, the buyer can then complete the surrogate bidding process for those suppliers not carrying out their own bidding. The buyer is able to enter the commercial terms provided by a supplier to enable scoring for the commercial round to be completed. Upon approval of the quote, it is short-listed for placing the purchase order or contract.

3.9.2.3. Supplier Response PDF

Organizations often have the need to keep a physical record of a supplier’s bid response for audit, reference, or offline review purposes. Oracle Sourcing Release 12.1.1 adds the ability to generate a PDF version of a supplier’s response, which allows suppliers to print the PDF for draft and submitted bids. In addition, buyers can print the supplier bids allowing buyers to review responses offline or to save for their internal records.


3.9.2.4. Enhanced Spreadsheet Support

In Release 12.1.1, Oracle Souring provides an enhanced XML spreadsheet format to support a standard look-and-feel and streamlined usability of the spreadsheets for supplier response creation and analysis/award. Buyers and suppliers can download all the information in one single spreadsheet, simplifying the loading and maintaining of spreadsheets for a negotiation.

Fig. 2: Line Level Response for Suppliers

The spreadsheets for supplier response creation not only has an improved and user friendly look and feel, but it can provide immediate feedback to suppliers through the robust formulas used to calculate scores, even when they are not connected to the system. The enhanced spreadsheets will allow buyers and suppliers to enter the data more efficiently and reduce the number of errors during data entry in the offline environment, thus improving the overall user experience during the process.

Fig. 3: Buyer Analysis of Bid Responses from Suppliers

Response – Lines

Predefined List of Values

Bid Total Calculated Instantly

Line Filter

Link to Scoring

Worksheet

Analysis – Lines

Award and Savings Amount per Supplier Calculated Instantly

Side-by-Side Bid

Comparison

Overall Savings Calculated Instantly

Perform What-If

Analysis


Buyers also have a more powerful tool to conduct analysis of supplier responses and make smarter award decisions. Buyers can easily view totals and savings, conduct what-if analysis of different award scenarios, and view side-by-side comparison of all elements of supplier responses.

3.9.2.5. Countdown Clock

In fast-paced auctions, the countdown clock will help to promote more competitive behavior among suppliers. Suppliers will know the exact amount of time left to create and submit their bids or quotes. The countdown clock updates automatically if there are changes in the negotiation close date (for example, if AutoExtend is triggered). The performance of the countdown clock is also optimized so that unnecessary use of network bandwidth is minimized. Buyers who monitor the negotiations from Live Console will also be able to monitor precisely how soon the negotiation will be closing. Buyers who monitor supplier activities will also see the time ticking down without manually refreshing the page. In addition to auctions, the countdown clock will apply to additional negotiation types of RFQ and RFI.

3.9.2.6. Price Tier Enhancements

Suppliers have flexibility to offer different unit prices depending on the volume of business that the buyer is willing to commit for a given product or service. Typically, a supplier will provide preferential pricing for a larger volume purchase. Quantity based price tiers allow buyers to specify different price points for each quantity range on negotiations with standard purchase order, blanket or contract purchase agreement outcomes. Suppliers can respond to the tier structure defined by the buyer, or they can provide their own price tiers.

Users can define quantity based price tiers when creating negotiations for Blanket Purchase Agreements. Buyers can select whether they want to have price breaks, quantity based, or no price tiers in the negotiation. When price tiers are enabled, buyers can define the quantity range and the target price for each tier within a line. Similarly, suppliers can create their own price tiers when they submit a bid. The award price is based on the tier that corresponds to the award quantity assigned to each supplier.

3.9.2.7. Cost Factor Enhancements

Cost factors allow buyers to model the total cost of a product or service. Cost factors operate under one of three pricing basis: (1) per unit cost (2) percentage of the unit price (3) fixed amount for the line.

This enhancement improves the calculation of the per unit total cost when fixed amount cost factors are used and the buyer awards a supplier a quantity that is either equal to or lower than the response quantity. Whereas before Oracle Sourcing used the response quantity to calculate the per unit total cost, now the formula utilizes the award quantity to distribute the fixed amount cost factor: resulting in a more accurate award amount calculation.

3.9.3. Release 12.1.2

3.9.3.1. Earnest Money Deposit

In certain global markets, particularly in APAC and EMEA, government organizations and some private sector enterprises often follow a formal process of taking EMD (Earnest Money Deposit) from their suppliers. A supplier, unless exempted, has to pay the EMD amount to the buying organization in order to participate in any Sourcing negotiation. This EMD amount is usually refunded after the negotiation is completed. Buying


organizations can leverage these capabilities to ensure the supply base is seriously interested in providing a competitive bid.

Oracle Sourcing supports various EMD payment methods:

• Cash • Check (Cheque) • Demand Draft • Corporate EMD. Corporate EMD is a practice where a supplier deposits a large

amount with the buying company and the EMD is adjusted against this amount. • Bank Guarantee

EMD is received by the EMD Administrator, a new responsibility made available for EMD transactions, or can be paid online by the suppliers (Corporate EMD). The EMD Administrator can exempt a supplier from paying EMD, or refund or forfeit the EMD amount, depending on the business policies. There is an out-of-the-box integration with Oracle Financials, so that the receipt, forfeit and refund of EMD can leverage Oracle Receivables and Oracle Payables. For customers not using Oracle Financials, there is a non-integrated EMD deployment process where the company can still use the EMD feature in Oracle Sourcing. There are reports available for the buying organization to validate the EMD status and details for different negotiations and suppliers.

This feature in Oracle Sourcing ensures that the end-to-end sourcing process for the buying organization can be performed using Oracle Sourcing application, and customers will not have to rely on processes outside the application to complete their sourcing negotiations. This shortens the sourcing cycle which otherwise can lead to delays in receiving and returning the EMD amount and affects the productivity of buying organization due to manual checks and coordination. Also, all EMD related information is retained in the application which can be leveraged for future reference and audit requirements.

3.9.4. Release 12.1.3

3.9.4.1. Requester Field in the Sourcing Header At times, there is a need to capture the name of the business owner of the negotiation or in the case where the owner/sponsor is separate from the person running the negotiation. The requester field is available in the negotiation header (RFI, RFQ and Auctions). The default value is the buyer, but it can be updated as shown in the screenshot below.

Fig. 4: Requester Field in the Sourcing Header Page


Please note that the field, by default, is not available in the application and can be made available though personalization.

3.9.4.2. Descriptive Flex Field (DFF) in Oracle Sourcing Header

Often, buyers have a need to provide additional information on the header page, for example, information on contract value, final project approver, etc. Headers attributes are of two types: a) Visible to Buyers only (who have access to negotiation) and b) Visible to both the buyer and supplier. As shown in the figure below, there are two DFFs in the negotiation header page which helps to capture these attributes:

• Additional Header Attributes (Buyer Only)

• Additional Header Attributes (Buyer & Supplier)

Fig. 5: Descriptive Flex Field in Oracle Sourcing Header Page

The buyer can create different contexts which will control the different attributes displayed. For example, in this case the context additional supplier information selection displayed the contact address, contact number and budget sanctioned attributes. These fields can be used to convey additional negotiation related information to the buyer and supplier community.

Please note that the DFFs, by default, are not available in the application and can be made available though personalization

3.9.4.3. Landed Cost Management (LCM) Integration

Customers sourcing overseas (25% or more) find that the item cost (procurement price) accounts for more than half of the cost to acquire the product. From a strategic sourcing perspective, Oracle has tried to give users some visibility into these potential costs, however, at PO creation time users need the same and even more refined insight. The integration with Landed Cost Management (LCM) allows them to make more tactical decisions about how to source an item. Additionally, it gives an organization better and early visibility into what their potential liabilities might be. For bigger ticket items such as heavier or bulkier goods, users can run through a number of different scenarios and compare the potential output before firming up the estimate. Then, once they prepare to receive an item, they can use this estimate as basis for that receipt. With LCM more closely tied to Procurement, Oracle is giving customers the information they need to make better tactical decisions and is giving them early insight into their outstanding liabilities. In fact, many of our customers don't want to approve a PO without having visibility into this. Finally, we observed that virtually all retailers, wholesale distributors and customers require this functionality and have modified their systems to give some visibility into this today. When faced with an upgrade, they will have to migrate these solutions to R12 or will need a solution like LCM.


3.9.5. Release 12.1.3+

3.9.5.1. Online Discussions Attachments

Buyers and suppliers can now upload attachments in the context of an Online Discussion. This is especially useful when highlighting information during the negotiation process. For example, the buyer may want to forward additional technical clarification to suppliers during a negotiation to procure complex machinery.

In addition, for negotiations with a style of “sealed”, supplier users can now send messages exclusively to the buyer. This allows clarification of unique queries without the mandate to broadcast every message to all participants. Buyers can respond to all suppliers or only the sender, as needed.

3.9.5.2. Terms and Conditions Controls

The Terms and Conditions display can now be controlled by the Sourcing Administrator with new settings. The page can be displayed to a bidder in the following manner, as required by the organization’s business policies:

• Before creating an offer • Before accessing the negotiation document, or • Never

The explicit supplier acceptance of Terms and Conditions can be captured, before allowing the supplier to proceed further.

To accommodate specific terms and conditions across business entities, the system allows for terms and conditions to be created for each Operating Unit. Finally, Terms and Conditions supports attachments to allow for displaying additional information.

3.9.5.3. Lot Price Summation

Certain negotiations use a Lot hierarchy to organize bidding lines. For Lots, the actual award happens at the parent “Lot” level with detailed bid information collected at the child (or “Lot Lines”) level.

Sourcing professionals can now view a Lot price, calculated as the sum of the price for each Lot Line in that Lot. One example where this capability is applicable is for basic bills of materials, where the item (Lot) level costing is naturally a summation of the individual components (Lot Lines).

3.9.5.4. Delete Supervisor from Collaboration Team

Today the buyer’s manager is added by default to the collaboration team when a negotiation is created. Sometimes, especially for negotiations where the total amount is less than certain threshold values, it is not required to add the supervisor to the collaboration team. Now, the buyer will be able to remove the supervisor using the remove icon.


3.9.5.5. Sort and Delete Suppliers from Invited Suppliers Page

In previous releases the Invited Suppliers page allowed deletion of invited suppliers one record at a time. Now multiple suppliers may be removed as a group. In addition, suppliers can now be sorted in the alphabetic order of the supplier name which will facilitate easier navigation to the desired supplier record.



3.9.6. Release 12.2

3.9.6.1. Add Requisition lines to a Draft Negotiation (RFx & Auction)

Currently, buyers can select requisition lines using Demand Workbench and use them to create a draft negotiation or an amendment negotiation document. Buyers can also select requisition lines and create a new draft negotiation using the Document Builder. However, buyers may want to add some additional requisition lines to the negotiation.

With this release, buyers can use Demand Workbench, select requisition lines, provide the negotiation number, and add the lines to the negotiation. Alternatively, buyers can navigate to the Demand Workbench page from within a draft negotiation by selecting the add requisition lines from the Lines tab. This provides flexibility to the buying organization in the negotiation creation process, as buyers can add demand to the draft negotiation during the negotiation creation process.

3.9.6.2. Response Withdrawal

Oracle Sourcing now provides suppliers with the ability to withdraw responses submitted on an RFI/RFQ. A new negotiation control enables Sourcing buyers to determine if suppliers can withdraw submitted responses on that negotiation. Suppliers can withdraw submitted responses only as long as the negotiation is open for bidding. Surrogate withdrawal is also possible where the Sourcing buyer withdraws surrogate responses on behalf of the supplier.

3.9.6.3. Track Amendment Acknowledgements

The Supplier Activities Page now shows a chronological log of all the supplier activities on the negotiation. Sourcing buyers can now track acknowledgements from invited suppliers to amendments made to a negotiation.

3.9.6.4. Staggered Awards

Sometimes sourcing awards are desired only for part of a negotiation. In these cases, optimal timing for awarding different parts of the negotiation occurs at multiple dates. For example, a large project scenario may involve a negotiation with many lines, with the entire project in one document. In this case a single award timeframe may be premature for the decision on certain lines.

With staggered awards a sourcing professional may evaluate and award one or more lines, and later revisit the negotiation and award additional lines. The staggered award process allows the buyer to award different lines at different points in time. New awards can be used to create a new Purchase Order or Agreement in Purchasing.

3.9.6.5. Import of Price Breaks

A new spreadsheet upload supports the buyer uploading price tiers when creating a negotiation. Support for both price tiers and price breaks makes spreadsheet use more effective. Price breaks uploaded via spreadsheet may reduce manual effort updating line-level price breaks, especially for complex negotiations or negotiations having a very large number of lines. As before, price breaks on awarded bids may automatically generate Blanket Purchase Agreements in Oracle Purchasing for rapid implementation of negotiated terms.

3.9.6.6. Negative Cost Factors

Cost Factors are typically positive values which are added to a bid price for a line to help a buyer understand total effective cost in competitive bidding scenarios. To expand this valuable capability, the buyer may now define cost factors whose values may decrement


the total cost for a line. For example, a bidder may want to submit a rebate or discount as a cost factor to improve the competitiveness of a bid.

3.9.6.7. Sourcing APIs

Many sources of demand can automatically populate a negotiation in Sourcing with relevant, integrated data. Now an additional scenario is supported: an API to create negotiations through direct data upload. The API supports the creation of RFIs, RFQs and Auctions, and negotiations are created in draft status. Organizations can now leverage an API to directly create a draft negotiation document from information available outside the system.

3.9.6.8. Mass Update of Buyers

It is sometimes necessary to update the buyer on a negotiation document. A buyer may leave the organization and their negotiations must be reassigned. A new concurrent program now allows you to add a new buyer to existing negotiation documents based on the parameter values provided.

3.9.6.9. Surrogate Quotes for Suppliers without an User Account

Organizations using surrogate quotes may not have provided each supplier user with access to Sourcing. Buyers may now create surrogate quotes for suppliers even if the supplier user does not have a user account in the system. All notifications for such supplier bids are sent to the email address specified for the supplier contact.

3.9.6.10. Multiple Active Offers

Oracle Sourcing now allows supplier to provide multiple responses for an RFx (RFI, RFQs and Auctions) document. The supplier can decide to either submit new active response or revise their existing response. The buyer will be able to evaluate all the active responses side-by-side even if they are from the same supplier. Each active response when fully or partially awarded will result in a separate award document. This feature is also available for surrogate responses. A control option in the controls page allows a Buyer to decide whether to accept multiple active responses or not.

3.9.6.11. Alternate Lines

Buyers can now choose to allow a Supplier, when they are responding to a Negotiation, to provide alternate lines for specific Negotiation lines. The supplier can specify if the Alternate Lines are for an existing Negotiation line or for the Negotiation itself. They can specify one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one relationships between these new Alternate lines and the existing Negotiation lines. Buyers can review these lines within the response document and evaluate them during their analysis. The Buyer can award the Alternate lines and also determine if they are linked to any backing PR, thus allocating the appropriate fund source from the PR line distributions, which would result in the appropriate PR split.

3.9.6.12. Sourcing Initiatives

Sourcing Initiatives is a new feature that provides Sourcing Buyers and Procurement Managers the ability to define, track and achieve strategic goals or objectives, by driving various tasks across the organization through a simple but effective collaboration platform. Using Sourcing Initiatives, buyers or procurement managers can

• Define SMART goals or objectives for the procurement teams, measure progress and achieve these goals by driving various initiatives in the organization


• Break down initiatives into smaller tasks and assign them to various cross-functional stake-holders; drive collaboration and involvement from these participants to add value to the initiative

• Use extensive workflows and notifications to drive each task and initiative to completion, and meet the objectives set by the organization

• Use pre-defined initiative templates and task lists to quickly create and drive initiatives.


3.10. Oracle Sourcing Optimization 3.10.1. Overview

When allocating business to suppliers, buyers often must strive to meet multiple purchasing goals and business policies. For example: “award at least 10% business to minority-owned suppliers,” “no single supplier should get more than 80% of the total business,” or “at least half of the business should go to incumbent suppliers”. It can be challenging to achieve maximum savings while meeting such business policies, particularly if there are many line items and a large number of competitive bids.

Oracle Sourcing Optimization can help by allowing the buyer to create scenarios that can be automatically optimized to determine the best award, while adhering to policies and goals defined on the scenario. This results in better and faster award decisions.

3.10.2. Release 12.1.1

3.10.2.1. Sourcing Optimization Enhancements

Sourcing Optimization has several enhancements to assist buyers in making optimal award decisions.

Buyers can now determine a constraint priority for award optimization by indicating the importance of a given constraint. The concept of setting up priorities for constraints will help the optimization engine identify which constraints can be automatically relaxed when, otherwise, no solution exist. By automatically relaxing a constraint, the engine may find an acceptable solution, saving the buyer time and avoiding an iterative process for optimizing.

Upon optimizing a scenario, buyers will be able to analyze the cost of a particular constraint. Buyers typically want to evaluate by how much an award decision results on a more expensive award because of a business constraint (i.e., the additional cost imposed by a business constraint). Cost of constraint refers to the difference in price (or cost or score) that occurs in an optimized award solution vs. what would be achievable were that constraint removed. Oracle Sourcing will now simplify the cost of constraint analysis by allowing buyers to select the constraint that they want to evaluate and returning the cost associated to the selected constraint. With the cost of constraint feature, buyers can determine how much more expensive is an award decision because of a business constraint.

Buyers will also have the ability to view award optimization scenarios side-by-side to compare the results of different optimization approaches. Buyers will select what scenarios they want to display side-by-side and Oracle Sourcing will show award amounts and savings for those scenarios. Buyers will be able to effectively see the before and after effects of changes made to the optimization criteria and/or weightings when reviewing optimization results.

With Quantity based constraints, buyers can now indicate award allocation not only in terms of award amount, but also in terms of award quantity. For example, 15% of all units should be awarded to minority owned suppliers allowing for more control over the optimization constraints.

3.10.2.2. Price Tier Optimization

Suppliers typically have their own price tiers that meet their business realities. Analyzing dissimilar tier structures is a very complex and time consuming activity. This process is greatly streamlined by the use of Oracle Sourcing Optimization. When Oracle Sourcing Optimization is used to find the best award scenario in a negotiation, the optimization


engine analyzes all combinations of price tiers submitted by suppliers to determine the best award recommendation. Award quantities specified in the award recommendation are used to assign the correct unit price to the resulting purchasing documents.

3.10.2.3. Supplier Incentives

Suppliers often provide incentives to increase the level of business transacted with the buying organization. The incentives can be in the form of a fixed amount (e.g., signing bonus), a tiered rebate structure (e.g., rebates that occur when a predetermined level of business is reached), or both. These additional savings through incentives may directly impact the award decisions that buyers make. How much business a buyer awards to each supplier determines whether additional rebates apply, and, therefore, the additional savings need to be factored in the award scenario analysis.

Oracle Sourcing Optimization allows buyers to enter the incentives given by suppliers. Buyers can enter the current total spend and rebate percentage for each supplier, and the rebate structure for any extra award made on top of the current spend. In addition, a fixed amount incentive can be specified to account for a signing or transition bonus. Oracle Sourcing Optimization uses these values to calculate the additional savings yielded by the incentives, and adds the amount to the total savings in the award scenario. Buyers can then use the information to make more informed award decisions.


3.11. Oracle Spend Classification 3.11.1. Overview

One of the biggest benefits from business intelligence applications that analyze spend derives from the consolidation of spend data from multiple sources. Whether from many sources, or just one, it is generally true that spending data is inadequately categorized for use by procurement. One of the reasons is an emphasis on recording accounting information, which often reveals little of the purchasing category. In most organizations, a majority of spend data is not categorized, categorized incorrectly, or categorized as miscellaneous. This leads to a skewed picture of the breakdown of spend, resulting in poor visibility to identify saving opportunities.

Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics (P&SA) includes adaptors that load data from many sources, including Oracle E-Business Suite 11i9, 11i10, R12, Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9, 9.0, legacy, and other sources.

Spend Classification processes the data contained in P&SA and predicts appropriate category information for each invoice line. To be able to do the predictions, Spend Classification uses existing categorized data from PS&A to create a knowledge base. Features in Spend Classification allow data stewards to test and validate the learning performance, ensuring the knowledge base is performing classification at adequate levels. Once the knowledge base has been built, the product can be used to classify spend data residing in P&SA.

Fig. 6: Oracle Spend Classification, Classification Summary Page


3.11.2. Release 12.1.2

3.11.2.1. Integration with Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics 7.9.6

Spend Classification is integrated with Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics 7.9.6 (P&SA), a component of Oracle BI Applications. It processes data from P&SA tables for invoice, purchasing, and requisition information. After Spend Classification predicts purchasing categories for spend lines, it reassigns categories in P&SA where it has a high confidence rating of a successful match.

3.11.2.2. Knowledge Base Creation and Incremental Updates

Spend Classification uses a sample of existing and accurately categorized spend data to learn successful categorization based on a wide range of an organization’s data. The product allows the users to enrich the knowledge base with incremental data as data evolves to increase classification accuracy over time.

3.11.2.3. Multiple Knowledge Bases

Spend Classification provides functionality to create a standard knowledge base that can predict categories at various levels of the purchasing category hierarchy.

Spend Classification uses Oracle Data Mining as its engine for predictive analytics. Advanced users may use Data Mining to create any of the alternate supported Data Mining knowledge bases and then reference these knowledge bases from Spend Classification to process future spend data.

3.11.2.4. Easy to Use User Interface

Spend Classification uses Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, a component of Fusion middleware, for its user interface. Pages provide dynamic sorting of data, column level search, and filters. Users can drill down to segments of data directly from various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) defined for classification results.

Fig. 7: Oracle Spend Classification, Classification Details Page


3.11.2.5. Export and Import to Excel

Spend Classification integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Excel. It allows users to export all data to Excel in order to do offline processing. If manual updates are made in Excel, the Excel file can be uploaded into OBIA. For example, this might be used in cases where the user decides to manually reassign categories.

3.11.2.6. Ability to Classify Data into Multiple Taxonomies

Spend Classification can categorize spend data into different category taxonomies. Category taxonomies that are supported include:

• The category setup in a source financials system

• UNSPSC

• Three additional custom category taxonomies

There is no restriction on the number of levels defined for a category hierarchy.

3.11.2.7. In-line Commodity Classification

At times, requesters may need to order off catalog and create a Non Catalog Request. When requesters describe the purchase, there is a high likelihood of it not being classified into an existing commodity hierarchy. This increases misclassification of spend information, contract leakage, lower compliance and internal controls.

In R12.1.1 onwards, requesters creating Non Catalog Requests will have the option of category being predicted for the purchase being made. After the requester clicks on Add to Cart they will be able to view a “suggested best fit” category with a list of categories that could be alternate possibilities. The same window can also be used to parse the complete Category hierarchy. This approach uses the Oracle Spend Classification in real time to assess the category of what the requester is ordering. The requester merely picks the purchasing category and continues checking out. This capability allows even unstructured requests to be categorized appropriately, aiding downstream spend analysis.

3.11.3. Release 12.2

3.11.3.1. Reclassify Historical Data

Currently, Spend Classification supports classifying a Batch against a particular taxonomy once, and can reclassify a batch up to a maximum of 5 times, each time against a Knowledge Base having a different taxonomy.

With this release Spend Classification can be used to reclassify a previously classified Batch or a range of data belonging to a previously classified batch, as required, against a Knowledge Base with the same taxonomy. This feature provides the flexibility to reclassify the Batch if the earlier classification is not satisfactory.

3.11.3.2. Asynchronous Approval Flow

Asynchronous approval flow enables approval of classified batches in parallel, thus allowing users to perform other tasks while the Batch is being approved. As in previous releases, users can monitor the approval status of batches submitted for approval through the Approval Activity Log under the Monitor Activity tab.

3.11.3.3. Enhanced Training Data Upload

Using Spend Classification, users can now upload Dataset files as large as 100MB, and can specify the number of errors as a threshold up to which the upload should continue. If


the number of errors exceeds the threshold, then the upload stops and the errors can be viewed in a log file.

Also the Data Template can be downloaded directly from the application, where the format for dates and numbers can be specified. Additionally, the Category Codes instead of the Category ID can be entered in the template. This helps users save considerable time as they can avoid checking database tables to determine mappings for Category IDs.

The datasets that are uploaded can be deleted by navigating to the Configuration, Manage Datasets tab. This helps users free up database space by purging potentially large datasets that are no longer in use.

3.11.3.4. Enhanced Tracking Capabilities

An enhanced tracking capability now monitors the progress of the knowledge base creation, enrichment and classification processes. During the execution of any of these processes, an indicator reminds analysts of the current step of the process and for certain steps, percentage completion. Historical data for each process can now be tracked individually in the Monitor Activity screen. Similarly, during the Dataset Upload process the system provides indication about the upload of data.

3.11.3.5. Improvements in Analyzing Batches and Excel to Export

While viewing the KPIs pertaining to the classification process, analysts now see information about the batch whose data is being analyzed. While analyzing batches, should an analyst decide to filter the transactions within the batch, a count of transactions resulting from any query is now displayed. This helps the analyst to decide if she has a good sub-set of data to work with or if she needs to filter it even more.

Also available is ability to export only the filtered rows to Excel. With the count of transactions now available in the filtered data set, analysts are able to estimate the time it would take to export to Excel, based on past experience. Spend Classification analysis provides analysts the best and second best predicted classification codes, with corresponding confidence levels. Now analysts can export these values at each level of the taxonomy structure. This provides access to knowledge base prediction patterns at each level of the taxonomy for additional evaluation and analysis.

3.11.3.6. Increased Flexibility in Resetting Data

Now, when analyzing classified data, it is possible to reset the classification code for certain records. Analysts can select transactions records by specific values of classification code. This provides greater flexibility to reset the classification code for specific records.

3.11.3.7. Delete Classification Batch Users can now delete classification batches that are no longer required for any business function. This will allow users to get rid of batches that are no longer of any use, such as a batch created after an unsuccessful classification run.

3.11.3.8. Run Classification on Selected Transactions

Prior to this feature, when a classification run was initiated the application created a single batch and picked up all eligible transactions. This sometimes created a huge classification batch.


Now users can explicitly specify the set of transactions that need to be classified, leading to manageable batch sizes. Smaller batches lead to improved query performance, reduced download time, quicker batch analysis, and faster approval and reset.

3.11.3.9. Simplified User Interface Spend Classification now comes with a simplified user interface. Most key functions such as creating a knowledge base, enriching a knowledge base, and initiating a classification run are centrally organized around the Dataset entity In addition, users can now view the entire history of actions performed in the context of each entity.

3.11.3.10. Prevent Reset of Transactions in Classified, Unapproved Batches

The ability to reset dataset transactions that were part of a classified but unapproved batch was possible. However, this could be confusing as once the batch was approved; all transactions within the batch were stamped with the predicted category codes. Now the application ignores resetting transactions that are part of a classified, unapproved batch.


3.12. Oracle Supplier Hub 3.12.1. Overview

Many organizations track supplier data in multiple ways, driven by the needs of different business units or unconnected business processes The result is disparate supplier definitions that make it difficult to have a complete and coherent summary of each trading partner.

Oracle Supplier Hub is an application that provides a portfolio of Master Data Management tools to enable organizations to better manage their supplier master records centrally. Built on the foundational technology used to support mastering of customer information, Supplier Hub can be used by both organizations that need to aggregate supplier data from a range of application systems and also by those running a single E-Business Suite instance.

Supplier Hub consolidates supplier information from disparate systems and business lines into a single repository, provides cleansing and third party enrichment tools for effective data management, and provides the resulting "single point of truth" supplier data as a service to consuming applications, enterprise business processes and decision support systems.

Supplier Hub is a complementary solution to Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM). It can be implemented to extend the SLM capabilities by providing comprehensive quality management functionality to cleanse the underlying supplier identity information that has been enriched through the SLM tools.

Deployment of Supplier Hub enables organizations to have a consistent understanding of the trading partners that they use to procure the various goods and services required to support their business. This clarity is essential in order to be able to carry out effective analysis of spending patterns so that appropriate tactical and strategic decisions can be made about specific supplier relationships and overall company procurement policies.

3.12.2. Release 12.1.3 Oracle Supplier Hub provides the following set of features:

• Supplier Master Profile • Supplier Classification Management • Supplier Hierarchy Management • Supplier Data Import and Source Management • Supplier Data Quality Management • Supplier D&B Data Enrichment • Supplier Data Publication and Synchronization

Full details about the current capabilities of Oracle Supplier Hub can be found in the Master Data Management RCD.


3.13. Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management 3.13.1. Overview

Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) provides an extensive set of features to support the qualification, profile management and performance assessment of suppliers as well as tools to track ongoing supplier compliance with corporate and legal requirements. Utilizing these capabilities, organizations can exercise proper control over suppliers throughout the lifecycle of their relationship with the organization; from initial discovery, through qualification and on-boarding, to ongoing maintenance and possible obsolescence.

A key factor in improving the quality of an organization’s supplier master file is to establish proper processes to formally qualify different types of prospective suppliers. Supplier Lifecycle Management enables any and all of the peculiar information required to assess a prospect to be gathered and then routed through the organization to ensure efficient review of the supplier’s credentials.

Once a supplier has been approved, SLM also enables organizations to gather feedback from key stakeholders as part of an overall supplier performance tracking process. In addition, Supplier Lifecycle Management also allows key stakeholders to identify and track critical compliance documents and attributes that need to be gathered from suppliers on a periodic basis in order for the two parties to maintain an active business relationship.

3.13.2. Release 12.1.1+

3.13.2.1. 360° Supplier View

One of the challenges with managing supplier information is that the pieces of information gathered about a supplier can be stored in a variety of applications and systems. This data disbursement can hamper organizations as they look to review supplier performance or to comply with audit requirements.

Supplier Lifecycle Management provides a repository for storing information from disparate sources and then enabling a 360° view of the data to be provided to the key business users within the organization. As well as access to basic supplier information - such as Address, Contact, Business/Diversity Classification, General Classification, Product and Services category and Banking details - users will be able to review qualification and on-going evaluation details for the supplier, view key documents that have been included in the supplier’s profile and check the status of Deliverables that the supplier is required to provide to maintain their status within the system.

3.13.2.2. Supplier Search

To assist administrators charged with managing the vendor master for their organizations, Advanced Search capabilities enable them to efficiently find and retrieve suppliers.

The Advanced Search allows any of the standard and extended profile attributes to be used as search criteria and for the results to be viewed using multiple display formats. The profile information retrieved from the search can be exported in spreadsheet format, modified and then re-imported to enable mass data changes to be handled in an efficient manner. The Advanced Search criteria and display formats can be personalized both at the administrator and business user level.


3.13.2.3. Supplier Profile Management (including Self-Service)

Most organizations maintain a team of administrators to deal with the flow of administrative updates from trading partners containing changes to their company profile details. To make this process more efficient, Supplier Lifecycle Management extends existing iSupplier Portal functionality to allow supplier users to be given online access to maintain a wider range of their own profile details.

The supplier user can maintain standard company profile details; Address, Contacts, Business Diversity Classifications, Products and Services category and Banking Details. Changes they provide can then be reviewed by internal administrators before approval.

Suppliers can also access qualification and on-going compliance information that they are required to provide to the buying organization to maintain their status in the system.

3.13.2.4. Extended Supplier Profile

To better understand the capabilities of suppliers in key product categories, Supplier Lifecycle Management utilizes User Defined Attribute technology to allow administrators to add an unlimited range of attributes to the supplier definition and to group these into logical Profile sections. Typically, this is the sort of information stored in paper-based systems that are maintained by different departments throughout an organization. In addition to the attribute name, administrators are able to add descriptive text to help explain the purpose of the attribute.

Fine-grained access control tools allow administrators to manage which users can have access to the individual attributes in the extended set of profile details. This is particularly important when sensitive information is stored in the profile and access needs to be restricted to appropriate users either internally or at the supplier.

3.13.2.5. Registration and On-Boarding of New Suppliers

To help manage the stream of inquiries that come from supplier prospects interested in doing business with the buying organization, many companies now use their corporate websites to have potential suppliers register their interest in establishing a business relationship. This allows the organization to get key information from the supplier that can be used to qualify whether they are a suitable trading partner.

Supplier Lifecycle Management provides a supplier registration feature that can be configured by business unit to gather the data elements required to assess each prospective supplier request. The registration form can be configured to include Address, Contacts, Business Classification, Product and Services category, Banking detail and any of the Extended Supplier Profile attributes. The prospective supplier can also upload attachments as part of their registration packet.

To support sophisticated and conditional qualification procedures, administrators can also establish RFI documents that allow various profile and compliance information from the prospect to be captured using a questionnaire format.

In addition to the walk-up process, buyers can pre-register and send invitations to prospective suppliers, requesting them to provide additional details for pre-qualification and approval using the self-service capability.

To support complex or lengthy supplier registration, prospective suppliers can save their draft registration request at any time, and return to it at a later date. Once a prospective supplier has registered, their request is routed through an approval hierarchy for review.


3.13.2.6. Qualification Management

For many organizations, the processes for assessing new supplier relationships are cumbersome and inefficient. In an effort to ensure that “business gets done”, companies often support multiple channels for receiving new supplier requests and then follow a very limited or haphazard procedure to review supplier credentials. Oftentimes, this is a poorly coordinated manual process that requires tasks to be sequenced and tracked across multiple departments as credit checks are carried out, customer references called, quality standards reviewed and production facilities inspected.

Supplier Lifecycle Management leverages the Approval Management Engine to allow companies to generate customized approval flows for processing supplier requests and registrations. The details for each new supplier can be passed to multiple stakeholders across many departments within the buying organization. Approvers are notified when they are required to review a request and can check graphically the overall approval status for a given request.

As part of the approval routing, SLM includes the qualification information collected from the supplier as well as incremental feedback provided by business users assessing the request. This allows basic supplier profile and qualification details to be gathered, deliverables like Insurance certificates and Code of Conduct documents to be stored and Products and Services information to be recorded within the Qualification packet.

The buying organization can apply business rules that will use the details in the request to customize the approval flow so that the appropriate approvers can look at the details.

Once a registration request has been approved or rejected, the supplier is automatically notified by email. Following approval, the qualification details provided by a supplier become part of their profile that can be updated at a later date.

3.13.2.7. Compliance and Profile Audits

Whilst there are regulatory requirements for some types of organization to keep key supplier profile elements up to date, this is also an important process for a lot of non-regulated organizations that are looking to meet Corporate Social Responsibility standards that they have set for themselves.

Supplier Lifecycle Management enables administrators to utilize the RFI tools to gather and manage supplier compliance and profile information that are required on an anniversary basis. They can define key compliance information that is required from suppliers and then store the feedback provided by the supplier into the supplier master profile record.

3.13.2.8. Performance Evaluation

Companies recognize that employees who interact with suppliers can provide insightful feedback on “soft” performance metrics for the supplier. Being able to canvas opinion from these key stakeholders and then use the information to help drive an overall assessment of a supplier’s performance is a key part of any collaborative program intended to help improve supplier relationships.

Supplier Lifecycle Management will allow administrators to generate internal RFI documents that can be sent to key personnel within the organization to evaluate and score specific aspects of a supplier’s overall performance. This will allow stakeholders in a diverse range of departments, such as Procurement, Finance, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Quality, Design and Legal, to combine their opinions into a rating of how well the supplier is doing.

The feedback gathered about the supplier is stored in the supplier profile allowing performance trends to be tracked and risk to be effectively managed.


3.13.2.9. Supplier Notifications

To assist with supplier communication, Supplier Lifecycle Management provides tools to allow notifications to be selectively communicated to a company’s supply base.

Administrators enter notification information and then use search tools to generate the list of suppliers that are to receive the message.

3.13.3. Release 12.1.3+

3.13.3.1. Mandatory Internal Requirements

Today the requirements that are sent to the internal evaluation team cannot be marked as mandatory, making it challenging to get complete responses from the evaluation team in a single iteration.

With this enhancement the administrator may specify internal requirements as “mandatory” or “optional”. Each evaluation team member will have to respond to mandatory requirements before submitting responses; otherwise the response may not be submitted. This capability will increase the efficiency of the internal evaluation process.

This feature is also provided for Sourcing.


3.13.3.2. Associate Address to Contacts

Prior to this release, while creating a registration request a prospective supplier did not have the option of associating an address to a contact. This was done by an administrator within the buyer’s organization once the supplier was registered.

This feature allows the prospective supplier to associate an address to a contact during registration process. All the addresses defined by the supplier in the system will be available for association, streamlining the registration process.

This feature is also provided for iSupplier Portal.


3.13.3.3. Keyword Search

Keyword search for a Supplier is now possible within Supplier Lifecycle Management. In a keyword search, the system searches across primary and user-defined attributes of a supplier matching the words provided by the user with their occurrences in these fields. For example a search with keywords “John Doe” and “Canada” will return a list of all suppliers with these keywords in either their primary or user-defined attributes.


3.13.3.4. Default User Creation

This enhancement allows the buyer administrator to control the default account creation for supplier contacts. In prior releases, a user account was created by default for the supplier contact whose details were provided during the registration process. Now the buyer administrator will be able to decide whether a user account should be created or not.




3.13.3.5. Reinstate a Rejected Supplier Request

Prior to this release, if a supplier registration request was rejected it was not possible to make updates to the registration request and resubmit the same. Hence, if a Buyer Organization wanted to reconsider the supplier at a future point in time the supplier had to re-register.

Now buying organizations can reconsider rejected suppliers by re-opening earlier rejected requests and asking for specific additional details from suppliers. Suppliers need to re-register themselves, thus saving them time and effort. This also allows the buying organization to work closely and efficiently with their suppliers to handle their registration requests.



3.13.3.6. Registration Approval Workflow Enhancements

Approvals Management Engine (AME) is now available for the Registration Approval process. Key features of AME like forwarding, re-assigning, and vacation rules are available for use. If AME is enabled action notifications are sent to users as per the workflow definitions.

In addition, AME approvals will be represented graphically for quick comprehension.



3.13.3.7. Streamlined Prospective Supplier Registration Process

The prospective supplier registration process has been revamped to make it more structured and organized. Usability enhancements allow Suppliers to more quickly and easily register themselves.



3.13.3.8. View Prospective Supplier Registration Status

Prior to this release, suppliers were notified only after their registration request was either approved or rejected. Until this point there was no way for the Supplier to determine the status of their registration requests.

Now a registration link is sent to supplier as soon as the supplier registers with the buying organization. Using this link a prospective supplier can track the status of their registration request and take appropriate action based on the different statuses.



3.13.3.9. Pre-Qualification Template & Dependent Questions

Prior to this enhancement, only one Questionnaire list, also known as a Pre-Qualification Template, could be attached to a registration request. This did not allow any flexibility in the questionnaire that was asked of the prospective suppliers. With the latest release of Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management, based on the Supplier’s Profile, the system dynamically attaches one or more questionnaire lists to the registration request, thus allowing the much needed flexibility and automation. The Administrator has the ability to either add or remove one or more of the attached Questionnaire lists.


Besides the modifications to the Pre-Qualification Template functionality the application also now supports the concept of ‘Dependent Questions’. The questions a Supplier now gets asked will be based on their responses to previous question(s), thus making the entire questionnaire presented to a Supplier during the Registration process relevant to them.



3.13.4. Release 12.2

3.13.4.1. Registration Approval Workflow Enhancements

Two AME features are now supported in the Registration Approval Workflow:

• Ad-hoc approvers • FYI notifications

These features improve the reach and completeness of this approval process.


3.13.4.2. Approval History on Supplier Profile

The approval history for a supplier now appears on a supplier’s profile page. This will help internal users to track the history of the supplier record such as who approved or rejected the supplier and when.


3.13.4.3. Automated Assessment Process

Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management now provides the capability to create a touch less automated end to end flow for assessments, eliminating the need for any manual intervention to move an assessment from one phase to the next. This is possible for the following phases:

• Assessment Initiation • Locking of Scores • Assessment Completion

This would allow automatic creation of ‘Profile Audit’ and ‘Performance Evaluation’ assessments and take it to their completion without any manual intervention. It would also allow the assessment creation from Purchasing i.e. if a Purchase Order should be followed with a performance evaluation/ profile audit being carried out for the supplier.

3.13.4.4. Dynamic Invitation List

An invitation lists is a list of Suppliers that can be attached to an assessment. Static Invitation list cannot be modified implying that it does not allow for the additional of new Suppliers that have been on-boarded or existing Suppliers to be removed. This resulted in a major usability issue and severely limited the re-use of these lists.

However, with the latest release a new type of list called ‘Dynamic Invitation Lists’ has been introduced. Unlike the Static Invitation List, a Dynamic one doesn’t store the names of the Suppliers but the search criteria. Thus whenever they are used they provide the correct list of Suppliers as the names of the Suppliers are queried at that instant from the existing set of suppliers available in the system.


3.13.4.5. Sequential and Parallel Routing of Scoring

Sequential and Parallel Routing of the scoring of Suppliers allows one to determine the order in which the various Scoring teams would be providing their scores. Whereas some teams would be able to provide their scores at the same time (parallel), others would be able to do so only after some initial assessments have been made. The parallel and sequential routing of ‘Scoring’ would be based on pre-defined conditions in Supplier Lifecycle Management. A scenario where this would be of help would be if a Supplier should be rejected if they fail to attain a minimum score in a certain section. If this happens for a particular Supplier then that Supplier is rejected at that stage and no other teams are required to enter their scores, thus eliminating unnecessary work.

Oracle SLM will now be able to provide the overall picture for a supplier as it would display the aggregate scores at the supplier level, unlike before where the scores were aggregated only at the response level.

3.13.4.6. Update Evaluation after Submission

An evaluator might want to update his evaluation after submission due to various reasons such as to rectify a mistake, which was not possible so far. Now with this enhancement an evaluator can update their response anytime during the assessment cycle. Furthermore, there will be appropriate warnings given to the evaluator if he tries to update evaluation after the scoring has been completed.


3.14. Oracle Supplier Network 3.14.1. Overview

The Oracle Supplier Network (Oracle SN) enables Oracle Purchasing customers and their suppliers to accelerate collaboration and deliver significant efficiency savings by conducting business electronically. Buying organizations are able to achieve quick cost savings by leveraging the community of enabled suppliers on Oracle SN where thousands of XML transactions are exchanged daily.

An Oracle-run service utilizing an Internet-based hub transaction model, Oracle SN provides a wide range of features that are designed to ease the challenges of electronic messaging.

• Single Connection: Oracle SN is a messaging hub so each organization need only setup a single connection to get access to the community of buyers/suppliers

• Multiple Document and Transformation Support: The buying organization and its suppliers can exchange Purchase Orders, PO Acknowledgments, PO Change Requests, Advanced Shipment Notices and Invoices that can be automatically converted between OAG and cXML formats

• Self-Testing: Trading partners do not have to coordinate connectivity testing. Instead, Oracle SN allows each partner to utilize a Test Hub to send and receive sample documents to validate their connection

• Supplier Punch-in access to multiple customer Oracle iSupplier Portal applications

3.14.2. Version 5.0

3.14.2.1. Consolidated Hub Administration

Streamlined account administration tools allow administrators to manage all the messaging configurations for both their test and production transactions from a single account login. Users no longer migrate account setup between hubs. Instead users control separate transaction delivery parameters centrally for routing over the Oracle SN Test Hub and the Oracle SN Production Hub.

3.14.2.2. Production Routing Controls

Users can restrict specific trading partners from exchanging production messages.

3.14.2.3. UTF-8 Support

UTF-8 message encoding enables Oracle SN to route messages containing multibyte languages.


3.15. Oracle Supply Command Center 3.15.1. Overview

Oracle Supply Command Center is the application for procurement professionals that develops purchasing strategy while empowering cross-document actions. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts supply management costs.

Procurement teams across industries need to transform themselves from being a support function to assuming value creation function. Procurement alignment with other business functions can be a key enabler for business success by providing supplier expertise and partnerships necessary to differentiate the company’s offerings from the competition.

Oracle Supply Command Center equips you with tools to support this transformation within your company. Using the power of Endeca, Oracle Supply Command Center provides buyers with relevant insights to discover, prioritize and resolve issues before they affect business, identify cost savings, improve customer satisfaction, and improve category management.

3.15.2. Release V6

3.15.2.1. Procurement Operations Dashboard

The Operations Dashboard helps buyers gain end-to-end visibility of the status of procurement. For example, a buyer can view the backing requisition for a purchase order line, the agreement line from which the PO line was sourced, the RFX award from which the agreement line was created, and open supplier deliverables.

3.15.2.1.1. Full Procurement Lifecycle

Using this dashboard, buyers can filter and see relationships across all the following domains:

• Requisitions

• Purchase Orders

• Global Blanket Agreements and Contract Agreements

• Negotiations

• Deliverables

By viewing related documents, buyers can quickly assess individual document flows end-to-end as well as evaluate important related documents. The buyer can quickly review all procurement activities pertaining to them, discover issues and resolve them before business is affected.

With graphs, buyers can visualize agreement utilization status and take action to terminate, re-negotiate, or extend documents as needed.

3.15.2.1.2. Requisition Management

A critical customer service area is requisition management. Buyers can review requisitions and prioritize requisitions based on business needs. Buyers can also manage requisition and other document workload using Action Items.

3.15.2.1.3. Integrated Payables Information

Buyers can respond more quickly to purchase order and agreement performance by monitoring these documents beyond the walls of procurement. Buyers can track ordered,


shipped, received, invoiced quantities and amounts, and quickly zero-in on invoice holds and overdue payments, and track procurement contracts deliverables

3.15.2.2. Indirect Procurement Dashboard

Indirect Procurement Dashboard enables buyers to analyze buying behaviors of requesters within the organization from both requisitions and expense reports. Reviewing Requisitioner feedback helps buyers update purchasing documents and refine the available catalog to better meet business needs. Buyers can also:

• Analyze reviews and ratings provided by requester on the catalog items available in iProcurement, and initiate necessary corrective action

• Act on specific feedback coming in from requesters

• Gain insights into catalog usage and refine catalog content

• Review off-contract spend behavior (including spend from iExpenses) and identify cost-saving opportunities

3.15.2.3. Action Items

Action Items organizes workload within a procurement team. For example, a certain requisition in the pool might require a series of tasks (estimating overall demand, performing market research, checking price / availability, evaluating viable alternatives etc,). Other buyers may be specialists in one of these areas. Action Items allow buyers to assign tasks to others within the procurement team with a target completion date, create visibility into ownership, and track tasks to completion.

Buyers can create action items against the following:

• Requisition line in the pool

• Open purchase order header

• Purchase order line

• Agreement header

• Agreement line

• Review or a Feedback record (in iProcurement)

3.15.2.4. Item Analysis

Buyers use Item Analysis to explore the history of items used in the organization including on-time delivery, quality, and item suitability. Items requested in the requisition can be compared to other item performance measures to ensure the best item fit for the Requisitioner.

3.15.2.5. Supplier Analysis

Supplier Analysis provides supplier history for goods or services used in your organization. Past performance, including on-time delivery, quality, and supplier capabilities can be evaluated or compared to the items requested in the requisition to ensure the best suppliers are selected.


Documents

Oracle EBS RCD with Major features