Sourcing against the Contract PO in Oracle Procurement

Sourcing is the key feature of Oracle procurement which provides the flexibility to organization for automating the buying process so that buyers could put efforts towards more value added activities. Most of the organization does regular business with standard suppliers for the regular use items. They don’t do the complete process of quotation and analysis for every frequent purchase they do. Few of the examples are

1. Buying phones  
2. Buying stationery
3. Buying printers
4. Buying laptops

For most the above purchases, organization does not expect to go through the complete procurement process. As the negotiation is done so they prefer to do a contract with the supplier with the negotiated prices. These prices will be available on their iprocurement catalogue. Once the item is selected by requester and approved by his supervisor will make sure an automatic PO is created and emailed to supplier. To achieve this process we do need to setup ‘Sourcing against the contract PO for catalogue item’. In this post I will discuss how to set this feature in oracle.

 Oracle iprocurement provides the feature to associate the contract PO against the requisition line which is created in iprocurement. This allows the automatic creation of PO and it uses PO create document workflow. Following steps need to be followed to achieve this functionality

1. Create a contract PO for the supplier and site in core purchasing
2. Bulk load the catalogue items and specify the contract PO number in the file. The template for the same could be taken from the econtent Manager responsibility
3. Once items are bulk loaded then validate the item and confirm the contract number does appear for each item.
4. Now create the requisition for this item and approve the same
5. Automatically standard PO will be created and

This automation is achedFollowing workflow attributes plays the key role for this execution from Create PO document workflow. This workflow is assigned in the requisition document type.

1 Is Automatic Creation Allowed?  Yes

2 Should Contract be used to autocreate Doc? Yes

3 Is Contract Required on Requisition Line? Yes

This automation is achieved by the workflow named as Create PO Document. This workflow is assigned in the document type screen for requisition. Following attributes plays the key role for this execution from Create PO document workflow.

1. Is Automatic Creation Allowed?  Yes

2. Should Contract be used to autocreate Doc? Yes

3. Is Contract Required on Requisition Line? Yes

As the creation processes is setup as deferred in Main Requisition approval workflow so after the requisition is sent for approval workflow Background process need to be run for item type as ‘Requisition’. Once that is completed the standardPOwill get automatically created.

Oracle Procurement also provides options of auto Sourcing with ASL and Sourcing rule. I would try to bring some of those topics also for our discussion later