When creating a negotiation, buyers can nominate collaboration team members to participate in the creation and administration of the sourcing document. This includes the entire life of the sourcing document from the initial creation to the award process. Buyers can optionally grant full access to some team members while restricting others to read-only access. Each member can be assigned specific tasks, and some team members may be required to approve the final document before delivery to potential suppliers. Such tasks could include defining the item attributes, inviting additional suppliers, scoring supplier responses, awarding business to supplier, and creating document outcomes.
Who can participate as team members?
The negotiation creator and anyone with Manage Collaboration Team job function can add/delete team members. You can define a collaboration team when creating the document, or you can use document templates to define collaboration teams. By default, all members have full access to the sourcing document, but members can be restricted to requirements scoring-only, or read-only access where appropriate. The buyer and the buyer's manager always default to the team. Buyers can delete their managers from the list of approvers for a negotiation. The manager name appears by default for any buyer in the list of approvers. Select the Delete icon to remove a manager from the list of approvers. Buyers can delete their managers from the list of approvers for draft and published negotiation. Any other user from the same buying organization can be added. Team members can be optionally assigned tasks with target dates. Team members with required tasks should indicate when those tasks are completed.
Collaboration team members must belong to the business group of the negotiation, which is determined from the owning operating unit. If the buyer changes the operating unit after defining the negotiation team, the system will validate that the team members belong to the new business group of the operation unit.
Note: This rule is only in effect if the profile option HR:Cross Business Group is not set to Yes. If the profile option is set to Yes, the buyer can add employees and contractors from different business groups.
Document Approval Process
Any user who is on the Collaboration Team can be designated as an approver for that document. Approvers can be added or removed as necessary at any time before the sourcing document is submitted for approval. Any user who has access to modify a draft document and has the functional security of "Manage Collaboration Team" can change the list of approvers.
Once the document has been submitted for approval, no changes can be made to it (other than having approvers removed) unless the document is rejected. You must have modification access and the functional security of "Manage Collaboration Team" to modify the collaboration team definition. The approval process is not hierarchical; all approvers can access and approve the document simultaneously. There are no dependencies among approvers.
Once the document has been approved, a Publish button appears to anyone who has the Publish Negotiations job function. Anyone with this job function can publish the approved negotiation to suppliers .
Note that throughout the approval process, notifications are sent between the buyer and the document approvers. Not until the document is approved and published are notifications sent to suppliers about the document.
Adding Collaboration Members
On the Create Header page, there is an area where a buyer can identify collaboration members. The buyer and the buyer's manager are automatically identified as team members. The buyer can search for and select additional collaboration team members if necessary . For each member, the buyer identifies:
If the member is an approver.
The members access level. Members with full access can update the document (including updating the collaboration list). Members with Scoring access are eligible for inclusion in a scoring team team. Members with View Only access cannot update the document (although the can be assigned tasks to perform)..
If that member has been assigned a task, and if so, when the target date is.