Help Home/ Creating Negotiations
In many cases, buyers need to create a negotiation that contains large numbers of Requirements and/or large numbers of negotiation lines. For example:
In public sector RFIs, there may be several hundred questions (represented by negotiation Requirements) suppliers must answer.
Companies negotiating entire catalogs need to represent the items in the catalog as lines on the negotiation.
RFXs and RFIs for large construction projects may need to list thousands of lines.
In these cases, the user needs to efficiently:
Create the initial document.
Create amendments.
Take the negotiation to a subsequent round of responding.
Easily and completely respond to the negotiation such that the integrity of the negotiation is retained.
Analyze responses and make awards.
Generate documentation about the negotiation.
Oracle Sourcing supports all these tasks when dealing with large negotiation. If you specify that your negotiation is large by selecting a large negotiation style when initially defining your negotiation. Afterwards whenever you access the negotiation lines, you can use a search function to display a subset of the entire collection of lines. You don't have to page backward and forward through all the lines to process particular negotiation lines.
Additionally, if your negotiation meets the criteria set by the Sourcing Administrator, and qualifies as a "very large" negotiation, the processing done at various point in its life is performed asynchronously. For example, if your negotiation contains several thousand lines, the publishing process could require considerable time. Therefore it is performed by a Concurrent Program running in the background. This frees up your terminal so you can continue working. Once the publishing process is completed, you receive a notification that the publishing is completed, and the negotiation appears with a status of Completed on your Negotiation Home page.
Since the Oracle Sourcing featuresAutoExtend, Power Bidding, and Proxy Bidding can affect large numbers of lines automatically, they are discourages for large negotiations and not allowed with very large negotiations. Additionally, since if you use a bid ranking method 1, 2, 3 the responses for all the lines must be sorted, this ranking method is discouraged.
Searching Lines Of a Large Negotiation
Once you have defined multiple lines to a large or very large negotiation, you can use the search function to view or process selected lines. This allows you to access and work with only those lines that meet your search criteria (for example, only lines whose items come from a particular category). There are two fields that display line number information. Number of Lines specifies the aggregate number of all lines defined to the negotiation, including constituent lot lines and group lines. Last Line Number refers to the last independent and/or parent line number. Lines in lots and groups are numbered as children of their parent line number and so are not reflected in Last Line Number. This means there can be a difference between the two. For example, if you have a negotiation with many lots, the Last Line Number might be 200, while the Number of Lines might be 375.
To search negotiation lines:
On the Lines page (Create, View, Bid) enter as many search criteria into the fields in the Search area as are necessary to define the set of lines you wish to process.
You can search on Line Number, Category, Line Description, and Item Number.
If you select "Show table data when all conditions are met," the lines retrieved must each of the criteria you define.
If you select "Show table data when any conditions are met," the lines retrieved must meet at least one of the criteria you define, but not necessarily all.
You can add multiple search clauses by selecting an entry from the Add Another menu and clicking Add. This enables you to search for a range of items (for example, Item Number > 123 and Item Number < 789), or for items from more than one category.
After you have specified your search criteria, click Go to display the results.
Once the lines are displayed, you can process them as you normally would.
Note that if you use a search clause with the comparison types of
Contains
Is not
Ends with
you must also include at least one search clause having a comparison type that is not one of the types listed above.