What is Process Management inAriaSourcing?
The Ariba Sourcing solution package includes process management features that allow you to control sourcing projects from the planning stage to the awarding of individual events, including:
- Using templates that enable you to create new events and projects using approved business processes.
- Store and manage events and documents.
- Use negotiation tasks to collaborate with internal and external users to review and revise projects and events, including workflow notifications for reviewers, approvers, and negotiation participants.
- Designate planned projects using the Planned state so that you can keep track of upcoming projects for the quarter or year and allocate resources for future projects.
- Manage multiple related events and track savings, including negotiated, implemented, and actual savings.
- Customize review and approval flow to match your company’s business processes.
What are Quick Project and Full Project?
Quick and Full projects are types of Sourcing Projects.
Aquick projectis an event such as an RFI(Request for Information), RFP(Request for Proposal), or auction that is created from a default Ariba template. Quick projects are limited to the functionality defined in those templates, and are useful for creating basic events that don’t require a lot of customization or process management.
Afull projectcan be created from any available template, including templates your company has created to manage different business processes or types of events. Full projects can be events, or they can be sourcing projects. They include full support for process management, including document storage, tasks, a message board, and project team. It is common for companies use a sourcing project that includes planning and savings tracking to manage one or more subproject events.
What are the Sourcing Project Components?
The main components of full sourcing projects are:
- Overview
Attributes about the sourcing project, such as the name, owner, associated suppliers, and start and end dates.
- Documents
Documents, such as planning documents, savings tracking documents, and forms. Ariba Spend Management supports files in multiple formats, including Microsoft Word, ASCII text, and Microsoft Excel.
- Tasks
Actions assigned to users, such as reviewing, approving, or negotiating. These tasks enable you to collaborate with internal or external users to review and revise project information. Ariba Spend Management tasks include features to specify workflow and approval orders and to help you track review versions and comments.
- Team
The users who are allowed to access different areas of the project and perform different actions, such as modifying or reviewing documents.
- Message Board
A collection of messages for the project. Users can create topics (messages), add replies to messages, and label messages for filtering. The system creates a unique email address for each project message board.
Internal and external users who know the address can send messages to the project message board’s email address for posting to the message board, so that project team members can collaborate with other internal users, suppliers, and interested outside parties.
- History
A history of the project and its components, such as updated document versions. The history includes the name of the user who performed each change.
Desktop File Sync:
Document tasks use the Desktop File Sync (DFS) feature to enable users to create new document versions in the Ariba system using links from the tasks pages. Ariba recommends that you enable DFS when working with document tasks. The procedures described in this chapter for processing review, approval, and negotiation tasks assume that DFS is enabled.
If you do not have DFS enabled, many of the document handling features in tasks will not be available, including:
Instead, you must manually download the files you are working with and manually upload revised files.
Sourcing Process Management Features
Process management in Ariba sourcing projects allows you to:
A template serves as a starting point for a project. Users must select a template to create a full or quick sourcing project. Templates are prepopulated with documents, tasks, and team members. Templateauthors can also set conditions in templates to automatically display or hide content according toinformation such as location, commodity, or other project attributes.
Ariba supplies default sourcing project templates. In solutions that include Ariba Sourcing Professional,you can copy and modify these default templates, or you can create your own templates.
Sourcing projects provide centralized storage places where users can store and manage multiple versions
of project documents. You can also prepopulate sourcing project templates with documents to standardize
their use across projects.
Ariba provides the Desktop File Sync (DFS) feature which enables you to easily use the centralized file
storage provided by Ariba Spend Management with efficient local file editing. When DFS is enabled,
opening a document stored in the Ariba Spend Management system downloads a new version of the file to
the user’s desktop if the user does not have the latest version of the document. If a user modifies his or her
local copy of the document, the system detects the change and asks if the user wants to create a new
version of the file in the system by uploading the local file.
Forms are customized data-entry documents. If your Ariba Spend Management solution includes forms,
you can create form documents in projects from your company’s custom templates to collect information.
You can also prepopulate sourcing project templates with form documents to standardizeinformation-collecting across projects.
You can configure the system to send email to notify users when projects are started, completed, ormodified and when users are assigned to tasks.
You can configure tasks as milestones, predecessor tasks, and follow-on tasks to standardize workflow
and make sure that parts of the project are completed before others start.
With group-based project access controls, users are assigned to groups. Groups have roles that control
permissions for resources and actions. Users can be assigned to multiple groups, and therefore can have
multiple roles. You can set up access control so that users share some but not all permissions.
Groups can be defined per project or globally for your site.
You can define groups and assign groups for tasks and access control in a template. Template group definitions and assignments are inherited by all projects created using the template, allowing you to standardize project team membership.
You can also create a team member rules file for a template that specifies the groups and users for projects
based on different project attributes such as commodities and geographic locations.
You can create the following relationships between sourcing projects:
- Subprojects: A subproject is tightly linked to its parent project. The subproject is contained in the parentproject and inherits team members and multiple attributes from it. You can create permanent links fromfields in a parent project to subproject fields so that changes in the parent project are automaticallypropagated to the subproject.
- Follow-on project: A follow-on project is a project that can inherit field values, but has no permanentlinks to the predecessor project.
You can import and export tasks from Ariba Spend Management to Microsoft Project. You can alsoexport tasks from Ariba Spend Management to Microsoft Outlook.
If your Ariba Sourcing solution includes both Ariba Sourcing and Ariba Contract Management, you cancreate savings tracking forms to automatically track savings for procurement contracts that are or will beassociated with sourcing projects.
You can create reports about contract projects using data from multiple contract fields that is filtered,sorted, and compared in multiple formats.
Preparing Clean Versions of Word Documents
The following procedure describes how to create a clean version of a Word document. Use this procedure if
you need to view or incorporate a reviewed document from a reviewer using an unknown or higher version
of Word than your version or if you need to process a Word document created using Word 97 (or earlier).
- Open the file using Word.
- Select all the text (CTL+A) and copy it to your Microsoft Office clipboard (CTL+C).
- Close Word.
- Paste the text from your Office clipboard (CTL+V) into a plain text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad.
- Select all the text (CTL+A) from the plain text editor and copy it to your Office clipboard (CTL+C).
- Start a new instance of Word and create an empty file.
- Paste the text from your Office clipboard (CTL+V) into the new Word file.
In addition, you must remove any password protection. Ariba Spend Management cannot synchronize
changes made in password-protected documents.
Microsoft Word Integration
Ariba solutions are integrated with Microsoft Word, which enables users to seamlessly edit Word documentsin projects. When DFS is enabled and a user opens a Word document in a project, Ariba invokes Word on theuser's system and loads the document for the user. If the user does not have the most recent version of thedocument, Ariba automatically downloads it to the user's local system.
In addition, Ariba solutions provide the following Word integration features when DFS is enabled:
- The Compare Versions operation, which is selected from the Version History tab of the detailed view of a document. This operation enables you to compare a document with changes from the previous versionwith the changes highlighted inline.
- The Merge Document operation, which is selected from the Action menu for a document. This operation merges a document with another Word document in a project. The merged document shows the changes highlighted inline.
- The Review Change operation, which is available when working with review and approval tasks. Thisoperation enables you to view changes from reviewers and accept or reject individual changes within thefile.
When these options are selected in the Ariba UI, Ariba invokes Word on the user's system. Word then performs a combine or merge operation to merge the documents and uses the Word Track Changes feature tohighlight the changes in the documents.
Microsoft Word Requirements:
When using Microsoft Word integration features with Ariba solutions, users must meet the following
requirements:
- Use Word 2000 or Later
The Word version must be Word 2000 or later. If you have documents written in Word 97 or earlier, youcan use the procedureto createclean versions of these documents in Word 2000 or later.
- Use the Same Word Version
All users editing a Word document (creating, modifying, or reviewing a Word document with edit access)must use the same version of Word. This is a requirement regardless of the document extension type (.docor .docx). For example, saving a file with a .doc extension in Word 2010 does not ensure that alloperations will be successful in Word 2003.
It is possible to edit a document using a Word version that is higher than the version used to create it, butall subsequent authors must edit the document using the higher Microsoft version level. For example, adocument created with Word 2003 can be edited by a Word 2010 user (in compatibility mode), but if aWord 2003 user subsequently attempts to edit the document, errors can occur or the action can fail.
If a document is only opened and viewed (but not saved) using a version of Word that is higher than the version used to create it, users can continue to edit the document using the (lower) version used to createit. For example, the following sequence of events can complete with no problems:
- A Word 2003 user creates a document.
- A Word 2010 user views the document and does not save or create a new version.
- A Word 2003 user edits the document.
- Do Not Merge Documents from Reviewers Who Use a Higher Word Version
Task owners cannot process reviewed documents from reviewers who use a Word version that is higherthan the task owner’s version.
Microsoft does not support or provides limited support for merging a document into a document that was created using a lower Word version. When processing a document reviewed by an external email reviewer (such as a supplier), a task owner submits the reviewed document on behalf of the reviewer. As part of the submittal process, the reviewed document is merged with the current version of the document. Becausethis merge is performed and because of Microsoft limitations when merging Word documents, taskowners cannot merge documents from reviewers who use a higher Word version. A task owner must beusing a version of Word that is the same or higher than the version used by the external email reviewer.
For example, a task owner using Word 2007 can process documents reviewed using the followingversions of Word:
- Word 2007
- Word 2003
- Word 2002
- Word 2000
However, a task owner using Word 2007 cannot process documents reviewed using Word 2010.
If a task owner is not using the most recent version of Word and cannot ensure that an external email
reviewer uses a version of Word that is the same or lower, Ariba recommends that the task owner creates a
clean copy of the reviewed document and then submits the cleaned version.
- Do Not Install Multiple Versions of Word on a System
Users cannot have multiple versions of Microsoft Word installed on their systems. The presence of
multiple versions in the system registry can cause runtime problems with the Microsoft APIs.
