Now that we have discussed an overview of Strategic Sourcing, bid factors and scoring, let’s focus on creating the sourcing event.
There are three types of events in PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing:
- A sell event: the sale of goods that you own (equivalent to a forward auction).
- A buy event: the purchase of goods or services (equivalent to a request for purchase or quote or a reverse auction).
- An RFI event: a request for information.
For the purposes of our discussions, we will focus on the buy event as outlined in the diagram from PeopleBooks below.
(Click to enlarge)
Let’s look at what is required to setup an event, focusing on an RFx event (not an auction). The information at the summary level is pretty straightforward, including the name of the event, a description of the event along with the times the event begins and ends. One feature that requires a bit more discussion is the “Copy From” drop down list. This allows the user to copy directly from various sources. Most of these sources are other sources within PeopleSoft modules including Engineering, Manufacturing, Purchasing and other sourcing events.
As discussed previously, we can setup bid factors at the header level. Typically these might be bid factors that apply to the whole event such as warranty, or class of business etc. Then we have to create the line information. Remember, the default bid factor for the line is the price. But we may have different bid factors by line such as warranty, quality or delivery time.
Once you have your event configured, then you can invite bidders and finally post the event.
But hold up — all of this is much easier to demonstrate than discuss, so let’s look at a short video outlining the setup of an event. A picture being worth a thousand words and all of that.
In this video, we will duplicate the examples we discussed in the last blogs so we can tie back to how events are scored and eventually awarded. As always, if you have any questions on this topic or about the video below, please reach out and let me know. I’m happy to help.