Purchasing tasks and procurement cases

All automated purchasing tasks and procurement cases are created using flow designer from the Service Delivery Common (SDC) application. The flow designer uses the underlying task and case generation decision tables, and purchasing tasks and procurement cases are created based on the conditions defined in the decision tables.

Conditions and triggers for task and case creation

While the Sourcing decision dependent on case and Order dependent on case fields in the Finance Case table determine the need for a procurement case to be created, the Sourcing decision dependent on task and Order dependent on task fields in the Finance Task table determine the need for a procurement task to be created.

Tasks and cases are generated when the following rules are triggered, with the decision tables supporting this generation via decision inputs.

• Purchase Requisition Task and Case Generation Rule
• Sourcing Request Task and Case Generation Rule
• Negotiation Task and Case Generation Rule
• Sourcing Event Task and Case Generation Rule

Procurement case types

Here’s a list of the types and subtypes of procurement cases:

• Edit a purchase
• Edit a receipt
• GL Coding Review
• Budget Review
• Contract Review
• Send NDA for Signature
• Return a purchase
• Replace a purchase
• Request a Corporate Card
• Inquiry
• Delivery Address Review
• Request a copy of contract
• Due Diligence

For procurement cases, you can also create child cases or associate child cases to parent cases. However, remember that you must close all child cases and associated child cases before you can close any parent case. Similarly, you can reopen a child case or associated child case only when the parent case is still open.

Procurement case states

The states that are available for a procurement case are listed.

• Draft
• Processing Case
• In Review
• On Hold
• Work in Progress
• Closed Canceled
• Closed Rejected
• Closed Completed
• Awaiting Acceptance

When the condition in the Enable case resolution acceptance decision table is set to True, the procurement case state automatically changes to Awaiting Acceptance after the fulfiller sets it to Closed Completed.

The requestor gets an email notification to accept or reject the resolution within a set time.

• If the requestor accepts the case resolution, a predefined email is generated for them to send and the case automatically changes to Closed Completed.
• If the requestor rejects the case resolution, the case moves back to Work in Progress.
• If the requestor does not respond in time, the case is automatically marked as Closed Completed.

For more information on email notifications, see Alerts and email notifications from ShoppingHub.

Purchasing task types

A list of the types and subtypes of purchasing tasks are listed.

• Purchasing task
  • Select a Supplier: Ask the shopper to compare pricing from multiple suppliers and select a supplier.
  • Sourcing task
  • Ask a question: Ask the shopper for more information about the purchase.
• Procurement/Supplier task: Create a procurement task for a supplier.

You can also create child tasks or associate child tasks to parent tasks. However, remember that you must close all child tasks and associated child tasks before you can close any parent task. Similarly, you can reopen a child task or associated child task only when the parent task is still open.

The following are the key fields of a purchasing task:

Tableau 1. Purchasing task fields

Field	Description
Number	System-generated unique identifier of the purchasing task.
Assignment group	Group to which this purchasing task belongs.
Assigned to	User to which this purchasing task is assigned.
Primary contact	Person within the procurement team working on the purchase who can be contacted with questions. This field is populated or updated with the same user in the Assigned to field of the parent task record, as follows: For a sourcing task, from the referenced sourcing request For a purchasing task, from the purchasing task itself For a contract task, from the contract task itself For a supplier task, from the supplier task itself For a finance task, from the finance task itself
State	Status of the purchasing task.
Substate	Progress of obtaining the shopper’s responses to the procurement specialist’s questions.
Due date	Expected date of completing the task.
Short description	Short description of the task.
Description	Detailed description of the task.
Detailed description	Detailed description of the Custom Task for Employee task subtype. You can enter your instructions in html or rich text format, and even add hyperlinks or images as required.
Summary Details
Supplier	Supplier reference for this task.
Sourcing request	Sourcing request associated with this task.
Purchase requisition	Purchase requisition associated with this task.
Purchase order	Purchase order for which the revision request task is raised.
Sourcing decision dependent on task	Specifies whether this task must be completed before a sourcing request can be created. Remarque : This field is displayed only if a related sourcing request is entered.​
Qualification dependent on task	Specifies whether this task must be completed before a qualification request can be created. Remarque : This field is displayed only if a related sourcing request is entered.​
Order dependent on task	Determines if completion of this task is required prior to a purchase order being created. Remarque : This field is displayed only if a related purchase requisition is entered.​
Expected start	Expected date of starting work on the task.
Actual start	Actual date of starting work on the task.
Actual end	Actual date of completing the task.
Duration	Actual time taken to complete the task.
Question & Answer
This section contains the information of the questions posed to the shopper and the responses that the shopper provides.

• Purchasing task and procurement case creation
  Create purchasing tasks and procurement cases in sourcing requests and purchase requisitions.