Ariba: publishing an RFQ and reading the suppliers' bids

If your company buys through SAP Ariba, SourcePro can publish an RFQ on your Ariba site and bring the suppliers' bids back as draft quotations. Nothing is confirmed by itself: a bid is a draft until you say it counts. The page and the card below exist only where your SourcePro offers Ariba, and only once your company's admin has connected it.

Before the first RFQ (your company's admin, once)

Your Ariba administrator makes an application for SourcePro in Ariba's developer portal and gives you four values: your site's name, the application key, the client ID and the client secret. Under Settings → Ariba link → Connect you type them: SourcePro asks Ariba whether it takes them before it keeps them, and then keeps them sealed (nobody can read them back). Test asks again; if Ariba stops accepting them the page says Needs attention and you are told. Disconnect forgets them. Where Ariba hosts your site is your company's own arrangement with SAP.

Publish an RFQ (a buyer)

1. On the RFQ's page, the Ariba card has Publish to Ariba. The dialog looks for the vendors you asked among the suppliers of Ariba by their GSTIN. One whose name agrees is linked; one that may be the same company is shown for you to answer Same company or Not the same (a vendor is never linked by its name alone). A supplier belongs to one vendor only.
2. A vendor with a link is invited on Ariba and is not emailed; every other vendor is emailed as always. Email it instead keeps one vendor on email for this RFQ.
3. Everything that stops the RFQ from going is said at once. From the click the RFQ is fixed as it is when an email goes; to change it, Withdraw from Ariba, change it, and publish again.
4. Your name and work email go to Ariba as the event's contact; the dialog says so.

Cancelling the RFQ calls its event off, and awarding it closes the event to bids; Ariba tells its suppliers, so no cancellation email goes to them.

The suppliers' bids

SourcePro looks at an open event every few minutes (Settings → Rules → Ariba link), and Read now on the card looks at once. Each supplier's bid becomes a draft quotation of its vendor:

• It says Read from Ariba with the bid's number, and holds the prices, the quantity when it is not the one asked, the lead time, the make, the supplier's note on a line (as the line's deviation), payment days, validity, delivery terms and the supplier's own comment in the remarks.
• What a bid cannot say is yours: the price basis (and its place) and GST are left empty. The quotation page offers Use the RFQ's for the price basis. Check the draft, complete it and confirm it.
• A newer bid of the same supplier replaces a draft nobody has worked on, or makes a new version of a quotation you confirmed. If you are in the middle of that vendor's quotation, the new bid waits until you confirm or discard yours, and the card lists it under Bids that need you.
• A bid SourcePro cannot take is listed there too, with why and what to do: not in rupees, a price with more than four decimals, a supplier you did not invite through SourcePro, a quotation you turned down. Nothing is ever rounded, cut or guessed; you ask the supplier to bid again, or enter its quotation by hand.
• If your company seals quotations until the due time (Settings → Rules → RFQs), bids on Ariba are not read at all before it: the card shows how many suppliers have bid, and their prices are read after.
• A supplier that declines on Ariba is marked declined on the RFQ, and a draft nobody worked on is thrown away. A quotation you already confirmed stays: only you can turn it down.

The RFQ's page warns, at the top, of suppliers that bid on Ariba and have no quotation that counts yet. The event is Finished once it has closed and every bid has been read.

Good to know

• Withdraw from Ariba is not offered once a bid has become a quotation: cancel the RFQ, or let the event finish.
• If Ariba stops accepting your company's values, the card says Not reading Ariba since a time, with why, and your company's admin is told. Connect again and reading goes on.
• Prices on Ariba are rupees all through: a bid in another currency is not taken.
• The RFQ's History (at the bottom of its page) tells what happened on Ariba, newest first: published (who was invited and who was left out), the event opened or closed, a read asked for, each bid read into a quotation or not taken, a supplier's decline.
• Everything SourcePro sends to Ariba and reads back is in your data processing agreement (Schedule A); Ariba is your processor, not SourcePro's.