Managing and Awarding a Sourcing Event (Non-IT)
Once a Sourcing Event is published and open for bidding, vendors have through the allotted time per the Due date to provide electronic responses to the solicitation. These responses are concealed from the Project Owner until envelopes are opened once the Due date passes. During the time that an Event is open, vendors can ask questions through Event Messages, and Project Owners can respond, if needed, by creating Addendums or even extending the timing of the Event. Although awarding the solicitation to the winning bidder does not happen within the Sourcing Tool, there are several steps supporting this process that do, such as gaining P&C’s approval of the Award Recommendation Packet.
For more detailed step-by-step information regarding this topic in a printable format, see the following job aid.
Even though the Sourcing Project Owner will not be able to see the vendors’ actual responses until after the Sourcing Event’s Due date, Sourcing Project Owners can check the Suppliers section at any time to see which vendors have responded. During the Sourcing Event, if vendors have any questions, they will submit them via email or in the Event Messages section.
Sourcing Project Owners can provide answers to vendor questions – or make any other necessary updates to the Sourcing Event – by posting an Addendum in the Sourcing Event before the Due date of the Sourcing Event.
Sourcing Project Owners have the ability to extend the Due date and time on a published Sourcing Event if necessary.
When the Sourcing Event reaches the response Due date, the event status becomes Pending Selection. At this point, the Sourcing Project Owner can open the Envelopes to review the responses.
While reviewing the vendor responses, it may be necessary to seek clarification with certain vendors. A Request for Clarification Template is available in the Sourcing Project Documents folder. Sending the requests for clarification to applicable vendors will be handled via the Sourcing Event’s Messages section.
After all information has been received and considered, the user can develop an Award Recommendation Packet and post the final Bid Tabulation and Award Notification on eVP. If the solicitation was previously approved by P&C, the Award Recommendation Packet will also need to gain P&C approval before the solicitation can be officially awarded to a supplier. This is done via the built-in Gain P&C Approval of Award Recommendation Packet task in Phase 06 of the Tasks section.
Once the solicitation has been officially awarded per the process outlined by P&C, and the Sourcing Project Owner is certain that no more communication with the responding vendors will be necessary, the status of both the Sourcing Event and Sourcing Project should be marked Complete for clarification purposes.
Ariba Sourcing Events can accept a maximum of 100 supplier responses, and although reaching that threshold is extremely rare for solicitations created by state of North Carolina users, a plan is in place if an event nears that threshold. The Sourcing Project Owner will begin to see alerts within their Sourcing Event and may receive an additional communication from the NC eProcurement team that their event is nearing 100 suppliers. At this point, the Sourcing Project Owner and the NC eProcurement team will monitor the number of responses as the Due date approaches and if it seems possible that over 100 suppliers will respond, they will work together to create an Overflow Event in the same Sourcing Project to allow more than 100 suppliers to respond to the solicitation.