Quote Messages and Awards
A Quote Message and an Award are technically different documents.
- Quote Message
- A Quote Message is the supplier’s bid details submitted in response to an RFQ. It includes pricing, discounts, service rates, lead times, comments, and attachments for evaluation and comparison. It represents the supplier’s response to an RFQ in SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing.
- Award
- An Award is the buyer’s formal selection of the winning quote in SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing. It involves selecting the winning supplier(s) and final bid details for an RFQ event. The award decision is sent from SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing to the SAP system via the Managed Gateway. It represents the accepted quote and finalized commercial terms, including the awarded supplier, items/service lines, prices, quantities, and delivery details. It drives the creation of follow-on documents like Purchase Orders, Scheduling Agreements, or Outline Agreements. It ensures end-to-end sourcing process completion from RFQ to Quote to Award to Purchase Order or Contract in the SAP system.
In the context of SAP Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network (Managed Gateway), an Award refers to the process and document when a buyer selects suppliers as winners of sourcing events like RFQs, RFPs, or auctions conducted in SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing. An Award represents the finalized sourcing decision sent from SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing to the buyer’s SAP back-end system (ERP or S/4HANA) after a sourcing event and supplier selection.
Award data includes:
- Winning supplier(s)
- Awarded items or lots
- Awarded quantities and prices
- Terms and conditions
- Event and project references
Managed Gateway Integration and Benefits
The Managed Gateway integrates Awards, ensuring awarded sourcing results from SAP Ariba flow seamlessly to the SAP back-end for follow-up actions like creating Purchase Orders (POs), Outline Agreements, generating Contracts, and synchronizing data between sourcing and procurement systems.
It transforms and maps Ariba Award cXML documents to corresponding SAP documents (e.g., Contracts or POs), handles master data cross-references (e.g., supplier IDs, company codes, purchasing organizations), and provides error handling and monitoring for award transmission.
Benefits of Award Integration via Managed Gateway:
- Eliminates manual data entry and errors.
- Provides real-time visibility of awarded sourcing results.
- Accelerates procurement execution.
- Maintains data consistency.
When a buyer sends a Quote Request to SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing, it processes the request and creates a sourcing request. The sourcing manager approves the request, creates a sourcing event, and invites suppliers to participate based on the criteria defined in the Quote Request and Sourcing Request template.
Suppliers bid on the event, and SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing awards the winning bids. It sends the award as a Quote Message back to the SAP system. Based on the award’s information, Managed Gateway creates a Purchase Order, Scheduling Agreement, or Contract (Outline Agreement) in the SAP system.
If the award contains a Framework Order reference document type and a FO document category, Managed Gateway creates a Purchase Order of Framework Order type with the specified validity dates in the SAP system. The Contract (Outline Agreement) also includes the validity dates.
To create a Purchase Order, Scheduling Agreement, or Contract (Outline Agreement), maintain the Cross-Reference Parameters in the Managed Gateway integration project.
Buyers must import material master data from SAP back-end to SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing. They can create Purchase Orders, Scheduling Agreements, or Contracts from awards without an SAP Request for Quotation reference.
When SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing sends an award against a winning bid with manually created material items, the Managed Gateway creates a Purchase Order, Scheduling Agreement, or Contract in the SAP ERP system. The manually created material items must include item category and material group values.
Upon creating the Purchase Order, Scheduling Agreement, or Contract, the SAP system sends a confirmation message to SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing via Managed Gateway.
The confirmation message contains:
- SAP Purchase Order ID and Date
- SAP Contract ID and Date
- Sourcing Event ID
- Vendor ID
- Status Code – 200 (Received successfully) or 503 (Failure)
- Status Text – Success or Failure
Additional Notes and Resources
For Purchase Orders created on SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, the domain attribute for the IdReference identifier element stores the SAPPurchaseOrderId value.
For Contracts created on SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, the domain attribute for the IdReference identifier element stores the SAPAgreementID value.
The SAP Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network Overview Guide provide more information on the Quote Message or Award.
Navigate to Transactions for SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts > Inbound Transactions for SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts. Then refer to the Quote Message section, Prerequisites section, and Limitations section.