Configuring General Event Rules and Market Feedback

If enabled, an event owner can create multiple bidding rounds within a single event. Event owners can select the participants and content to include in later rounds.

Procedure

Must participants improve their bids. If this rule is set to Yes, the system validates bids based on the bid improvement rules. It rejects bids that don’t meet the requirements of the improvement rules.

This rule is the main factor that dictates if the event is competitive and doesn’t apply to RFIs.

When enabled, participants can submit bids by e-mail for noncompetitive events (Must participants improve their bids must be set to No).

A supplier can submit a response to the event by e-mail. The response indicates that the supplier agrees to, and accepts the terms specified in the bidder agreement that was sent as an attachment to the invitation mail.

Alternative bidding gives suppliers (participants) the ability to submit alternate bids after they've submitted a primary bid based on a guided sourcing event as you’ve defined it. You can then view the primary and alternative pricing responses and decide what meets your needs the best.

Only alternative pricing is available in guided sourcing currently, as supplier bundles and volume tiers aren't supported.

We recommend that template authors create templates with alternative bidding rules configured for event creators. The alternative bidding rules in a guided sourcing template include:

• Can participants create alternative responses?
• Can participants create alternative pricing?
• Include alternative pricing bids when bids are ranked.
• Should questions be visible in alternatives?
• Should there be a limit on number of alternatives?
• Alternative Limit value.

Out of these rules, only Can participants create alternative responses? is available on the Set event rules page for a guided sourcing event.

When preparing the event, new items and lots are created with a term that is marked editable in alternatives:

The supplier first submits a primary response and has the option to create an alternative response where they can change the term values that are marked editable in alternatives. The price and color of pens can be changed in the example below:

To allow suppliers to add items and lots to alternative bids, enable the Allow suppliers to add items event rule.

Suppliers can select Add New Lot on the lot selection page to add items and lots.

After a supplier adds an item, they can submit a bid for the item.

When set to Yes, participants can select the currency in which they place their bids from a list of currencies associated with the event. Project owners set the exchange rate set, and participants can only select the currency for lots and line items.

Show Currency Exchange Rates to Participants appears only if you chose to allow participants to select the bidding currency. If it's set to Yes, a currency exchange rate table appears on the participants' Event Details page.

Pricing conditions can be helpful for products or services that have seasonal or fluctuating prices that can be captured on a monthly, quarterly, annually, or custom time frame.

• Pricing can be captured on a Monthly, Quarterly, Annually, Supplier, or Buyer-defined duration intervals.
• Buyers can opt to display quantities with units of measure to participants.
• Scales can be used to enter the volume tiers for which pricing must be collected.

When enabled, participants can use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with offline content to submit responses.

Custom offline response sheets enable you to create your own customized version of the SAP Ariba Sourcing offline bid sheet. When creating your customized offline response sheets, you only have to map cell values from your custom offline response sheet into the standard SAP Ariba Sourcing offline bid sheet.

You can determine which questions can be customized in Microsoft Excel and which questions can be answered in the SAP Ariba Sourcing user interface. Each item that is added has an Add to offline bid option to indicate which fields are to be mapped to Microsoft Excel sheets for participant data entry.

It's standard practice to specify a common set of bidding rules for all lines and lots in an event with line-item-specific price decrements. However, lot-specific or line item-specific bidding rules can be configured.

Event owners define improvement values when they create individual lots and items. When adding a new lot, the bottom of the lot attributes includes the bidding rules:

1. Improve bid amount by is either a nominal amount or a percentage.
2. Bid decrement (%) is the minimum percentage that a participant must lower their previous bid by.
3. Protect the lead bid with a front buffer of (%) creates an area ahead of the lead bid where the system doesn’t allow competing participants to bid. To move into the lead, a competing participant must bid at least this percentage ahead of the leading bid.
4. Protect the lead bid with a back buffer of (%) ensures that a competitor remains behind the leading bidder by the percentage specified.
5. Can participants submit tie bids are bids that have the same rank. If ties aren't allowed, the system prevents a participant from submitting a bid with the same rank as another participant.

If a starting gate is enabled, it applies to all participants invited to the event.

Participants who don’t submit a valid bid that satisfies the starting gate criteria won’t see any market information on the Bidding Console, Event Details page, or the Lot Details page.

if starting gates are used, we advise requiring a starting price at lot level.

• Enable a starting gate for each lot. Each lot has its own starting gate and a valid bid in one lot shows only the market information for that lot.
• Enable one starting gate for the entire event. One bid in the event, regardless of the lot, allows the participant to view market information for the entire event.

• Show participant responses to other participants controls when participants can see price, quantity, participant aliases, responses, item terms, bid score, total cost, and rank details from other participant responses.
• Show lead bid to all participants. If participants can't see lead bid information, they see only their own responses. They can’t view the bid graph or bid history table.
• Can participants see ranks?. Participants can only see whether their bid is market-leading or not if they're winning.

This rule available only in Dutch and Japanese auctions.

Choose Yes to display the target price to all participants. The target price is typically the last price before the auction closes. In addition, Dutch auctions can be configured to close based on time and Japanese auctions can be configured to close based on the number of active participants.

The target price depends on the type of auction.

Scoring enables you to assign a weight and level of importance to participant responses. If you allow scoring on participant responses, the Scoring display option appears when entering content, allowing you to assign a numerical level of importance to different lots, items, or questions.

Team Grading allows project owners to assign team members to the team grader group to provide their scores on the participants’ responses.

You can also add external graders to your event and specify if the external graders can see the participant's identity or profile during the grading process. To increase the level of objectivity and remove bias when scoring participants (blind grading), you can choose if this participant information is hidden.

• Analyze an event that contains a large amount of content or receives many supplier responses.
• Remove bias from your awarding decision. For example, you might want to continue to purchase from an incumbent supplier even if they don't make the best offer.
• Define and numerically rank the factors in your purchasing decision.

• Allow participants to see scoring weights displays the Overall % weights are displayed in the participants bidding console.
• Enable blind grading on participant responses determines whether blind grading is enabled which hides the participant names from the external team graders to remove potential bias.