Creating and Editing a Contract Workspace

A Contract Workspace is an SAP Ariba project used for contracts and includes information about the contract, contract documents, project team members, and tasks.

SAP Ariba Contracts supports the following contract workspace types:

• Contract Workspace (Procurement)
  • Used for contracts with a supplier
• Contract Workspace (Sales)
  • Used for contracts with a customer or buyer
• Contract Workspace (Internal)
  • Used for contracts within companies or organizations

All contract workspaces include an Affected Parties field in which you can specify supplier or customer organizations who are involved in the contract project but are not direct participants.

A contract workspace is organized by documents, tasks, and the team. It is a place to store everything you need to create the contract.

• It includes a contract document called the Main Agreement and contract addenda. It may include documents such as supporting documents, pricing history, etc.
• The workspace lists all the tasks that must be performed to create and approve the contract. Task information includes who will perform the task and when it is due. The tasks may be based on your organization’s best practices, and can be tailored for your specific situation.
• The workspace also includes a list of team members who participate in the creation, review, and approval of the contract. When you assign team members a task, the system alerts them immediately, and sends automatic reminders to make sure things move forward in a timely manner.

Project templates are tools that are used to create contract workspaces.

• Standardize the creation of projects.
• Usually model an organization’s contract lifecycle. They may have unique processes for different commodity categories or contract amounts.
• Prepopulated with team members, documents, tasks, and other project items.
• Can contain conditions that determine the documents, tasks, and phases created according to the project attributes.

The templates that are available depend on the following:

• Project information you have entered, and the user groups you belong to.
• Header field data that you enter when creating the contract workspace.

Typically, only advanced users with specific process and/or commodity knowledge have the access required to edit and maintain project templates.

• Only users with proper system permissions (Contract Manager group) have the ability to create contract workspaces.
• System permissions are granted by your system administrator.
• Those who do not have permissions to create a Contract Workspace but do have access to SAP Ariba can create a Contract Request (discussed later in the course).

There are a few ways you can create a contract workspace. Three of these ways: creating a workspace directly, copying an existing contract workspace, and creating from a contract request are methods available to users of SAP Ariba Contracts solution.

Creating a contract workspace from an SAP Ariba Sourcing event is a method available to those who use both SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts solutions. This method expedites the creation of a contract workspace after a sourcing event has been awarded directly from the Award tab of a sourcing event. Once you have run a sourcing event, such as an auction or an RFP, you select your winning bidder(s) as you normally would. Then you can click Contract. You are presented with 2 options: Create New Contract or Add to Existing Contract. See the Event Management Guide for details on creating contract workspaces from the Award tab in a SAP Ariba Sourcing event.

As always, you should check to make sure a contract or contract workspace does not already exist to satisfy your needs before creating a new workspace. You can do that by using the Search tool and searching for the contract. You can search by contract title, keyword, supplier, and many other fields.

You must create a master agreement before you can associate a sub agreement with it. Master agreements and their sub agreements must be of the same contract workspace type (sales contract workspace or procurement contract workspace). When you perform project search results, you can display results for contract workspaces in tree view, which shows the relationship between master and sub agreements.

If you create a sub agreement directly from a master agreement, the sub agreement inherits the following project field values from the master agreement:

• Supplier (for procurement contract workspaces) or Customer (for sales contract workspaces)
• Regions
• Commodity

If you create a contract workspace and later associate it as a sub agreement to a master agreement, it does not inherit supplier or customer, region, or commodity field values from the master agreement.

You can change a contract workspace’s hierarchical type at any time by editing its attributes. If you must work on both a master and sub agreement simultaneously before you publish the master agreement (or a supplier or customer is decided upon), you can create the sub agreement as a standalone agreement, and then change its hierarchical type after you publish the master agreement and associate it with the master agreement. Alternatively, you can work on and publish the sub agreement by setting the master agreement to Pending status.

When a master agreement expires or you close it, the sub agreements under it do not automatically expire or close. Instead, they expire on their individual expiration dates, or you must close them.

When you modify the expiration date of the master agreement, the user interface displays a set of the sub agreement contract workspaces. You can select the checkboxes next to the sub agreements to which you want the new expiration date to be automatically propagated. Note that you can propagate changes to only sub agreements that are in Draft or Draft Amendment status.

The basic process of project creation consists of the following steps:

1. Launch the Project Creation Wizard: From the dashboard, click the big, blue Create button at the top right of the screen and then choose a Contract Workspace (type) to begin the step-by-step process of creating a project.
2. Enter Overview Information: The overview information page displays header level fields specific to the project type that are used to enter the particulars of your specific project. These details include things like the workspace (Contract) name, description, start date, and other pieces of information. Other overview information captured on this page may change the list of templates available in the next step.

   The fields in the Create Screen are both searchable and reportable. You may also be able to add custom fields that are specific to your organization.

   
3. Select Template: Select a template from the list of templates displayed. Depending on the template you choose, you may be prompted with additional questions that may have been defined in the template itself. These questions have underlying conditions which are used to include/exclude different objects (phases, tasks, documents, team members) in the project.
4. Create Project: Once the preceding details have been entered or selected, the final step is to click Create.