Creating Contract Workspaces

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to create contract workspaces using all methods available in the SAP Ariba application.

System Permissions and Contract Stakeholders

Key Contract Management Stakeholders

Contract agents are responsible for creating and maintaining contract workspaces (CW), providing certain approvals, overseeing contract creation, and amending and maintaining the contract.

Contract managers are responsible for providing approvals, denials, or changes while overseeing the contract process.

Legal representatives are responsible for approving or denying contract terms and negotiating with suppliers. They are in charge of drafting contract documents from a legal standpoint.

A supplier’s contacts can also be involved in the contract workspace management process during the negotiation and review steps.

Stakeholders' visibility and capabilities in a contract workspace are determined by the system permissions assigned to them and the project group they belong to. Contract owners can further restrict visibility using the access control feature in the contract workspace.

System Permissions

System groups grant users access to functionality in SAP Ariba solutions. These system groups are set up during the design phase of the solution deployment and maintained after go-live. System group membership grants relevant stakeholders, such as buyers and contract managers, access to the SAP Ariba Contracts solution in a capacity that fits their role and business processes.

Some of the system groups that allow creating procurement contract requests are:

  • Junior Sourcing Agent
  • Sourcing Agent
  • Internal User
  • Supplier/Customer Manager

Some of the system groups that allow for creating procurement contract workspaces and are typically assigned to contracts managers are:

  • Contract Agent
  • Contract Manager
  • Contract Project Administrator

Ways to Create a Contract Workspace

In SAP Ariba Contracts, there are multiple ways to initiate the creation of a contract workspace, all of which result in navigating the user to the Contract Workspace Creation Wizard.

Contract Workspace Creation via Contract Request

This process was explained in the previous lesson.

Contract Workspace Creation by Copying an Existing Contract

This functionality enables a contract manager to copy an existing contract to initiate a new contract workspace. When you copy a project, SAP Ariba creates a copy of the current project that retains most of the original project’s attributes. You cannot specify a project type or template when copying a project; the copy of the project uses the original project’s type (a procurement-type contract, for example) and the latest published version of the template used to create the original project. You can copy a contract if you have the required permissions and access to the copied contract project.

To copy a contract workspace, you can use the Copy From header field on the contract workspace creation page. Alternatively, you can access the CW you wish to copy and choose Actions → Copy Project on the Overview tab, as illustrated in the image below.

View of the Copy Project option available in a contract workspace UI

Contract Workspace Creation from a Sourcing Event

If your SAP Ariba solution includes both SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts, you can create a new contract workspace project directly from an SAP Ariba Sourcing event award. Contract workspaces created from event awards automatically include the supplier name, commodity, region, effective date, and the SAP Ariba Sourcing project name as the predecessor project.

This method allows the transfer of the awarded items to the workspace's Pricing Terms document or Contract Line Items Document (CLID) stored in the Documents tab. These documents are discussed in detail later on in the course.

Using the guided sourcing capability, after you create an award, you can select the More icon next to the name of the awarded supplier, and choose Create a contract for awarded items or Add awarded items to an existing contract. Play the video below to learn about the procedure.

The contract ID appears under Associated Contracts in the event UI:

View of the Associated Contracts section in a guided sourcing event.

Using the classic SAP Ariba Sourcing UI, after you create an award, you can choose Contract and then select Create New Contract or Add to Existing Contract. A screenshot of the procedure is shown below.

View of the Create New Contract and Add to Existing Contract options that are available in the classic SAP Ariba Sourcing event UI.

In this case, the contract workspace is shown in Follow-On Projects on the event overview page, as illustrated below.

View of the Follow-On Projects header field in a classic SAP Ariba Sourcing event.

Contract Workspace Creation from the SAP Ariba Dashboard

A contract manager with the correct system permissions can create a contract workspace from the SAP Ariba dashboard for internal, sales, or procurement purposes. A contract workspace creation wizard will be shown to collect data needed to create a contract project.

Data such as name, description, hierarchical type, supplier (in case of procurement type CW), and contract type are collected as part of the header attributes.

Header attributes are the key data elements a user enters when creating a project. These data elements are used to drive content within the project through the use of conditions, to provide information to project stakeholders, and to provide key data on which to report.

View of the Create Contract Workspace (Procurement) page and its header fields.

The screenshot above shows contract workspace header fields. Let’s discuss the most common of them in more detail.

Name: Name (title) of the project. The name cannot be the name of another project in the same folder and cannot contain the following special characters: \ / : ? " < > | # + % & . The maximum name length is 254 characters.

Related ID: Specifies an ID of a record or document in an external system related to the project.

Copy from Project: Choose a project from the pull-down menu to copy data from an existing project into the new project.

Test Project: Test projects can be used for internal testing and training. By default, reports include data from test projects.

Hierarchical Type: Specifies a relationship with another contract workspace. Valid values:

  • Stand-alone Agreement: A contract workspace with no hierarchical relationship with other contract workspaces.
  • Master Agreement: A contract workspace that can be the parent of a subagreement. You must create a master agreement before associating a subagreement with it.
  • Sub Agreement: If you choose this value, SAP Ariba displays a field where you must specify the parent (master) agreement.

Supplier: Available only for procurement requests and procurement contracts. Sales contracts display a Customer field instead.

Affected Parties: Supplier or customer organizations involved in the contract project who might not be direct participants. For example, treasury agreements, cooperation agreements, and purchase agreements often include organizations that are not direct participants in a contract. This field is useful for contracts that are sometimes referred to as multi-party contracts.

Contract Amount: The monetary value of the contract; typically, this is the negotiated amount that has been approved.

Agreement Date: The date for the agreement. This field is provided for you to record information about the contract. You can use this field as defined by your organization. For example, this can be the date the contract is executed or the date the supplier or buyer accepts the contract.

Term Type: The contract term type. Valid values:

  • Fixed: A contract workspace that expires permanently when it reaches its expiration date. After the expiration date, you can only extend a fixed contract workspace by amending it and changing the expiration date.
  • Perpetual: A contract workspace that never expires; also known as an evergreen contract.
  • Auto Renew: A contract workspace that is automatically renewed (extended) past its expiration date. The first renewal occurs on the original expiration date.

Note

Besides selecting the correct header attributes to create a contract workspace, the contract manager also chooses a template and answers any template questions.

Play the video below to learn how to create a contract workspace from the SAP Ariba dashboard.

Next Steps

Once the contract workspace project is started, the common next steps are to validate the members of the project team according to the type of contract that is the subject of the contract workspace.

The project owner will start working with the tasks and documents in the contract workspace inherited from the template and can add their own documents and tasks as needed. The contract manager can publish the project when all required tasks are completed and the documents are either published or in a draft state and ready for publication. A published contract workspace project remains in effect until it expires, is closed, amended, or terminated.

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