Working with Contract Tasks

A task is an action assigned to a user to be completed.

A phase is an organizational structure for tasks. Phases enable you to activate a task or group of tasks in an order that aligns with your organization's business process flow. This helps to move a contract through its lifecycle.

As users work on a task, the task status changes. The status of each task in a project is visible on the Tasks tab, so all team members are aware of the project’s progress. When a user is assigned a task, SAP Ariba adds the task to the user’s My Tasks page, calendar, and To Do area if it includes a due date or end date. The system also sends an e-mail notification to the user.

Most tasks are inherited from your template, but you can make modifications where modifications are allowed. Since the task information defaults to the content provided in the template, the project or task owner often edits the details to make them specific to the project. You can also add tasks as needed.

SAP Ariba Contracts supports the following task types:

• To Do
• Review
• Negotiation
• Approval
• Signature
• Notification

Contract Managers and Active Team Members can create tasks inside the workspace and edit their own tasks.

To Do tasks are simple tasks that track an action. They often remind users to take action outside of the project, such as compiling a list of potential business contacts or setting a meeting.

Optionally, you can associate a To Do task with a project, document, or folder, but it does not include features to help users review or incorporate changes from others.

To Do tasks are the only task type where the task owner is also the user who completes the task. After they complete it, they must manually mark it complete.

Approval tasks are used to obtain approvals for project documents. The task owner creates or submits the approval task, which includes a list of approvers and a document or multiple documents.

The term approver refers to approvers in an approval flow. The approval flow defines the users assigned to approve a document for a task.

Approval tasks can only be approved or denied by approvers. If an approver denies an Approval task, the task owner must create a new approval round, which must be approved to complete the task.

Approvers are required to be internal users. They cannot be granted edit access to modify the document in the system, but approvers denying an Approval task can include comments and modified documents in their responses.

The task owner processing the denial can review and incorporate changes from the approver and submit a new document version for a new approval round.

If all approvers approve the task, it is completed, and no further action is needed.

Play the video below to learn how approval tasks are used within a contract workspace.

Negotiation tasks record the negotiations for a document between two or more parties, such as your company and an external supplier or buyer. The task owner creates or submits the negotiation task, which includes a list of negotiation reviewers and a document or multiple documents.

Although negotiation tasks include features that enable the task owner to incorporate document changes from the negotiating parties, negotiation tasks are primarily intended to manage long-term tasks associated with contract negotiations. For example, if you are negotiating a contract with a supplier or customer, a negotiation task can capture comments and modifications from all negotiators.

Negotiation reviewers can be internal or external. Internal negotiation reviewers are users with access to the SAP Ariba system. External negotiation reviewers are external users who do not have an SAP Ariba login. Negotiation reviewers cannot be granted edit access to modify the document in the system. However, they can accept the document or create a counterproposal with a modified document and optional comments.

The task owner processing the counterproposal can review and incorporate changes from the negotiation reviewer and submit a new version of the document for another negotiation round. The user processing the counterproposal must make the changes for the negotiation reviewer.

Once negotiated, the task owner can mark the task complete.

Review tasks request the review of project documents. The task owner creates or submits the review task, which includes a list of reviewers and a document or multiple documents.

Reviewers can be internal or external. Internal reviewers are users with access to the SAP Ariba system. They are granted edit access that permits them to complete their review by modifying or replacing the document and attaching the new version to the task. Internal reviewers can also include comments clarifying any modifications.

External reviewers are users who do not have an SAP Ariba login. SAP Ariba sends an e-mail to the reviewer with the document attached. When the external reviewer replies via e-mail, they can attach a modified document version. After that, the task owner can view the e-mail from the reviewer, save the document in the message to a file, and submit the file to SAP Ariba on behalf of the external reviewer. SAP Ariba attaches the modified document to the task, and the task owner can process the document as one would for an edited document from an internal reviewer.

Once reviewed, the task owner can begin a new review round or mark the task complete.

SAP Ariba Contracts lets you collect electronic signatures from internal and external signers for a document in a workspace through Signature tasks. To create a signature task, you must first enable the electronic signature feature, an optional add-on for SAP Ariba Contracts.

SAP Ariba Contracts provides signature tasks using the following electronic signature providers:

• DocuSign
• Adobe Sign

The electronic signature feature enables you to quickly obtain required signatures on important, time-sensitive contracts from customers or suppliers worldwide. An electronically signed contract can designate a specific version as the official, agreed-upon version, understood by all parties as the version in effect. After a document has been electronically signed, no one can modify the document without invalidating the electronic signature. If a signed document is modified, it must be re-signed by all required signers. The signature process is discussed in detail in the next unit of the course.

Notification tasks enable you to send reminder e-mail messages to SAP Ariba solution users and external business contacts. These tasks are intended to help users manage projects through e-mail notifications.

Notification tasks are unique because they can continue to occur regardless of the project's state. Consequently, you can use them for ongoing activities that need to be performed regardless of the contract's state, such as checking contract activity or market pricing.

You can configure notification tasks to send an e-mail message once or to send multiple rounds of the message at scheduled intervals. The schedule for sending notification e-mail messages can be based on a fixed date, the start of a parent phase, or linked to a project date field.