Characterizing Supplier Qualifications

Qualifications allow you to evaluate a supplier's ability to provide specific commodities to various regions and departments in your company. You express these qualifications through different qualification statuses. A supplier can hold multiple qualification statuses for different combinations of commodities, regions, and departments. Your organization can manage these statuses using template-based projects, supplier-related data import tasks, or the Supplier Data API with Pagination.

SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance is designed to maintain qualifications over time through projects that have questionnaires and workflows. Setting qualification statuses through data import or API helps your organization track qualifications earned outside of SAP Ariba, but it does not create associated projects.

By default, qualification is the third step in the SAP Ariba supplier lifecycle, as shown in the following diagram:

If your company qualifies suppliers, you'll use one of two methods:

• Supplier Qualification and Disqualification Projects

  With this method, you view and manage qualifications exclusively in the Qualifications area of supplier profiles. When you search for suppliers, you won't find filters for process status.

• Process Qualification and Discontinuation Projects

  If your organization uses this method, you can view and manage qualifications in either the Qualifications or Processes area of supplier profiles. You can also manage miscellaneous lifecycle processes using process projects. When you search for suppliers, you'll see process status filters.

Process qualifications and discontinuations offer a more customizable alternative to legacy qualification and disqualification projects.