Creating Project Templates

The template editor is the section of the user interface dedicated to template creation and editing. The basic steps to creating contract workspace templates are as follows:

1. Plan the Template: Plan out which documents, teams and tasks will be needed for all workspaces based on the template as well as when content should be available under certain conditions.
2. Create Draft Version: To begin creating a template, you start from the templates project and select a location where you want the new template to be stored. Usually the templates project has a hierarchical structure of folders based on type. Create the template from within the appropriate folder. When you have filled in the header information, a new draft template is created.
3. Add Data: This step represents the bulk of the work that goes into composing your template. The data that you will add to the template includes all the team, document and task information. The user interface is similar to what you have seen in working with contract workspaces.
4. Add Conditions: This optional step consists of adding conditions and/or questions and tying them to template content to control template availability as well as what parts of the template will be used in the contract workspace.
5. Publish: The final step is to publish the template to make it available to the contract authors who create contract workspaces.

There are default templates for each solution. You have the option to copy and modify a template or create a new one.

Factors to consider when planning the project template:

• Team members who will manage contracts and their needed access
• Documents to include in the contract workspace
• Tasks for various team members to perform, and the process
• Routing reviews, negotiations, and approvals
• Access control and conditions to hide or expose different parts of the workspace under different circumstances
• The number of different business processes you want supported by a single template

• Appropriate when no existing template fits the requirements of a new project
• When creating the template, add the necessary information:
  • Documents
  • Tasks
  • Team Members
  • Conditions
  • Advanced Options
• Publish Template

Creating a new template is rarely needed within SAP Ariba Contracts. Usually, during the deployment phase, customers will design a standard process template. This process template should mirror your business process, thus, copies should suffice to make needed changes to the existing process. You may need to make copies of that process template for future changes and tweaks, but the overall design should remain the same to give you a good foundation to add the new process requirements.

If you do decide to create a new template, you must have permission to create a Contract Workspace. You will need to be a member of the Template Creator group for SAP Ariba Contracts.

It is a best practice to always make copies of template rather than creating templates from scratch. In some project templates, there is built-in functionality that would need to be re-created by the user creating a new template. For example, Contract requests have built in documents based on conditions on the status of the approval task. If you create your own request template, this functionality will not be automatically included and will need to be rebuilt by the template creator. For this reason, it is recommended to make copies and modify the copies rather than creating brand new templates.

• Easy and fast way to create a new template
• Appropriate when an existing template is very similar to what you need
• After copying the template, modify the new copy with appropriate changes:
  • Documents
  • Tasks
  • Team Members
  • Conditions
  • Advanced Options
• Publish Template

One of the easiest ways to create a new template is to copy an existing workspace template, and make the necessary modifications. It is also a best practice to copy default SAP Ariba system templates so that your out of the box default templates remain untouched should you need them at any point.

When you begin using SAP Ariba, it is another best practice to first create one template and get it approved. It is likely that any additional workspace templates will be similar. It is more efficient create a good first template and make copies from that, rather than create several templates simultaneously and risk the need to make corrections to all of them.

Copying a template creates a duplicate copy of the template, including the template type. In other words, if you copy a template of type Contract Workspace (Procurement), the copy will also be of type Contract Workspace (Procurement). You cannot copy a Procurement template to create a Sales template, or a Contract Workspace template to create a Contract Request template.

To make a copy of a template, click on a template link and select Copy. On the subsequent page, enter a name and description for the new template. Then proceed to make the necessary modifications to the template. Once you have completed making the changes, you must publish the template to make it available to users. For SAP Ariba Contracts, it is a best practice to check the Advanced Options tab to verify the Template Upgrade setting. Publishing a template can cause all projects using that template to upgrade to the version that was just published. This will be covered in more detail later in this course.