As part of the 9r2 Readiness series, on December 19th, 2013, Ariba conducted a webinar on the upcoming 9r2 Upstream feature - Supplier Organization Hierarchy
Webinar Date/Time : December 19th, 2013, 11 AM ET
Webinar Speaker : Hari Babu Krishnan (hkrishnan@ariba.com and hari.krishnan@sap.com) and Jason Brown (jasonbrown@ariba.com and jason.brown@sap.com)
Webinar Presentation and Recording: https://connect.ariba.com/ACgo2/1,,152137,00.html
Find the questions raised in the webinar and the responses to them. We will use this forum to answer any additional questions you may have. Please feel free to raise any questions as a comment, so that we can answer here so that the entire community may benefit.
SI# | Question | Answer |
1 | What about the current (9r1) Supplier hierarchy "Active Suppliers" available in reports? | They will not change. All current hierarchies will continue to exist. There will be one more hierarchy called Supplier hierarchy will be added on top. |
2 | What is the maximum number of levels for hierarchy on reporting side? | We are restricting the levels to 10. However there can be unlimited children to a parent. Same thing applies for Analysis reports as well |
3 | Can there be more than 1 parent? | No, a child organization can have only one parent |
4 | This new feature implies that all Suppliers levels are registered as Supplier Organizations on the Transactional schema and correctly linked as parent/child, right? Therefore, it cannot be enriched (by D&B for example)? | Yes, the data cannot be enriched. The definition has to be created in Upstream through UI or export import |
5 | I understand this hierarchy is dynamically generated according to the field "Parent" from the Supplier Organization profile. What happens if there are more than 10 levels (which is theoretically possible)? | We do not allow more than 10 levels to be created. |
6 | If we invite a parent organization to an Event, is there any impact on Child organization(s)? Like users being invited as well to the event? | The hierarchy is defined to understand the structure of the organization the buyers are dealing with. So there will not be any impact on children organizations if the parent organization is invited to an event. In other words in this condition the organization that gets invited will be treated as a individual one. |
7 | Is "Organization hierarchy" available only in "Available Hierarchies" or also in "Available Fields"? | It will be available only in “Available Hierarchies”. In “Available Fields” individual 10 levels are displayed i.e. supplier level 1 to supplier level 10 and supplier id 1 to supplier id 10. |
8 | How will the vendor hierarchy work when the vendors are imported from Buyer? | The hierarchy will not be impacted. CDS, today, takes care of it. Also note that the hierarchy can only be designed in Upstream and CDS will Sync that information to Buyer. |
10 | What about companies owned at 50/50 by 2 parents? | This cannot be represented as two parents for a single org. It has to be attached to a single parent and the reports have to be decoded accordingly. |
11 | When we create a child Supplier, some information of the parent can be copied to the child automatically? Either in the OOTB or by some customizations? | No, this is not possible. For child organization the details has to be entered. |
13 | When you search for parent I noticed that the result doesn't display the child but when you search a child it displays the parent as well. If my observation is right, please give me the rationale behind it. | When you search for the parent org, the children will not be shown but they will be rolled-up by default. When you click on the arrow button the children will be displayed.
When you look for only children we need to show who its parent is so they will be expanded by default. |
14 | If a DUNS number or Tax number is associated with a parent how will you assign the same to the child organization? Buyer synching also will throw an error saying there is an org id with same DUNS number. | You cannot enter same DUNS and Tax ID for different organization in the system today and so will be even after this feature. This feature will allow you to model the parent child relationships between organizations after they get added to the system. |
15 | If there is a Contract with Parent Organization, will it have any impact on children organizations – like they inheritance or anything? | No, they will stand as two different objects and there will not any inheritance of data between contracts on parent and child organizations. |
16 | Can a report be generated which shows all the contracts with a parent organization? | Yes, this is possible. |
17 | Can we build hierarchy with import process? | Yes it can be done through data file imports |
18 | Hierarchy can be crated in UI on upstream side and will be synched as Common Suppliers to Buyer. This common supplier might not have any partitioned suppliers and the ID of the Org created in Upstream is not shared to Buyer. So when suppliers are loaded through Suppliers.csv the id might not match. Is this not a problem? | This situation might not occur as we are not creating any new organization while defining hierarchy; we are only modeling the existing organizations in the system in a parent child fashion. If the synch has not happened to Buyer then it is a different issue and should be occurring even today. |
19 | Will the hierarchy be available in Downstream Object Model? | Yes, when CDS happens the data will be synched with Buyer from Upstream and will be available in Object model of Buyer. But this information will not be reflected in Buyer UI. |
20 | Will this have any impact on Contract Terms , Contract Hierarchy, Pricing Terms, ACC etc…. other than reporting? | No, this functionality will not have any other functional impacts apart from display and reporting. All other functionalities will work as usual as they are today. |