Business Rules

The Procurement application operates on a variety of rules and concepts. Before you manage system information in the Procurement application, it is important that you understand the relationship between your business and the Procurement application:

• How the system represents business structures.
• How roles, scopes and privileges provide access control.

In the Procurement Advanced Administration application, you can represent a complex business, with multiple organizations, within a single system. Before you use the Advanced Administration application, we recommend that you determine the structure of your business and how it corresponds to items in the Procurement application. The following describes important system constructs:

1. You can administer the system as a host. A host is any entity that provides procurement services to other companies.
2. You can create Enterprises, which represent individual, confidential entities. An enterprise typically corresponds to a single company, or business. Enterprises receive procurement services from hosts. An Enterprise can contain one or more Buying Organizations.
3. You can create Buying Organizations, which represent units within an enterprise which use procurement services. In the Procurement application, a Buying Organization can represent a business unit, a division, or other subdivision within a business:
• You can define a hierarchy when you create one or more Buying Organizations within an original Buying Organization.
• Each Buying Organization can operate under different business rules, have access to different suppliers, and so on.
• Parent-child organizations exist in a hierarchy of Buying Organizations. For example, Buying Organization A, which you define under Buying Organization B, is considered a child of B and B is the parent.
• In parent-child relationships, a child can inherit business rules and configuration from their parent. That is, the child has its own rules and configuration that are identical with the parent's. In the Procurement application, this is only true for certain approval rules.

In addition to your business rules, you must obtain data from Commerce One to enter into the Advanced Administration application. This the Advanced Administration application requires knowledge of certain key supplier information for each of your suppliers. To obtain this information, please contact your supplier or your marketplace operator.