Business Constraints

Business constraints is a model of a real world constraint on purchasing activities. Business constraints are a mechanism to add limiting conditions within a scenario. The conditions could be based on existing business contracts, procurement policies, or business rules. For example, a favorite supplier rule, award limit rule, supplier count rule, total cost rule etc can be defined in a scenario.

This feature is applicable to RFPs, RFQs, and English reverse auctions.

Types of business constraints

The following table displays the business constraints available within Sourcing and their use.

Table 1. Example for a Scenario
Name	Use
Capacity	Award business to preferred supplier. Limit the volume of business to award to a supplier. Suppliers can create this constraint to indicate the demand that they can support.
Count	Specify a maximum or minimum number of suppliers to whom you want to award the business.
Supplier Cost Adjustment	Add excess cost incurred when doing business with certain suppliers.
Bid Adjustment	Adjust bids to account for costs not specified in the bids.
Bid Filter	Include or exclude bids in a scenario based on their attributes.

Use Cases

Following are some use cases where you can use constraints:

Favorite supplier - Allocate certain portion of the award to a favorite supplier even if the supplier is not offering the lowest price.
Award Limit - Limit the portion of the award given to a particular supplier even if the supplier is offering the lowest price.
Supplier Count - Limit the number of suppliers to be awarded or specify that an award be divided among several suppliers, even if only one of them is offering the lowest price.
Total Cost - Set a limit on the total purchasing cost for the RFx.