What are the important considerations when bidding with envelopes?

Sealed-envelope bidding is used when laws require that:

• Buyers can see only certain sections of an event containing supplier responses in sequence
• Buyers qualify or disqualify participants before opening the next section (envelope) in the series.
• Participants’ responses within sections associated with an envelope are not visible to the project team until the envelope is opened during the Pending Selection period.

Envelopes work as follows:

• When you create a section, you specify whether it belongs to an envelope, and if so, which one.
• An envelope can contain more than one section.
• An envelope contains responses for all event participants for that section.
• Buyers can see only responses in envelopes that are open.
• Envelopes can only be opened in sequence; partial opening and randomized selection is not permitted.
  • When buyers open an envelope, they can see the responses only from participants whom they have selected to continue.
    • When the buyer discontinues a participant, all of the participant’s responses (opened or not) are deleted, unless the Keep the Rejected Envelope Bids is enabled. Then rejected supplier bids can be recovered.

Updating rules are configured. The Capacity Type area and Capacity type for the event setting are visible only in RFP templates. The default capacity type is Standard. If you select Large, then implications are the following:

• Envelope bidding is not supported.
  • You cannot create envelopes.
  • The Envelope Rules section is not visible.

Ariba sends notifications during envelope bidding when the following events occur:

• An envelope is ready to be opened.
  • Ariba sends an email to project team members authorized to open an envelope when an envelope is ready to be opened.
• An envelope has been opened.
  • Ariba sends an email to the event owner and active observers when an envelope has been opened.

By default, Ariba Sourcing makes new RFP templates competitive and sets the rule Must participants improve their bids to Yes. If you want the ability to add envelopes to your RFP template, you must set the rule Must participants improve their bids to No.

Envelope Rules section: Configure the following rules:

Number of Envelopes - Select the maximum number of envelopes to use in this event. The default is No Envelope.

Authorize Teams to Open Envelopes - Select a project team for each envelope. Members of the project team you select here will be the only team members authorized to open the corresponding envelope. If you do not want to authorize a specific project team to open an envelope, leave the Team field blank.

Keep the Rejected Envelope Bids - Select Yes to retain the opened portions of rejected envelope bids in the system. If you select No, the rejected bids and all their previous versions are deleted from the system.

Discard Bids for Event Updating - When you update an event, you can choose to keep or discard envelope bids. Select Always Discard to discard the bids regardless of what type of edit you make to the event. Select Keep the Bids to retain the bids as long as the edits do not impact the integrity of the envelope bids.

Send notification to envelope openers - Select Yes to have Ariba notify project team members when they can open their assigned envelope.

For events containing envelopes, the download action does not download any Supplier attachments for items within a sealed envelope. Only when the envelope is opened and the contents visible in the user interface does the action download its attachment.

S2C Administration
Strategic Sourcing > Sourcing Events