To participate in collaboration on the buyer side, you must be a member of the collaboration team. For more information, see the Ariba Category Procurement Guide. To participate in collaboration on the supplier side, you must be an invited supplier on that requisition.

Each supplier must be set up in Ariba Buyer Administrator as a common supplier with a networkID value.

Note that each time you edit or submit a collaborative requisition or collaboration request, any associated contracts are re-attached. Therefore, if a contract for the supplier is created while collaboration is in progress, the buyer might see errors when accepting that supplier's proposal because the contract terms are now being applied.

A collaborative requisition enables buyers and suppliers to work together to define the exact details of a line item. When a buyer adds a collaborative item to a requisition and submits the requisition, a collaboration request is created automatically for each supplier specified for that item. Suppliers view the collaboration requests in their Inboxes on Ariba SN, review the details, and respond either by declining the request or by submitting a proposal, which contains the details of how they would fill the request. For example, if the line item is for a contractor to work as a temporary administrative assistant, the supplier’s proposal might contain the name of the proposed candidates, their resumes, and their hourly rates.

Collaboration occurs after a requisition has been submitted for approval. When adding approvers to a collaborative requisition, you choose whether they should approve the requisition before collaboration begins or after collaboration ends. When the requisition reaches the collaboration phase, approval stops until collaboration is completed, at which point the requisition moves on to the post-collaboration approvers. At the end of collaboration, the data from the accepted collaboration proposals is merged onto the requisition, and the commands for accepting and rejecting proposals and requests are disabled.

Collaborative line items can be edited through the change order process, but collaboration cannot be relaunched for these items. If you want to go through collaboration again, you must create a new collaborative item (you can also copy the item and delete the original) and resubmit the requisition.

The tasks available to you during collaboration depend on whether you are a buyer or a supplier: