If you are unable to attach a global contract to your request when creating a release order, contact your Ariba Contract Compliance system administrator. (Your administrator may need to add the supplier to the partition in which you are working, or your company may have special requirements for the supplier.)

Contract reports contain partition-specific information, so you must run them in each partition to obtain the complete set of information regarding your company's contract usage.

See the Ariba Contract Compliance Guide for information about how to implement Ariba Contract Compliance.

A global contract is a contract that allows users to create release orders from all partitions of Ariba Contract Compliance. When creating a contract request (CR), you can specify users who can create release orders against the resulting contract. If your Ariba Contract Compliance configuration contains different partitions, you can also specify whether users create releases only from the partition in which the contract was created, or from all partitions.

Global contracts do need to require release orders, nor receiving or invoicing. Such global contracts are useful as parent agreements within contract hierarchies, so that their subagreements can be located in different partitions.

Both contracts and global contracts are useful – compare them carefully to determine which best meets your business needs. In addition, review considerations that can help you obtain maximum benefit from using contracts and global contracts.

To change, approve, or deny a global CR, or open and close a global contract, you must do so in the partition in which it was created. (When changing a global CR, you cannot change the release access from global to partition-specific, or vice versa.)

If you start to create a CR, and then select All Partitions to designate a global contract, any partition-specific values initially associated with the contract are removed from the global contract. The values are temporarily stored and can be retrieved if you toggle back to Current Partition only. When you submit the global contract for approval, all partition-specific values associated with it are permanently removed. Some partition-specific values, such as accounting details, are added later to the requisition when the release order is created against the global contract.