Contracts

Maybe you can do this in Lawson Contract Management, which we don't have, but in PO25 you can only tie one vendor to a vendor agreement reference.

I am not sure if the question is related to the Contract Management module or the Vendor Agreements (PO25.1, .3, and .6) screens. I can only answer related to the latter.

You will end up having to create a full second agreement to accomodate the second vendor. So, as a for instance, if you can buy items through your distributor and through the manufacturer direct, you would have two PO25 documents. You can reference the alternative agreements in the "Dual Source Agreement" field of the PO25.1, but I think it is solely informational (as I have currently repurposed this field for another data element). You can also reference a primary agreement via the Manufacturer Agreement Reference field on the PO25.8 (accessed from the [Item Detail] button on the PO25.6. The downside to this last option is that I have not been able to figure out how to use Add-Ins to update this field (but I have also not really put a lot of effort into this endeavor either). Again, I think this field is informational only, but could be useful for synching connected agreements.

The next question is, "How do you determine which agreement to source from?" And there are a couple of answers. The first is by participation. That is, if the sourcing is determined by Company/IC Location/RQ Location, that is easily addressed in the PO25.3 screen (although RQ Locations can be tedious).
If determination of the source is not clear cut you can use the Priority field on the Header tab of the PO25 (the lower the number, the higher the priority). Priority can also be set at the agreement line level in the PO25.4 screen (accessed from the [More] button on the PO25.6). I would caution against this level of management because it is hard to troubleshoot when individual lines seem to disregard the priority set at the header.

If all other things are equal, Lawson has a number of tie-breakers (lowest unit cost, first agreement reference [text sorted], first line entered on the agreement). These can create different results than you might expect, so it is best to be explicit by participation and priority.

Add-on Topic 1 - Participation is not necessarily exclusive. That is to say if you have agreements where participation is available to ALL, to a single company and to a single Company/IC Location combination, Lawson will consider all three agreements for RQ Locations that meet these criteria. Just because there is a Company/IC Location agreement does not inherently make that the agreement of Lawson's choice.

Add-on Recommendation 1 - For a similar set of product/contracts, your more specific agreements (as defined by participation) should have a higher priority than your general agreements. In other words, a contract defined by the participation of Company/IC Location should have a higher priority than a contract defined by the participation of the Company only.

Hope this helps,
Red

Agreements are vendor specific so you would have to build an agreement for that vendor as well. Then you could reference the other agreement in the dual source agreement field and vice versa. Once those 2 contracts are built, one contract you could specify with a higher priority than the other for the default vendor and then when an item needs to be purchased from the non-priority vendor, when a requisitioner enters a vendor on a req or when a buyer enters a vendor on the PO, when the item is entered that will direct the price to be pulled from the lower priority contract.

If you would like to chat further as to how to do this or structure/build your contracts just let me know.

Hi Red, thanks for your help.

Do you think I could set up 2 po25's and link the same vendor agreement number to each then relate them with the dual source Agreement?  Not sure if it will take the same number twice even though it is on a second po25.  If not, do you think I could make one a Manufacturer agreement and a Vendor Agreement using the same agreement number and relate them with the dual source, and set the priority.

Thanks

I have two answers to that...
1) What we do right now: If we have a single agreement and can buy it from two sources, we use the primary contract number and then add the vendor number as a suffix. So, I contracted for bubblegum, the primary contract my be with the manufacturer and identified as "RW00001". The two source agreements in Lawson would be "RW00001 VN1" and "RW00001 VN2". The fact that both have the primary contract in the VAR ties the two together as close as using the Dual Source field (and probably a little tighter).

2) What we have thought of doing, looking to Rube Goldberg for guidance. A) We would build the primary agreement but not release it (or at least keep it on hold). B) We would build the source agreements and reference the primary agreement in the Dual-Source or the Manufacturer Agreement field (but probably better in the DS field for what follows). We would manage all changes against primary agreement and then run a report to synch the secondary agreements to the primary agreement. There really is not a lot of value to this process, compared to the above, but it does centralize your agreement management to only the primary agreement. I could see a Crystal Report kicking out differences between the primary and secondary in a format that could then be uploaded via Add-Ins. Not easy-peasy, but not too difficult.

Good luck,
Red

No, we have Lawson contract management, I will revert to you.