The Feature

Let Contractors Buy!

November 10, 2008 on 8:23 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

This feature of the week is for anyone using Oracle HRMS and Purchasing 11.5.10. When the contingent worker functionality was rolled out to Oracle Financials in this release, (see the original story from February 2006), the contractors could charge their time and expenses to projects, and have their costs calculated based on their time or purchase orders, and few other things.

Few months ago our implementation team at a local hospital in Seattle was surprised to find out that contingent workers were not allowed to enter or approve purchasing documents. Since a major part of the company’s supply chain was outsourced to 3rd party vendors, this was a major problem. It seems that other companies face the same problem, as documented in the bug 4534789 on Metalink. The business need can be summarized as follows:

“…Contingent workers who are allowed (in both business terms and in Oracle functionality) to have employees report to them and who can be entered into the requisition hierarchy do not have the ability to enter requisitions or approve their employee’s requisitions. This requires someone else to do that for them and that individual may not have the knowledge of whether the purchase is allowable or acceptable, creating delays and inappropriate approvals in the requisitioning process…”

Few Questions for Oracle Development:

• Can contingent workers buy in Release 12?
• Is this functionality going to be back ported to Release 11i?

If anyone has more information on the subject, I invite you to share it as comments on this post. Thank you!