Sourcing intake guided experience with playbooks
Summarize
Summary of Sourcing intake guided experience with playbooks
ServiceNow’s sourcing intake guided experience incorporates two key playbooks—the Sourcing Intake Playbook and the Negotiation Setup Playbook—to help sourcing managers efficiently manage the complex sourcing request intake and negotiation processes. These playbooks provide structured, step-by-step workflows that enhance clarity, collaboration, and progress tracking, allowing sourcing managers to focus on productive tasks such as supplier negotiations.
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Key Features
- Sourcing Intake Playbook: Enables review of requester requirements, purchase lines, and approvals. Supports requesting clarifications and collaborating with cross-functional teams by creating tasks or cases. Allows sourcing managers to choose whether to negotiate immediately or later by adding requests to negotiation events.
- Negotiation Setup Playbook: Facilitates reviewing and adding sourcing requests, purchase lines, and suppliers. Supports managing qualification work as part of the negotiation event setup. This playbook complements the intake process when negotiations are started later.
- Configurable Workflows: Customers can customize playbook stages, activities, and declarative actions through the Playbooks module. The activity experience’s appearance and behavior can also be tailored to organizational needs.
- Troubleshooting Guidance: Provides steps to diagnose and resolve issues by reviewing playbook processes, activity configurations, and automation subflows within Workflow Studio, ensuring smooth operation of sourcing and negotiation workflows.
Practical Application
- Review and Clarify Requests: Use the sourcing intake playbook to thoroughly review sourcing requests and request additional information if needed, enhancing accuracy and completeness.
- Decide on Negotiation Timing: Determine whether to proceed with supplier negotiations immediately or postpone, with flexibility to add sourcing requests to negotiation events at any stage.
- Manage Negotiations and Qualifications: Utilize the negotiation setup playbook to organize suppliers, sourcing requests, and manage qualification tasks effectively within negotiation events.
- Customize to Fit Your Processes: Adapt the playbooks to your organization’s specific sourcing and negotiation workflows, ensuring alignment with internal procedures and improving user experience.
Expected Outcomes
By leveraging these playbooks, sourcing managers can streamline the intake and negotiation setup processes, improve collaboration across teams, maintain clear progress visibility, and ensure that sourcing activities are executed efficiently and accurately. The guided workflows reduce complexity and help sustain focus on value-driven activities such as supplier negotiations and qualification management.
As sourcing managers, you can use the sourcing intake and negotiation setup playbooks to guide you through the complex request intake process so that you can focus on actual productive work such as negotiating savings from suppliers.
The sourcing intake playbook and the negotiation setup playbook embedded in the sourcing intake playbook as a flow, guide you through these actions with clear steps to view your progress.
Here's a quick breakdown of the playbooks and their associated tasks.
Sourcing intake playbook
- Review an employee or requester’s requirements, which include details of the sourcing intake, purchase lines, and approvals.
- Request clarifications or more information from the requester, if necessary.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams and create other work such as tasks and cases for them, if necessary.
For more information on how to perform these actions on the sourcing intake playbook, see Review details and request clarification on a sourcing request in playbook.
- Decide if you should negotiate in a negotiation event or not.
Here, as the sourcing manager, you can select a sourcing approach to source with similar employee requests. You can decide whether to work on negotiations with suppliers right away or at a later stage. In case of the former, you must add the sourcing request to a new or existing negotiation event to proceed.
For more information on how to perform these actions on the sourcing intake playbook, see Select a sourcing approach in playbook.
Note:If you have skipped negotiations at this stage, you have the option to work on negotiations after the qualification is complete. You can add the sourcing request to an exiting negotiation event or create a new negotiation event as required, before working with the negotiation event.
Negotiation setup playbook
- Review and add sourcing requests and purchase lines, if necessary.
- Review and add suppliers, if necessary.
- Manage qualification work.
For more information on this, see Set up negotiations with suppliers and manage qualifications in playbook.
Note:This action in available in both the playbooks, depending on when you want to get started with managing qualification work.
Configurations
The playbook stages and activities of sourcing requests and negotiation events can be modified by the customer from Playbooks. The Declarative Actions can be edited or newly created, and their mappings modified in the Activity Definition section. The look and feel of the activities can also be configured from Activity Experience in the Activity Definition section.
For details on how administrators, agents, and fulfillers can configure playbooks, see Running playbooks. For more information on Playbooks stages and activities, see Stages and activities.
Troubleshooting
- Navigate to the respective process in Playbooks. For sourcing requests and negotiation events, the processes are Sourcing Intake and Negotiation Setup respectively.
- Within the process, go to the corresponding activity that is not working as expected. For example, in the Sourcing approach section, which is the second stage of the playbook:
- If stage 2.1 is skipped, it should go to the Qualification workflow.
- If stage 2.1 is completed, it should go to the Add to an existing negotiation workflow.
- If stage 2.1 is canceled, it should go to the Create new negotiation event workflow.
- Under the Automation tab, navigate to the corresponding subflow in Workflow Studio.
- Open the executions of the subflow and check further.
- To check the activity experiences, go to the sys_pd_process_definition table and check the process configurations. This table contains all the activity definition configurations and action mappings for Declarative Actions.