Impact of using department/business unit in SLP on preferred supplier filtering in Guided Buying

[karimelgamal]

I am working with a customer who has implemented SLP. In SLP they have activated the SM Admin paramter that enables business unit or department as third dimension, along with commodity and region in supplier management projects.

Application.SM.DepartmentDimension = true

Suppliers are qualified in SLP using values for Commodity, Region and Department/Business Unit. From what I can tell Department/Business Unit is not being used as its true intention, but instead they have loaded custom values that are used in the supplier qualification process to help determine what questionnaires can be sent to the supplier. This means that suppliers are qualified for commodity = <XYZ>, Region = All and Department = <ABC>. Note that the department never = All in the qualification process.

Does anyone here have experience with the use of Department/Business Unit in the SLP Qualification & Preferred process? If so, can you tell me what the impact will be on displaying preferred suppliers in Guided Buying? Does it have an impact, and if so what are the requirements in Guided Buying to ensure that the qualified and preferred suppliers are displayed?

Thanks in advance for any insights you can share.

[karimelgamal]

For the record: the answer was quite simple.

In Guided Buying there is a parameter that determines whether the department/business unit value that you are using in SLP should be taken into consideration when determining which preferred suppliers to display:

SLP_THIRD_DIMENSION_FIELD - Specifies a third supplier characteristic (companyCode, pu, or plant) from Supplier Manager or Supplier Lifecycle & Performance to consider when displaying tiles or supplier lists in non-catalog requisitions and RFQs

Simply leave this parameter blank if you don't want the department / business unit value that was used in qualification to have an impact.