Summary:
This article describes the how to manage, publish and use free-text forms in P2P Purchase.
Free-text forms allows professional buyers to create starting point for the requisition; defaulting, hardcoding or limiting some or none of the data. This helps the organization purchase according to predefined rules like from particular suppliers for certain types of products.
Free-text forms are ideal for purchases where user needs to fill the data in manually. They are normally used to extend the availability of the standard products (catalog or external webshops) or used for special types of purchases.
For complex purchases, it is possible that buyers will assign a field that is not normally used. The field could, for example, steer the approval process by enabling a certain process activity if the product type is free-text form.
Users can mix the product types as they like by adding different types of products into the shopping basket and then creating a purchase requisition from the basket.
Organizations can have an unlimited number of free text forms. It is possible to apply forms from higher organization levels to lower organizations.
Managing free-text forms:
Free-text forms are created and maintained in Data Management > Purchase > Free-text forms. To access this page, you must have the professional user permission Manage free-text forms.
If you need to change an existing form, the form must be first unpublished and it will no longer be visible for the normal users. Alternatively you can create a copy of the form and once the changes are made, simply activate and publish the new form and de-activate the old one.
The best way to create new free-text form is to copy an existing form. You can also use the default free-text form, which includes a standard set of fields, as a starting point.
You can search for fields and add them to the form. The list of available fields does not show the already used fields. Please note that it is not possible to add fields from requisition header data.
The additional fields can be used to improve the layout of the form, provide instructions to the requester, or collect custom information related to the item being ordered.
One of the special functionalities is the use of Additional fields > Text fields.
For example, you can create a free-text form for ordering t-shirts, where using the text fields is a good option for requesters to fill in the required information. In this example, the form creator has inserted placeholder text with all valid values to guide the user.
The values entered into text fields are concatenated in purchase requisition LineData > AdditionalInfo field like this:
T-shirt size : M
T-shirt color : Green
Additional Info data is also printed on the standard order PDF.
After adding all the fields, you configure the field properties for each field separately.
You can also choose to add attachments to the form which can be sent to the supplier together with the order documents.
Once the form is ready you must activate and publish the form. Then it will be ready for requesters to use. If the Integrated Shopping Experience is enabled then the form will be published to Marketplace.
Purchasing with free-text forms:
Standard users need the permission "Use free-text forms" to order items with free-text forms:
Standard users can find the free-text forms in P2P Shop. For
With Integrated Shopping Experience enabled, professional buyers can control which users can access each forms by organization and user group through Marketplace Views. Without Integrated Shopping Experience it is only possible to control access by organization - all requesters in an organization will have access to all published free-text forms for that organization.
Note that purchase requisition may contain multiple suppliers which eventually will be split into multiple purchase orders based on the split criteria.
Order split criteria is defined in Data Management > Purchase > Document creation settings and requires additional permissions to access.
Additional Information: