Managing a contract (Enterprise)

Managing a contract involves tasks that take the contract from creation to the end of the contract's lifecycle. The various tasks involved in managing a contract are performed by different roles.

Before creating a new contract for a buyer organization, the buyer organization must have a business account with your store. For information about managing a business account, see Managing a business account.

The following steps are involved in managing a contract using the Business Relationship Management tools available in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator:

  1. An account representative assigned to work with the buyer organization creates a new contract.
  2. When the contract is complete and the account representative has checked the contract by viewing a summary of the contract, the account representative submits the contract for approval. When the contract is submitted, an e-mail notice is sent to the sales manager.
  3. The sales manager checks the list of approval requests awaiting approval and approves or rejects the contract. If desired, the sales manager can add comments.

    If the contract is rejected, the account representative can do one of the following:

    If the contract is approved, the contract is automatically deployed. The terms and conditions in the deployed contract take effect on the start date of the contract.

If deployment of the contract fails, the sales manager or account representative can redeploy the contract.

There is no specific order to the tasks required to manage a contract once it is deployed. The following tasks are used to manage a contract, once it has been deployed, using the Business Relationship Management tools available in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator:

Viewing a contract summary

An account representative or sales manager can review an existing contract at any time by looking at the contract summary.

Suspending a contract

Occasionally, there will be a need to prevent a buyer organization from purchasing under a contract for a brief period of time. An account representative can suspend a contract at any time.

Resuming a contract

When the account representative wants to allow the buyer organization to purchase under the suspended contract again, they can resume the suspended contract.

Canceling a contract

Canceling a contract permanently prevents a buyer organization from purchasing under that contract. The contract stays in the WebSphere Commerce database for reference and can be viewed or used to create a duplicate contract. A canceled contract cannot be resumed.

Duplicating a contract

Duplicating a contract creates a new draft contract with the same information of the original contract except for the name of the contract. An account representative can make changes to the duplicate contract and then submit the contract for approval. When the duplicate contract is deployed, both the original contract and the duplicate contract can be active.

Create a new version of a contract

Create a new version of a contract creates a new draft contract with the same information of the original contract except the version number of the new contract is incremented from the version number of the original contract. An account representative can make changes to the new version contract and then submit the contract for approval. When the new version contract is deployed, the original contract is closed and unavailable to the buyer organization. A closed contract remains in the WebSphere Commerce database and can be used to duplicate a contract.

Deleting a contract

Deleting a contract marks the contract for deletion the next time the WebSphere Commerce database is cleared of all objects that have been marked for deletion. A contract that has been marked for deletion cannot be duplicated, resumed, or used to create a new version of a contract. Both account representatives and sales managers can delete contracts.

Updating a contract product and pricing terms and conditions

You can update your contract product and pricing terms and conditions without creating a new version of a contract by selecting Update Catalog Filter from the contracts list.

Related concepts

Related tasks

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