MeRLIN Buyer Portal Knowledge Base

Auctions can be created either from the Demand Management or from the Auctions. The creation of an Auction from Demand is provided in detail in the MeRLIN User Manual for Demand Management. In this document, we will talk about creating an Auction through the Auctions sub-menu that can be accessed under the Sourcing Event Management main menu on the left-side navigation pane.

MeRLIN supports two types of Auctions: Forward Auction and Reverse Auction.

In the Forward Auction, the buyers compete to obtain goods or services by offering increasingly higher prices. In a reverse auction, the sellers compete to obtain business from the buyer and prices will typically decrease as the sellers underbid each other.

The Suppliers can participate in the Auction from the Supplier Portals of MeRLIN. Also, in MeRLIN the buyer will be locked from viewing the bids during the auction process and can view the results only after the completion of the Auction.

The User Interface of the Auction submenu displaying the list of Auctions is shown below.1. The Create New button will let you create New Auction, which we will see in detail in the upcoming section.

2. Search is made available to help the users easily find the Auction they are looking for by entering some keywords of the Auction. Merlin displays all the Auction that matches with the entered word.

3. Using the advanced filter option in Merlin, one can easily find the Auction based on Auction Number, Status of Auction, Owner of the Auction, Category, Time zone Offset followed by selecting the desired items from the adjacent list. For instance, when the Auction Number is searched, all the Auction Numbers are listed from which one more selection can be made. Similarly, the same procedure can be repeated for other options. A combination of items can also be selected. In such cases, items from Auction Number, Status of Auction, Owner of the Auction, Category and\or Timezone Offset can be chosen and then followed by selecting related items from the adjacent list. All the selected Options are then displayed under the Selected Options section. Now click on the Apply button to apply the filter. Click on the cancel button to Cancel the filtering options.

If the Auction in Draft status is deleted, the Auction item will be removed from the Auction list and will return to the Demand to Source list in Demand Management.

Actions/Operations

Request Status Description