Masking of Bidders in Auction

[Former Member]

Hi

We have a client requirement whereby we want to mask the actual names of the participating bidders by givng them random names (everytime) during the Live Auction so that the person conducting the Live Auction should not come to know the Bidders' actual name & company name.

[Former Member]

Hi Vikas,

the user accounts are set when they are created for the first time.

In order to "mask" the bidders, you would need to separate the user creation

from the person creating the auction as well from the person conducting the

auction. When the supplier just have cryptic names, it should work for you.

Nevertheless, the company is known to the person conduction the auction.

Company records are the supplier records and they just get created once and

used in all areas within the system.

It is a bit strange what you are looking for - is this coming from public sector or

something similar?

Cheers,

Claudia

[Former Member]

Hi Claudia

You got it correctly. The requirement is for a Public Sector Company. They have a requirement like this. To avoid any kind of unwarrented favourism to a particular bidder, they want that the person conducting the Auction should not know the Bidder details.

At present they are working on a solution which supports this. It masks the Bidders with some random name each time & later the authorised person can know of Auction trail with the Bidder details by running a report.

[Former Member]

Hi Vikas,

I think standard SRM does not provide a solution for you. There is an extra version

SRM for Public Sector, which covers some of the specific requirements for

document sharing and workflows, but I do not know anything about auctions.

You maybe have a look at the service marketplace for SRM for Public Sector.

It could be a solution to integrate the auction provider into the SRM Process

Landscape and therefore use the fitting solution of that specific process.

Cheers,

Claudia

[Former Member]

Hi Vikas,

While you define(configure) the transaction type for the auction business object BUS2208 for the transaction type say AUC4 there is a screen at the bottom called

Hide Fields in the Applet,

you can hide the fields like Bidder Name, reserve price, First place and company name, best bid by bidder, hide competitor etc.,

Try if this helps for you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Best regards,

Sridhar.

[Former Member]

Don't these fields influence the visibility for the supplier view only?

Cheers,

Claudia

[Former Member]

Hi Vikas,

Here is what you can do:

- Create a Hash function that does the following:

CONCATENATE i_auction_guid i_partner_guid INTO s_guids.

CALL FUNCTION 'UPC_CALCULATE_HASH_CHAR3'

EXPORTING

i_string = s_guids

IMPORTING

e_hash = s_hash.

This will generate a 3-digit mask (containing numbers and letters). That means you may have 62 characters (52 letters + 10 numbers) for each of the 3 positions. That means you will have 62^3 different mask combinations (which is a lot)!

By using the partner guid combined with the auction guid you guarantee that the mask won't be always the same for a given partner in every auction.

Then you should call the aforementioned function from the BBP_LA_AUCAPI_USER_GETLIST function so that the Live Auction Cockpit will display the masks instead of the partner names. You may use the hash function both for the company name as well as for the user name, since the LAC displays both.

Masking will also require other actions, such as hiding the user's information button in the LAC (which will be easy comparing to what you will have done).

If you are interested in that solution, please let me know.

Regards,

Henrique Hermont

[Former Member]

Seems a bit of a strange requirement to me.

Why would they want to hide this information when they would have invited them to participate in the first place?