NegotiationTracker

What is a NegotiationTracker?

A DokuMate NegotiationTracker is an Excel workbook that displays RFP responses in Tabular or ReportCard Form (see Document Forms) in one of two ways:

• By DocId, meaning all responses to a document with a given docId value from all second parties side by side on one Excel worksheet per document (using the docId value as the worksheet name), with second parties ordered alphabetically from left to right by the secondParty value; and
• By Party, meaning all responses from a given party, identified by the secondParty value, on one Excel worksheet per party (using the secondParty value as the worksheet name), with documents ordered alphabetically from top to bottom by the docId value.

See Content Controls for more information on the docId and secondParty (as well as firstParty and docAuthor) tags.

How do I create a NegotiationTracker?

The NegotiationTracker feature is available in the DokuMate ribbon tabs in both Word and Excel. There is one large menu button entitled Negotiation Tracker with two menu items corresponding to the two forms (by DocId, by Party) mentioned above.

When you select either menu item, you will be asked for the root folder that stores the parties’ documents and the folder in which you want to store the NegotiationTracker. The latter defaults to the root folder selected in the first step. DokuMate will then process all documents, produce and store a new NegotiationTracker in the selected folder, and open the NegotiationTracker. You will see the last worksheet that was created, which is either the alphabetically last docId or secondParty or, if the root folder contains documents that were ignored, a sheet called “Ignored”. The latter lists the file names of all documents that are not included in the NegotiationTracker and the reason for why they were not included. Unless there was a technical error, the reason will be that the document did not meet one of the prerequisites described below.

Since you simply select the root folder of the documents to be included in the NegotiationTracker, there is a recommended way of structuring the documents:

• Root Folder: All documents
  • First Party: All first party documents (e.g., original RFP documents)
  • Second Parties: All documents of all second parties
    • Second Party 1: All documents of the first second party
    • …
    • Second Party N: All documents of the last second party

To create a NegotiationTracker by DocId, you simply select the Root Folder. This will use the first party documents to display the first party position and the second party documents to display each party’s response.

To create a NegotiationTracker by Party, with all parties in one workbook, you simply select the Second Parties folder. In this case, the first party position will be taken from the second party documents. If you select the Root Folder, the first party documents will be used to create an empty response, which might be useful in some cases.

To create a NegotiationTracker for a single party, you select the party’s folder.

What are the prerequisites to creating a NegotiationTracker?

The documents to be included in the NegotiationTracker must meet the following prerequisites:

• All documents must be Microsoft Word documents in the Open XML format (e.g., .docx) and in the Tabular or ReportCard Form (see Document Forms) as created by DokuMate. All other document types (e.g., Excel, PDF) and Word documents in Narrative Form are ignored.
• All documents must have defined values for the docId, firstParty, secondParty, and docAuthor tags (see Content Controls).
• For each document (e.g., "Annex 1"), the docId value (e.g., "01-100") must be identical for each party, i.e., the first party and all second parties. The docId value is used to correlate documents originating from different parties.
• All documents must have the same firstParty value (e.g., “ABC”). The NegotiationTracker is produced for one first party (e.g., ABC) and one or more second parties.
• All documents originating from a given second party (e.g., DEF) must have the same secondParty value (e.g., “DEF”). The secondParty value is used to group documents by second party.
• All documents representing the first party’s (e.g., ABC) position must have the firstParty value as their docAuthor value (e.g., “ABC”). First party documents are identified by the equality of the firstParty and docAuthor values.
• All documents representing a second party’s (e.g., DEF) position must have the secondParty value as their docAuthor value (e.g., “DEF”). Second party documents are identified by the equality of the secondParty and docAuthor values.

How do I create the above prerequisites?

If the documents you would like to include in the NegotiationTracker do not yet meet the above prerequisites, the DocumentTracker feature of DokuMate for Excel is the easiest way to set the required tag values. Among other columns (and corresponding tags and Content Controls), the DocumentTracker also contains the columns for the docId (DocId), firstParty (1stParty), secondParty (2ndParty), and docAuthor (Author) tags (and corresponding Content Controls).