How to verify and manage active supplier users during RFX creation? Follow

In the process of drafting Requests for Quote (RFQ) and Requests for Information (RFI) you may get to the point of wanting to send out the request to a supplier and find out that they have no active users. This is an immediate problem, because if they have no active users, then there is no one who can effectively address your request in the platform. There are multiple tools we have in place to help you identify and rectify this issue when it arises so that you can guarantee that suppliers are able to respond to your requests.

Supplier Active Users

When drafting an RFX, in the table of data for RFX Scope there is a column called "Supplier Active Users", which indicates the number of active users in a supplier organization in our platform. If that number of active users equals zero, it will be color-coded in Red to indicate a problem which requires immediate attention.

If an RFQ is sent (with or without Preview) to a Supplier with no active users, a warning prompt appears, and confirmation is needed to Proceed. User may opt to send anyway or go to the vendor management page. A supplier user must be added from the manage vendor feature in the main administration menu in the account; however, only specific users with administrative access can perform vendor management. If you send without adding users, you will want to notify your administrator and let them know you sent an RFX and that they need to add the appropriate supplier users immediately so they can respond.

User Management and Verification

To help manage active supplier users better, we include an "Active Users" column in the "RFQ Recipient Response" custom report.  The report shows what phase of the response the recipient is, and if you scroll horizontally to the right of the table, you should be able to see the Active Users column to confirm that the RFQ Recipient has users who are capable of responding to the request.

If you would like to gain a better understanding of which suppliers have active vs. inactive users, we provide a "Recipient User Activation" report that provides the real-time status of RFQ Recipient User Account Activation and maps the RFQ Recipients with the corresponding Commodity Manager(s).

If you find suppliers without any active users, and you have administrative permissions to modify them, you can navigate to the (1) three-dot menu in the upper right and select Managed Vendors. (2) In the Manage Vendors interface, you can (3) select the persons icon under the column header Manage Users in order to make changes to the user roster of that vendor.

Once in the Manage Users interface, when you (1) select Add User it will light up in dark blue and open an input panel below (2) where you enter the details of the user to be added and then (3) Save to finalize the user addition. In this interface you can also select users next to their name in the main table and make modifications to them in the button interface around the Add User button.

For more details on Managing Vendors and Vendor Users, please see: How can I manage vendors and their users?

Notification Messages

A weekly email is sent to the Global Commodity Manager (GCM) and copied to LevaData Customer Service for all the RFQs sent to supplier organizations with no active users. These emails should serve as call-to-actions that are immediately rectified so that requests can be responded to going forward.

Inviting Additional Suppliers

Users can add new suppliers as RFQ recipients during RFQ creation, and not be restricted to only using pre-defined suppliers from a previous data load. Inviting additional suppliers to participate in the bidding process assists in expanding the scope for negotiation from the buyer perspective and permits participation from multiple additional suppliers who would otherwise not receive a request for quote.

On the RFX Draft screen, clicking into the (1) Quick Action menu (lightning bolt icon) produces dropdown action for (2) Invite Supplier:

To invite additional suppliers to participate in the RFQ bidding, the user can select the respective parts from the RFQ scope and click on Invite Supplier.

When the Invite Suppliers pop-up appears, the user can select the suppliers that they wish to invite and click on the Invite button:

Additional Line items with the newly invited suppliers are added to the RFQ scope:

The User can modify the MPN and Manufacturer attributes if they need to:

Once the modifications are completed, by selecting the newly added line items, the user can proceed to the RFX preview page and notice the newly added line items are differentiated with a gold background color: