We rang in the new year with a variety of new enhancements spread across the application. This post will cover some of these: from improved user management to prettier graphs to threshold-based notifications. And of course, we're constantly fixing small bugs, increasing the performance and reliability of our infrastructure, etc.
User Management Improvements
Access Requests
Although Vendorful is free for vendors to respond to RFX issued via the platform, to participate in reverse auctions, to fill out onboarding forms, etc., that doesn't mean we take security any less seriously. So what happens when a large organization joins Vendorful to participate in an RFP and then, some time later, a sales rep in a different office is also invited?
Historically, this has been a manual, high-touch process for us that we channeled through our support team. But now things run much more smoothly. When a new user requests access to an existing vendor account, an email is automatically sent to the Vendorful team. A new administrative screen makes it easy for our team member to validate and verify the user. (Or, if the user can't be validated, our team member can decline access.)
The result is a much more streamlined process to ensure that vendors can securely access Vendorful and be responsive to buyers.
Business Units
In January, at the request of a customer, we expanded the concept of a Business Unit so that it functions as more than a label. Now, vendors and contracts — in addition to RFX — can be associated the specific business units. The other major change here is that users, too, can be associated with business units.
Putting this all together, organizations now have more ways to gate stakeholder access to contract and vendor data. Want someone in HR to see the data of the HR vendors, but not have visibility into vendors for the legal department? Easy peasy. Here's how to give a user access to a business unit:
Pipeline: Threshold-Based Notifications
The Sourcing Pipeline module is being rapidly adopted by our customers. One of the pieces of feedback we received was that it would be helpful if notifications were sent when large projects were scheduled or significant savings were realized. To accommodate this, we built a global threshold-based notification system. An organizational admin can configure Vendorful to send notifications tied to specific thresholds.
New Graphs for RFX Analysis
Since the earliest days of Vendorful, we've had graphs in place to help visually explain the results of a sourcing event. In our view, the look had gotten a bit stale. A little pixie dust and poof! New graphs! (We also improved the individual vendor response pages, but that screenshot is less interesting to look at.)
A Slightly Better Nav Bar 🙂
We like our users, we really do! So why were we YELLING at them with an all-caps Nav Bar? Problem solved. We now make liberal use of lower-case letters and improved the use of space.
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