Quick Reference

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Workflow

Benefits

• Reduce Complexity: Complexity is the enemy of business. Current supply chain ecosystems are a network of individual business systems that, because of the cost of integration, do not share information amongst themselves. The buyers and suppliers are required to become expert users in several different systems resulting in poor use and adoption of the systems.
• Improve Communications: The communication between the buyer and suppliers is often complicated because of the lack of the various contact information needed between the organizations and the requirement for sharing sensitive (and possibly regulated) data between both parties. This results is a mixture of ad hoc systems of email, text messaging, file sharing, postal services using clumsy encryption/decryption methods. This takes time and delay for seemingly simple transactions.
• Take Control of Your Systems: Most supplier portals are owned by the supply chain business but require IT resources to make any changes to them dealing with new content, or announcements, etc.  Accordingly, the information on the portal is often delayed in getting posted or stale because the owners cannot manage it themselves. This prevents the portal being quickly adaptable and relevant.
• Supplier Enablement: Suppliers often are not frequent users of current portals and forget how to do the basic functions resulting in support calls, delays in getting transactions completed and supplier user frustration.  If a portal gets a reputation of a difficult system, suppliers avoid using them and default to mainly manual systems involving traded voice mails and faxes. This results in a poorly managed process with no understanding of the status of the multiple transactions in motion.

Roles and Responsibilities

Buyer User: A buyer user can perform the following functionalities:

• Edit and verify self contact
• Search own org contact list
• Search Buyers contact list
• Search Suppliers contact list

Portal Administrator: Provides full control over the portal, to include the following, create additional areas in a portal, manage all areas in the portal, including managing all pages within the portal, the default page layouts, users and their roles, page widgets, and content in the widgets. A portal admin can also perform the following:

• Manage own contact list
• Edit and verify self contact
• Search own org contact list
• Search Buyers contact list
• Search Suppliers contact list

Area Administrator: Provides full control over an area, to include the following, view all content, manage pages, default page layouts, manage widgets in pages, manage content in the pages, including content in widgets, and managing users. An area admin can perform the following functionalities:

• Manage own contact list
• Edit and verify self contact
• Search own org contact list
• Search Buyers contact list
• Search Suppliers contact list

Page Manager: Pertains to the area in which the role was assigned and can perform the following, view all content, manage pages and default page lay-outs, manage widgets in pages, manage content in the pages and content in widgets.

Role Manager: Pertains to an area, and can perform the following, view all content, manager users.

Content Editor: Pertains to an area, an can perform the following, view all content and contribute content to an existing widget in the respective area.

Viewer: Can view all content in the respective area.

Supplier Administrator: A supplier admin ca perform the following functionalities:

• Manage own contact list
• Edit and verify self contact
• Search own org contact list
• Search Suppliers contact list

Supplier User: A supplier user can perform the following functionalities:

• Manage own contact list
• Search own org contact list
• Search Buyers contact list