Supplier User Guide
Purpose: This document is intended to provide a high level overview of the Levelpath platform for new users. We’ll walk through the functionality of the Suppliers page through the perspective of Requesters/ Stakeholders.
What is the Suppliers page?
The Suppliers page of Levelpath acts as a library or directory of all suppliers your organization uses or has used. Within the Supplier page, a user can look-up a supplier and obtain information regarding their description, contact information, business category, as well as work projects involving the supplier.
How do I access Suppliers?
A user can access their suppliers via the “Suppliers” icon along the menu bar on the left hand side:
Once the user is in the Suppliers page, they will see all suppliers listed down the page.
All users have access to search for a supplier. This will automatically pull up the individual supplier page. The search for a supplier button is at the top of the suppliers page and also on Front Door.
All users have access to filter and view Active, Pending, and Inactive suppliers.
The supplier toolbar provides users access to key details before selecting a specific supplier page.
NOTE: Only users with the ‘Supplier Manager’ role toggled on will have the ability to add and edit supplier information. Currently all suppliers added will be listed as Active, the Organizational Administrators will have access to change the status to Pending and Inactive.
Selecting a Specific Supplier
When selecting a specific supplier, the user will be taken to the ‘Overview’ tab:
- Commercial Entities: Displays the commercial entities associated with a specific Supplier.
- Payable Entities: Displays the payable entities associated with a specific Supplier. Only users with Supplier Manager permissions can view Payable Entities.
- Contracts: All Contracts associated with the specific supplier will be viewable for all users with Contract Viewer permissions on Levelpath.
- Projects: This tab shows users all projects that include this supplier. Users will only be able to view the projects where they are an assignee or collaborator within a specific projects.
- Value Tracking Records: Users can view all Value Tracking Records associated with the supplier with their associated estimated value, actual value, status, and more.
- Related Suppliers: Lists suppliers that are related to the selected supplier. Relationship Types include Parent, Child, or Legal Entity. You are able to relate a supplier by clicking the blue "Relate a supplier" button on this tab.
- Risk: From this tab, users can view and create risk records associated with the supplier. Risk type includes Information Security, Cybersecurity, Data Privacy and more.
Note: Levelpath offers Supplier Enrichment. The supplier above has been enriched, signified by the stars next to the Supplier Name. Therefore, the user can view all public products, services and competitors.
On specific supplier records, users will see an additional status next to the name. In the image below, one of the statuses is “Invited to Bid.” This indicates that the supplier is connected to a current Sourcing Event in Levelpath. This will be an automatically added status, making it easier to understand the supplier relationship at a glance.
There will also be a status next to each supplier. This can be changed by anyone who has Supplier Manager permissions. The statuses are defined as follows:
- New: supplier is newly created by the customer or newly requested by the stakeholders and supplier does not exist in the supplier list.
- Under Consideration: supplier is invited to a sourcing event to provide response, supplier is invited via supplier task to provide some information, and record has never been in Active status.
- Connected: supplier previously invited to sourcing event and/or supplier task but no further actions were taken, no contract is related to the supplier.
- Pending: customer is likely to work with the supplier but there are additional steps required to set up the supplier, contract is still under negotiation and has not been fully executed, supplier’s commercial entity and payable entity has not been verified.
- Active: supplier is active when the onboarding process is completed. Activity status: Is onboarded, is requested, all available activity statuses.
- Inactive: no longer working with the supplier
Supplier Module Card Updates
Supplier records now feature updated module cards that surface key insights for every module in one place on the supplier record home page. Each module card now includes the same icon used in the left navigation, and selecting a card still takes you to the same destination pages as before.
Enable supplier to display as recommended based on category
The organizational administrator can enable suppliers to display as recommended suppliers (i.e., when setting up a sourcing event) when particular categories are selected during request submission. Within the supplier record, the organizational administrator can navigate to a commercial entity and setup using the following steps:
- In the "Overview" section, set the "Preferred Supplier" field to "Yes".
- In the "Business Information" section, select the relevant categories in both the "Category" and "Preferred categories" fields.
Set expirations for preferred supplier status
Expiration dates can be set for preferred supplier status across suppliers. Once an expiration date arrives, the preferred supplier status would expire. Expiration reminders can also be set in order to notify on an upcoming status expiration.
Within a supplier record, please navigate to a commercial entity to update these dates.
Supplier invoice upload access
A designated supplier contact can be given permission to upload invoices directly through the Supplier Hub. From the People tab on a supplier record, a Supplier Manager can toggle invoice upload access for a specific contact. Once this permission is enabled, that contact can submit invoices for the supplier through the Supplier Hub. Submitted invoices are processed with OCR and then appear in the Invoice hub where they are visible and searchable for the appropriate teams.
You have now completed the Supplier Record training!🚀