Vendors

Use the Vendors workspace to maintain details about the vendors you use and to monitor their performance. You can also look up assets, purchase orders, and contracts by associated vendor. Procurement Manager and Contract Manager user roles have access to this workspace, as do the Asset Administrator and Asset Manager roles.

To create a vendor record

1.Open the Vendors workspace and click New.

2.In the Type drop-down, select whether the vendor is Internal or External.

3.Type a Name for the vendor, then complete the remaining fields as required with the appropriate information about the vendor. The Category field automatically fills to show that this is an asset-specific vendor.

4.Enter the Fiscal Year End for the vendor. This field automatically updates at the end of the vendor's fiscal year for the following year. Knowing when a vendor's fiscal year ends can help with your negotiations as a vendor looks to meet their sales margins for the year end. Saved searches are available from the Favorite Searches drop-down to identify which vendors are approaching the end of their fiscal year.

5.If the vendor supplies items or services that are critical to your business, select the Strategic Vendor check box so that a displays alongside its name in the vendors list. You can also filter for strategic vendors.

6.Complete the associated tabs as needed:

•Contact Details – Record details for how to contact the vendor, including the Primary Contact if required. Existing primary contacts are pulled from the External Contracts workspace. If you create a new one here, it will then display in the External Contacts workspace as well.

•Contacts – Add another external contact for this vendor or internal contact in your organization that may be relevant for this record. In either case, the selected person displays in the Contact column, along with their phone and email details.

Typically, a contact is either an external person or an employee who currently exists in your system. If you add a new contact here, that individual will now be added to the External Contact or Employee workspace respectively.

•Catalog Items – Lists items in the Product Catalog currently associated with this vendor. Select an item and click Go To to open that record in the Product Catalog workspace, where this vendor will display under the Approved Vendors tab.

•Assets – Link asset records from the Hardware Assets workspace that are associated with this vendor.

•Purchase Orders – Lists any purchase orders currently associated with this vendor. Select an order and click Go To to open that record in the Purchase Orders workspace.

•Contracts – Lists any contracts currently associated with this vendor. Select a contract and click Go To to open that record in the Contracts workspace.

•Performance – Shows this vendor's overall performance, based on a calculated average of all purchase-order scorecards created for this vendor.

•Scorecards – Lists all of the purchase-order scorecards associated with this vendor that have been created in the Purchase Orders workspace. For details, see the section below.

•Journal – Add any relevant notes to this record.

•Attachments – Attach a document to this record, or add a URL link to a relevant website. URLs must include the https:// prefix.

•Audit History – Automatically tracks any changes made to key attributes of this record.

7.Click Save.

Vendor performance and scorecards

Purchase orders give you the opportunity to add a vendor scorecard, where you can record the vendor's performance each time you interact.

For each of the provided categories, you can specify how the vendor has performed. Asset Manager then converts these ratings to a number (Very Good = 5, Good = 4, Acceptable = 3, Poor = 2, and Very Poor = 1) and calculates the average to give the vendor an Overall Performance score. If a category is not relevant, select N/A to exclude the score.

These scorecards are averaged to give the values that display on the Performance tab of the vendor's record.