Tips & Hints for Sharing Items with Suppliers
Follow these guidelines to set up and optimize collaboration with your Suppliers.
Three Conditions for Sharing Items
To share Items with your Suppliers, three conditions must be met:
- The Supplier contact must have access to your workspace.
- The Item revision must be sourced to the Supplier through a source relationship (create a source relationship in the Sourcing view in the Items world).
- The Item revision must be shared with the Supplier.
Create a Supplier Contact
Supplier contacts are the people you work with at a Supplier company. The first step to sharing Item information with Suppliers is to create a record for a Supplier contact.
- In the Contacts view of a Supplier, click Add a Contact.
- Enter information about the contact.
- Click Enter Information.
Grant Workspace Access to a Supplier Contact: Admins Only
After adding a Supplier contact, an Account Administrator sends the contact an invitation from BOMControl, inviting the contact to create a Supplier user account and collaborate with you in your workspace. Supplier access is granted on a per-user basis.
2 Different Access Levels:
Basic Supplier (or Component Manufacturer) Access grants access to Items sourced to the Supplier. Advanced Supplier (or Contract Manufacturer) Access grants access to those Items and their first-level BOMs.
- In the Contacts view for the Supplier, click Access for the appropriate contact.
- Use the radio buttons to select Basic or Advanced Supplier Access and click Assign Supplier Access.
- Select an Access Role for the contact and click Assign Role.
- Select which Items sourced to the Supplier should be linked from the contact’s Dashboard.
- Click Place on Dashboard.
- Review the invitation email that will be sent by BOMControl on your behalf.
- Click Send Invitation.
Share an Item Revision with Sourced Suppliers
The final step in Supplier sharing is to mark specific Item revisions as shared.
- Go to the Supplier Access view for the Item you wish to share.
- Make sure you select the revision you want to share from the Revision drop-down menu. You can share any working, effective or superseded revision.
- Click Share with Suppliers. The selected Item revision will be accessible to every Supplier user at every Supplier to whom the Item is sourced.
Re-Invite a Supplier Contact: Admins Only
If a Supplier contact rejects their initial invitation or does not respond, an Account Administrator can re-invite the contact.
Re-Inviting in the Account Administration Tool:
Account Administrators can also re-invite Supplier contacts from the Access view in the Account Administration tool.
- Go to the Contacts view for the relevant Supplier, and click Re-Invite for the contact.
- Review the invitation that will be sent and click Send Invitation.
Share an Entire BOM with a Supplier
To keep your product record secure, BOMControl requires additional steps for sharing an entire BOM with a Supplier.
- Grant the Supplier contact Advanced Supplier Access.
- Share each level of the BOM with the Supplier individually.
- Check the Sharing BOM subview of the BOM view for the Item to see which BOM lines are shared.
Set Supplier Approval Status
You can indicate that a specific Supplier should or should not be used for future buys by selecting Approved or Disapproved in the Approval Status drop-down menu in the Summary view of a Supplier. Everywhere the Supplier appears in BOMControl, it will be appended with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. Supplier Approval Status does not have any effect other than marking the Suppliers with these icons.
Use Approved and Potential Source Relationships
There are two types of source relationships in BOMControl: Approved and Potential.
- An approved source relationship is considered revision-controlled information. You can only modify it on the working revision of an Item, and then make that modification effective with a Change or the Make Effective command.
- A potential source relationship is not considered revision-controlled information. You can modify it on the effective revision of an Item.