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17 November
Improvements for the requirements tab
Supplier groups (or shortlists)
Mini Competitions: select suppliers to participate
Swedish national publication forms
Improvements for the requirements tab
Continuing the improvements from last month, the requirements tab now has some bigger changes to improve the ease of use. We’ve added a new inner page when opening a questionnaire. In this inner page, the buyer can see in the left menu the created questionnaires. This can be used to navigate between the questionnaire, reorder questionnaires and drag & drop questions inside the questionnaires.
On top of that we also improved the UI with fresh icons and renamed Snippets to a more clearer Question template.
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Supplier groups (or shortlists)
Inviting suppliers to your tender has been renewed a couple of months ago. Now, we add the option to use supplier groups to easily invite known groups of suppliers. You can manage these groups in Organisation Settings, and then use these to quickly invite them. You can favourite supplier groups for fast discoverability, or search in your list of groups.
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Mini Competitions: select suppliers to participate
For those creating mini competitions from DPS or Qualification Systems know that when adding approved suppliers to the MC means that all suppliers are added. Now, you can select the ones you actually want to participate. The feature has to be activated for your organisation in the BPM.
Smaller changes
Swedish national publication forms are now available
Verification is now a setting that can be managed in the tender itself > round settings.
Verification has received some additional tooltip and validation to make it more clear a deadline needs to be entered or updated (also when allowing a resubmission).
6 October
Multi-Factor Authentication
Requirements improvements
Tender History
Multi-Factor Authentication
To improve the security of a user account, a strong password is not enough. Setting up a second layer of security is a common way of ensuring the identity of the user when logging in. For Mercell Source-to-Contract, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is now available. It’s a feature that can be activated for an organisation in the organisation settings. It’s disabled by default.
Once the MFA is activated by the administrator, users have 14 days to set it up. During login, users are prompted with the question to configure the MFA.
They can skip the configuration for 14 days. Once they start the configuration, they scan the QR code with their authenticator app of choice. The configuration is complete after submitting the verification code.
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The user has to enter the verification code every time during the login process.
Requirements improvements
The look and feel of the requirements area in the tender has been improved. We’re improving the user experience when navigating through the different questionnaires and sections. This is the first iteration of making this better.
A side panel is added with the colleagues from the team tab. We show the role Lead buyers for users who have the right to “edit tender” and Viewers for the users who can view only.
Once a questionnaire has been added, you can click the whole box to start editing (previously, you had to click the title).
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Tender History
It’s now possible to view all actions taken in the tender over the course of the last 180 days.
As a buyer you want to be in control of your tender and know what, when and who performed certain actions in your tender.
The existing system logs that we have in the system are now made available on a tender level. On the overview page in the tender behind the 3-dots menu, you’ll find the ‘View tender history’ option.
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By default you’ll see the log of the last 7 days with no additional filters. The filters that can be applied are:
Actions
Users
Default time range
Smaller improvements
You can assign a license for Mercell Source-to-Contract to users who haven’t activated their account yet
You can assign a question in Question & Answer to users who haven’t activated their account yet
22 September
New web address for the application
General award letter
Copy requirements from other tenders
DPS Improvements:
Questionnaires per category
More clarity on sharing evaluation comments with suppliers
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Organisations with an SSO and API integration have been informed with specific instructions to make the transition as smooth as possible.
General award letter
Swedish legislation states that Some organisations want to send an award letter (or notice) should be sent to all participants that submitted an offer. Not only for public tenders, but also in tenders on invite or mini-competitions. Up until now, you created an award letter with individual information for the supplier. Now, you can create one identical award letter for all suppliers as well.
It’s a new tab in Awarding, specifically for Swedish organisations and it’s : ‘General award letter External’. Here, the buyer can select the template, draft the message and sent it. Templates can be created within Organisation Settings, just like the templates for other messages and requirements.
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The supplier will see the Awarding tab as well to view the letter that’s been sent.
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A lot of times, it’s useful to reuse requirements from other tenders you or your colleagues have ran in the past. Without having to copy-paste this information manually, buyers can now copy the requirements of an existing tender. When adding a questionnaire in a new tender, you can now select to either import, select a template or copy from an existing tender (that you already have access to).
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After selecting the tender to copy from, you can select which questionnaire you’d like to import. You can copy complete questionnaires, or individual questions.
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Dynamic Purchasing Systems: questionnaires per category
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As a buyer, this adds more flexibility to your DPS. Buyers can create multiple questionnaires and link each to one or more categories.
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Suppliers will see all questionnaires, but will only be able to fill out the ones linked to the selected category. Questionnaires that are not available, will be greyed out and include an information bubble to explain why.
The feature is only available for new DPS tenders and has to be activated in the BPM of your organisation. Contact your account manager at Mercell to have it activated.
Dynamic Purchasing Systems: more clarity on sharing evaluation comments with suppliers
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On top of the Norwegian Bank ID option, two more options are now available for suppliers to sign an offer:
NemID - used in Denmark
Swedish BankID - used in Sweden
The two options are only available for new tenders created after this release.
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