Internal release notes 2023 - Sprint 126 (Source-to-Contract)
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The history of the internal release notes can be found here.
Sprint 126 (March 9th 2023)
User Groups - BPM
Why
Company Admins would like to enable access to BPMs which are relevant to a specific user group only.
Quite useful for organizations who have different procedures for different departments.
What
Assign one or more user groups to a concrete BPM.
This new “assign” functionality is available for BPMs on Organization level only, i.e. visible in the Organization Profile > Modules > Tender Management > Business Process Management
The Business Process Management functionality on the System Configuration level does NOT support this new “assign” functionality.
How
In the list of BPMs add a new column called “Assigned to” - it will show:
User group name - the name of the concrete group assigned to this BPM
All users - default case for all existing BPMs, i.e. all buyers may use this BPM
N user groups - in case the BPM is assigned to more than one user group
In the list of BPMs add a new functionality to assign user groups. These are the two options to do that:
From the 3-dots menu on each BPM - option “Assign”
On mouseover the button “ASSIGN” appears
The assign functionality happens inside the window
Only members from the assigned group(s) will be able to use that BPM when creating a new tender.
MFA - by text/SMS + don’t ask me again
Why
Not all clients are able to use an authentication app to enable MFA. To serve more clients, we’ve added an additional method: by text/SMS.
Also, users can now mark a checkbox to skip MFA for the next 30 days. This should lower the amount of required re-authentications and makes MFA more user friendly.
What
A new method is added which can only be enabled by Mercell System Admins: MFA by text/SMS. When signing in, users will receive a code via SMS on their mobile phone, which they can enter in S2C to sign in.
When signing in with MFA, a checkbox is now added to skip MFA for the next 30 days.
How
When signed in as a Mercell System Admin, you can open any organization and go to the Security card. Here you see an additional method is added “SMS Authentication“.
Regular company admins can not enable this themselves. The reason is that there are costs attached to the SMS functionality, so arrangements need to be made with the clients first.
When enabled and a user signs in for the first time, he will see the screen below with some general explanation.
When the user clicks on “Start configuration” he will see the following screen and a SMS is sent. This is also the screen the user will see every next time he will log in with MFA.
At the top you see the Phone number where a SMS message is sent to.
If the phone number is incorrect, the user will need to edit this first in his user profile (so skip MFA or needs to be excluded for MFA by a company admin).
If the user didn’t receive the SMS somehow, he can resend this (there’s a limit of 6 tries).
And at the bottom you see the checkbox “Don’t ask me again for 30 days“. When marking this checkbox and signing in, the user is not required to use MFA for the next 30 days. Precondition is that the user is using the same device and same browser. If he uses something different, the user will be asked to authenticate himself again.
This checkbox is also added for the Authenticator App method.
Please note there’s currently a bug which is causing the checkbox to not work for the SMS authentication method. This will be addressed.
An example of how the the SMS message with code looks like.
Linear price scale formula
Why
The main reason for implementation is that users are able to use this formula in Negometrix3. This formula, in Negometrix3 known as the Weighted Factor method, allows users to determine the range of prices the suppliers can submit.
What
This formula works similarly to Negometrix3, where the weighted price is added to the weighted quality. The only difference is that the P/Q ratio is not set on the highest level, but is determined by the points that are assigned to both quality and price.
How
The buyer can set this formula by default in the BPM, can select this formula in the assistant, or can select it in the round settings. When this formula is chosen, there will always be an additional field that the buyer needs to fill out. These include the range of prices, and whether we allow the supplier to submit a price outside the range.
Note that it is also possible to click on the arrows-icon. This will switch the highest price score with the lowest, in the rare case of a higher price being ‘better’ and should therefore receive more points.
This blue box can be found in the round settings, but can also be found in the price element. These boxes should mirror, so the settings will always be similar. We decided to have two places because we want to prevent buyers from searching for this important setting.
If (one of) the checkboxes are checked, it means that the supplier is able to submit a price higher and/or lower than set. This will change the range accordingly. So if the range was first from €250 til €600, and a supplier submits with €700, the formula will calculate with the range €250 until €700.
Suppliers will always see the range that is set by the buyer. This can be seen in the example below. They will not be able to submit outside this range.
Export all offers answers
Why
Until now, customers can only compare the evaluation results of the offers. We’ve often heard that they also want to compare the offer answers. Our research shows us, that this comparison mainly is done outside our platform. We therefore decided to skip the comparison in the UI, and provide an Excel export directly.
What
We created a new button in the Offer menu, called “Export answers”.
How
When clicking on the button, an Excel export is created. In this Excel export, there’s a tab available per questionnaire of the tender. The answers of all offers are put on the same row, so they can easily be compared.
For each question type, we show the answer that the supplier provided, with some exceptions:
For the question type “Document question” and “ESPD“: we show the document names of all uploaded documents, comma separated.
For the question type “Evaluation criterion“: we show a placeholder that no answer was required.
Conditional questions are shown as an additional row with the same question number + if YES/NO. If the question was not relevant for that supplier, we show a placeholder that the question was not applicable for this offer.
Small changes
In this release, the following small changes have been implemented:
Bug Fixes
In this release, ?? bugs have been resolved. Please find below a list of the noteworthy bugs: