Sprint 128 (April 20th 2023)

MeForms - Form selector

Why

With the arrival of eForms, users will need to get used to the new available forms. We want to implement a form selector which helps the user in selecting the right form, based on a few questions.

By doing this, we will no longer manage the publication forms through the BPMs. All forms will be available in all created tenders: the form selector will limit the available forms.

This should also reduce the number of questions to the Service desk with questions about which publication form a user needs to select for their specific case.

What

When adding a new form, the user won’t see the entire list of all publication forms but he will see a selector. Some values are prefilled, to reduce the number of available forms.

How

When MeForms is set as the Publication authority, and the user clicks ADD in the publication menu, he will see the window as well:

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At the top is a short instruction to the buyer. He can straightaway select the actual form (“Notice subtype” in above screenshot, might be translated differently later), but he can also fill-out some of the other fields first as well. Below a short explanation per field:

• Language: concerns the language the form must be filled-out with. This is prefilled based on the user profile language.

• Country: this will determine to which publication authority the publication is sent to. This is prefilled based on the company profile and can not be changed.

• Legal basis: this determines which directive is used (2014/24EU, 2014/25/EU etc., comparable to general, special sector and defence) and limits the amount of available forms. This will be prefilled from the company profile in a future update.

• Form type: all forms are clustered in 5 types: Planning, Competition, Result, Direct preaward announcement or Contract modification. Selecting one of those, will further limit the available forms.

• Notice type: every “Form type” has some specific types. A “Planning” form can for example be to “shorten time limits“ or “just to inform the market“. And a “Competition“ form can be a regular “Contract notice“ or a “Design contest notice“. Selecting one of those, will again further limit the available forms.

• Notice subtype: this is the actual form a user can select. There are 40 regular forms to select from if there are no filters applied.

Some things to be aware of:

• It’s not mandatory to fill out all fields. If you know which form to use, you can go straight to the Notice subtype field and add the form.

• Changing a value will clear any already filled out fields below it..

• When selecting a value, we make a call to the MeForms API. This may take some time to load in some cases.

User groups in Requirements Templates

Why

Currently Questionnaires Templates and Single Question templates (aka Snippets) can be used by all users within an organization. For larger organizations this is a problem, since department A is not allowed to use templates from department B for example.

What

We already can assign User groups to BPMs (already on Live) and now with additional functionality to assign User Groups to Questionnaire & Question Templates we help buyers in saving time and reducing chance of making mistakes when creating a new tender.

How

We assume there are already created user groups and members assigned to those groups.

PART 1: User groups in Questionnaires templates

In Organization > Tender management > Templates > Requirements > Questionnaires tab:

• There is a new column called Assign to

  • By default all existing Questionnaire templates are assigned to “All users”

• There are two options to assign the user group to a selected questionnaire:

Option 1: On mouse over the questionnaire template the ASSIGN button appears

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Option 2: Via 3-dots menu

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Either of the options will open a user group selector, so the admin can decide which user group to assign

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Assigned user groups will appear in the dedicated Assigned to column

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What is the end result?

• In the above example only the members of the EU Tenders Department group will see and can use EU Tenders Template during the creation of the tender

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  or when attempting to Import a template when in tender’s Requirements page
  
  

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PART 2: User groups in Questions templates

In Organization > Tender management > Templates > Requirements > Questions tab:

• There is a new column called Assign to

  • By default all existing Questions templates are assigned to “All users”

• There are two options to assign the user group to a selected questionnaire:

  • Option 1: On mouse over the questionnaire template the ASSIGN button appears

  • Option 2: Via 3-dots menu

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Assigning the user group to a question template is similar to the above explained case for Questionnaires.

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What is the end result?

In the above example (image) only the members of the NL National Tenders Department group will see and can use General terms and conditions question template when preparing a questionnaire template:

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SRM - Add ‘Mandatory’ option to SRM meta fields

Why

Until now, we hard-coded which fields were mandatory when the user created a supplier profile. But that was no longer sustainable with different customers with different needs. With this update, it will be possible to modify which fields become mandatory, by the admin.

What

In the SRM admin menu, beneath the tab Fields, there are two sub-tabs with Meta fields and Custom fields. In the sub-tab Meta fields, users can view all fields that can be filled upon the creation of the supplier. The only possible action until this update was to modify the setting ‘Read-only’. A new checkbox has been added called “Mandatory”.

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Changes has been made in the sub-tab Meta fields

How

When the admin goes to the sub-tab Meta fields, he is able to click on the button “Edit” (visible on hover). The user will see a new checkbox called “Mandatory”, which he can (un)select.

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New checkbox “Mandatory” beneath the existing one

This allows users to modify the behavior of the fields that are needed to create a supplier.

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As a result, this field is now mandatory to fill.

There is one exception, and that is the field “Company name”. This is always mandatory and can’t be modified by the admin.

Note that for our current users, nothing will change. That means that the default setting will be similar to the earlier hard-coded settings.

Small changes

In this release, the following small changes have been implemented:

• TM - From now it’s possible to transfer any tender to the bin. Before, DPS, QS and FA tenders (Dynamic Purchasing System, Qualification System and Framework Agreements) could not be removed.
  Please note that by transferring such a tender to the bin, all child tenders (mini-competitions) are moved to the bin as well. Restoring the DPS/QS/FA will also restore all child tenders. When permanently deleting the DPS/QS/FA, all child tenders are also automatically deleted from the bin.

• Portal TM - Addition of new featureset called ‘disable_tm’ which prevents users from creating a new tender, but allows them to view all past tenders (Internal use only)

• CM - New formula field outcome: Currency

• CM - Clicking ‘Cancel’ while creating a new contract does not end up in an error screen

• CM - Character limitation to Contract Name and Contract ID

• IM - Manually close rejected forms

Bug Fixes

In this release, XXX bugs have been resolved. Please find below a list of the noteworthy bugs:

• SRM - Not being able to import vendor managers is fixed ('group'-column)

• IM - Questions with type ‘Table’ is fixed: No longer extra enters after saving