Sprint 144

Release date: Monday 25th of March 2024

Anonymous buyer

Why

Buyers don’t always want suppliers to know their contact details, to prevent suppliers try to reach out to them outside the system (like calling them). Especially in big tenders - like DPSs - or tenders about sensitive topics, buyers want their contact details to be anonymous. This concerns the name, phone number and email address which is shared on multiple places inside the tender and on public pages.

This feature is marked as a gap with Negometrix3, where buyers are used to be able to use this.

What

When a buyer has created a tender it is now possible to enable the Anonymous buyer setting, so the buyer can anonymize or change the contact information which should be visible to the suppliers in the tender. 

Enabling and editing the Anonymous buyer setting is only possible for the Lead Buyer/Admin (any buyer with the ‘edit tender’ permission) in the tender.  

To enable the settings, the user must access the tender, go to the Team menu, and then click on the 3 dots for the Lead buyers and choose “Anonymous buyer settings”.  

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In the Anonymous buyer settings the user is now able to enable the functionality, and fill-out the wanted contact information - Name, Phone number and Email. It is only Name that is mandatory field to fill-out, while Phone number and Email is optional. After adding the Anonymous buyer information, then click on the Save button to active the settings. 

Only the filled-out fields will be visible for the suppliers in the tender.

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After saving the Anonymous buyer settings, there will be shown a yellow information bar in the Team section informing that the Anonymous buyer settings has been enabled. This way, it’s clear for all buyer participants this setting has been enabled.

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How does this look for suppliers?

After enabling the Anonymous buyer settings, the suppliers will not be able to see any contact details of the contact person regarding this tender. This goes for both the public pages and within the tender. Instead the provided information in the Anonymous buyer settings will be shown. Below you can see a couple of examples of how it looks like from a supplier view when the Anonymous buyer settings is enabled.

Example 1: When a supplier gets an invitation for a tender

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Example 2: When a supplier visits the Public Tender page

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Example 3: A pop-up with details within the tender

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These are just some examples, but everywhere where the buyer contact details were shown, this is now anonymized.

Also when the first eForm in the tender is created, the anonymized values that are entered in the anonymous buyer settings are used to prefill the contact person details in the eForm. Please note the following:

• This only applies to the first eForm that is created in a tender. If an eForm is already created (or published), the anonymized values will not be automatically added. These values will be copied from the earlier form instead.

• If the phone number or email address were left empty, those values will also appear empty in the eForm.

Also, to prevent the buyer will accidentally share contact details in messages or letters for example, the buyer is warned on several occasions in case anonymous buyer is enabled:

• When clicking on Send in messages, when a placeholder with ‘Sender’ information is added.

• When clicking on Send in invites, when a placeholder was used from an invitation template.

• When creating a document (for example on the offer page, or when loading a template for an award letter).

In these cases the buyer will get a pop-up like below before continuing.

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Small changes

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

• DPS rejection details - Last release we improved how the comments of the buyer are displayed inside the application, when a suppliers application for a DPS is rejected by the buyer. We now further improved the visibility by creating a button “View details“ on the offer page of an application. This pop-up contains all questions + comments that are marked as KO by the buyer. With WhatFix we could guide the suppliers that have been rejected to this button in case they visit the offer page while their submission is rejected in a DPS.
  
  

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• Internal documents - In the properties of a tender it’s possible to add internal documents, which are only visible for buyer participants. These documents were not part of the full export of a tender. These are now added in a subfolder of the Properties folder in the full tender export (ZIP export). Obviously, these documents are NOT visible for supplier and are not added to the public tender export.

• Permissions - A change has been implemented in the organization permission to “Manage tender folders”. Before, you would not be able to move a tender to the bin without this permission because the 3 dot menu for tenders was not be visible. Especially for bigger organizations, it’s not desired that all buyers have the permission to manage tender folders. For that reason, the following changes have been implemented:

  • The 3 dot menu per tender is now always visible. The action “View” is always available. The actions “Move to bin“ and “Move to folder“ are also always shown, but only enabled if you either have “Edit tender” permissions within that tender, or the “Manage all tender permission as a LB/admin” on organization level.

  • The 3 dot menu per folder is now only visible if you have the organization permission to “Manage tender folders“.

• Reporting - There are two report types which are specifically created for Dynamic Procurement Systems (DPS). When viewing such a report, a list of DPS tenders appears from you first need to select one tender before results are shown. In this list, only DPS tenders were shown. However, some buyers are using Qualification Systems (QS) instead and have the exact same need. For that reason, QS tenders will now also appear in this list of tenders.

• Portal email notification URL to S2C - All Portal notification emails currently contain a general URL to the S2C login page, instead of to the My Tasks page. When users click on this URL, they will land on the Tender management page which is confusing for them (since it’s about a task related CM/SRM). The URL in those emails couldn’t be pointed to the My Tasks page, because S2C has an organization ID in that URL. From now it will be possible to have this URL to the My Tasks page, as this general URL will convert to the organization URL after logging in https://s2c.mercell.com/organization/mytasks.

• Time zone eForms - The way the time zone is displayed in eForms is improved. This will become active as soon as the MeForms team has a Production release (most likely in the week after Easter).

• Rate limit on forgotten password requests - It’s possible to request a new password from a public page. To improve security and prevent abuse of this feature, a captcha (proving you’re not a robot) is now implemented before a password reset can be requested.

Bug fixes

• All answer Excel export - The Excel export of all answers of all offers would in some instances lead to an error page. This has now been fixed.

• Text formatting - On some locations text that was marked, would not appear as marked after saving (but only in Edit mode). This has now been fixed.

• Approval - In some cases, after the approval decision was finalized, the View Details button would lead to an error 404. This has now been fixed.

• Training email notifications - No email notifications were being sent from Training environment. This has now been fixed.