We are thrilled to announce our second major release for the year, which includes the introduction of a brand new module—Sourcing. This update brings a wealth of new features and enhancements that will significantly expand your procurement capabilities within oboloo. Read on to discover how these exciting updates can empower your sourcing activities.

🎉New Features

1. Brand New Sourcing Module: We are excited to introduce the Sourcing module, a powerful new addition to oboloo that allows users to create comprehensive sourcing activities such as RFPs, RFIs, and RFQs directly within the system. With this module, users can:

• Build Dynamic Sourcing Activities: Customize your sourcing activities based on any criteria you wish. You can pick and choose which sections to include in your activity, such as:
• • Pricing: Request detailed pricing information from suppliers.
  • Questionnaires: Include one or more questionnaires with weighted scoring to gather specific information or evaluate supplier capabilities.
  • Internal Pre-Built Sections: These sections provide suppliers with key information about your organization, such as “About Us” or “RFP Response Rules.” They are designed to guide suppliers on how to respond effectively.
  • Supplier Sections: These are sections where suppliers can provide written responses to your prompts. For example, suppliers might describe how they plan to meet your requirements or outline their service level agreements (SLAs). These responses can then be evaluated and scored by your team.
  • Supporting Documentation: Easily attach or request supporting documents from suppliers, ensuring all necessary information is collected in one place.

• Scoring Management: Assign scorers within your organization to evaluate supplier responses. Scorers can be designated to score specific areas or the entire supplier response, ensuring a thorough and fair evaluation process.
• Scoring Analytics: Gain high-level insights across all scorers and suppliers by analyzing scores given to suppliers’ responses to questionnaires and supplier sections. This feature allows you to see how different scorers rated suppliers and provides an overview of how suppliers performed across different areas of the sourcing activity.
• Financial Analysis: Users can now compare suppliers side by side on their pricing responses. This analysis is available at both a high level—comparing overall supplier pricing—and at the product level, allowing for detailed comparisons of pricing by individual product or service.
• Sourcing Library and Sections: Save time and maintain consistency by using the Sourcing Library to create reusable sections for your sourcing activities. These sections can be internal, providing suppliers with information about your organization (e.g., “About Us” or “RFP Response Rules”), or external, where suppliers respond with their own information (e.g., their SLAs or understanding of your requirements). Internal sections typically guide suppliers on how to respond, while external sections allow suppliers to provide written responses that can be scored by your team.
• Supplier Questionnaires: Design standard or one-off questionnaires that can be inserted into multiple sourcing activities. Suppliers can respond to these questionnaires directly within the system, and their responses can be scored by assigned scorers. This feature allows for structured and efficient supplier evaluations.
• Reusable Sections and Questionnaires: The Sourcing Library also supports the creation of reusable sections and questionnaires that can be easily inserted into future sourcing activities. This functionality helps maintain consistency across sourcing events and saves time by eliminating the need to recreate common sections and questions.
• Sourcing Activity Customization: The new Sourcing module enables users to tailor their activities to be as simple or complex as needed. You can design activities that range from straightforward information requests to detailed pricing inquiries that include multiple questionnaires with weighted scoring. This customization ensures that your sourcing process aligns perfectly with your organizational goals and requirements.
• Sourcing Type Field: A new configurable field, Sourcing Type, has been introduced to allow users to categorize their sourcing activities. This is similar to the supplier, contract, and savings type fields, offering enhanced organization and reporting.
• Easy Activity Creation via Wizard: Creating a sourcing activity has never been easier. Our step-by-step wizard guides users through the entire process, ensuring that all necessary details are captured efficiently and accurately.
• Supplier Response Management: Suppliers can now respond to sourcing activities directly within oboloo. These responses are confined to defined opening and closing dates, ensuring timely submissions. Users will receive notifications once suppliers have responded, keeping them informed throughout the process.
• View as a Supplier Function: Before sending out activities to suppliers, users can now view how the activities will appear from the supplier’s perspective with a simple click. This ensures that the presentation is clear and professional.
• Timezone Functionality: We have introduced a timezone function that allows users to set the opening and closing dates of activities based on their local timezone. This ensures accuracy and clarity in deadlines, especially for global teams.
• Award a Supplier: Once sourcing activities are completed, users can now award a supplier directly within oboloo. By clicking the ‘Award Supplier’ button, a popup will appear allowing the user to choose a supplier from a dropdown list. After awarding, the system will update the activity status to “Awarded,”. The awarded supplier’s name will also appear in the main eSourcing table.
• Reopen Activity: Users can now reopen sourcing activities to selected suppliers. This function allows for new opening and closing dates to be set, and selected suppliers will be notified via email. Suppliers can access the activity again, edit their responses, and resubmit them. Users will receive notifications when suppliers resubmit their responses.
• Historic Submissions Management: When activities are reopened, suppliers may resubmit responses. Each submission is treated as a separate entry within the system, and users can easily distinguish between different responses from the same supplier by viewing timestamps next to each response. This feature is applied across all tabs where supplier responses are viewed, including Supplier Sections, Financials, Questionnaires, and Supporting Documents.

🏆Improvements

Several improvements/enhancements have been made to the service including:

1. Supplier Scorecard Archiving: We have removed the restriction that only the creators of supplier scorecards can archive their own scorecards. Now, any user can archive any supplier scorecard, a change that has been highly requested by our user base.

2. Supplier Portal Translation: A new translation function has been added to the supplier portal, allowing suppliers to translate oboloo into their native language, enhancing accessibility and ease of use.

3. Contract Expiry Dates: We have implemented a function where the contract expiry date is no longer required. This change allows for better management of contracts that do not have a fixed end date, such as evergreen contracts.

4. Document Expiry Date Removal: We have removed the need to have an expiry date against supplier and contract documents. Additionally, you can now set expiry dates for documents in the past, accommodating situations where historical documentation needs to be maintained accurately.

5. Contract Reference # Column: We have added a ‘Contract Reference #’ column to the main contract management table, providing better reference and organization for your contracts.

6. Responsive File Uploads: The file upload field on the supplier portal has been made more responsive, improving the ease and reliability of uploading documents.

7. Change Document Type: Users can now change the document type of a supplier document, offering greater flexibility and control over document management.

8. Download Scorecards as PDF: Users can now download scorecards that have been applied against suppliers as a PDF, making it easier to share and archive evaluations.

9. Supplier Questionnaires Responsiveness: We have made the question field in supplier questionnaires more responsive, allowing users to more easily view and manage questions within pre-built questionnaires.

10. New Sourcing Tab under Supplier Profile: A new sourcing tab has been added under the supplier profile. This tab shows a list of all sourcing activities that a supplier has been invited to previously, providing a comprehensive overview of the supplier’s engagement history.

11. Additional Filters in Savings Management: We have added additional filters to the savings management dashboard, enhancing your ability to narrow down and analyze savings data.

12. Duplicate Suppliers Allowed: We now allow the creation of duplicate suppliers within oboloo. While the system will still check for duplications and warn users, it will permit the creation of duplicates if the user confirms their decision. This change was made in response to user feedback and allows for more flexible supplier management.

13. Supplier Compliance Sorting: The table on the supplier compliance submodule is now sorted A-Z by default, making it easier to navigate and find information.

14. Supplier Portal User Guides: User guides have been added to the supplier side of oboloo, providing additional support and guidance to suppliers using the platform.

Bug Fixes

1. Pagination Fix: We have resolved an issue with pagination across all tables. Previously, if there were too many records under a module, pagination became unresponsive. This issue has now been fixed, ensuring smooth navigation through large datasets.

📢Development Roadmap

Below are oboloo’s main future development workstreams. Much of the below roadmap has originated from client feedback, which as always we are very grateful for. As always, please let us know your ideas.

1. Parent and Child Relationships: We will be adding a function to associate records as parent or child for suppliers, contracts, and savings records. This feature will help in better organizing and managing related records within oboloo.

2. Contract Notice Periods: A new function will be introduced to allow users to mark that they have successfully given notice to a supplier for a contract. This will improve the tracking and management of contract termination processes.

3. Multiple Sections of Categories: We will be enabling the ability to assign multiple categories to records, such as having multiple contract types against a single contract. This feature will provide more flexibility and granularity in categorizing and managing records.

4. Sourcing Analysis: We will be enhancing the visual analysis capabilities of sourcing activities, particularly around financial/pricing analysis from suppliers’ responses and scoring analysis from internal scorers. This will provide deeper insights into sourcing outcomes.

5. Integration with Zapier: We will be integrating oboloo with Zapier, allowing organizations to connect oboloo to over 7,000 other third-party applications. This will greatly expand the flexibility and connectivity of your procurement processes.

6. API Development: We are building an API that will allow organizations to integrate oboloo directly with their ERP systems and other applications. This will streamline data flow and improve operational efficiency.

7. Requesting Multiple Documents from Suppliers: We will introduce a feature that allows users to request multiple documents at once from a supplier, whether for contracts or supplier records. This will streamline the document collection process and improve workflow efficiency.