The Vendor Portal (interchangeably referred to as the "Supplier Portal" at Gatekeeper) is a Vendor management solution that allows you to collaborate with your Vendors in a secure & auditable online environment. This article describes the various Vendor Portal Controls & Features available to Portal Users.
If you've read the article and want to learn more, check out our Webinar where we explore why you would want to move some of your online Vendor Interactions to a Portal:
Sections in this Article
How Vendors Can Update their Profile
How Vendors (Admins) can Manage their Colleagues
Sending Messages to Gatekeeper Vendor Portal Admins
What Can My Vendor Users Do?
The rest of this article walks through in more detail what Vendor Users can do once in the portal and how they do it....
....but a quick summary is:
- View & complete Workflow Forms, providing data, documents & comments on your Workflow assessments & Review
- Update their own User Profile details, such as name, email, profile picture
- Add in colleagues as new Vendor Portal Users, inviting in any collaborators needed to assist with Workflows
- Partake in Message threads, either that they have started or that they have been tagged in by an internal Gatekeeper User
- See details* about their own organisation (Vendor) and agreement (Contract) records you have stored in your Gatekeeper repository
- *Vendor Users will only be able to see the Core data fields. Any Custom fields you configure & populate will not be visible to them while browsing the repository
- View & complete Events tasks
Vendor Users cannot directly amend details of their Vendor/Company record
This is a deliberate restriction to ensure that you have complete control of the data in your Vendor Repository which can be trusted as your Central Source of Truth!
If you want to provide the ability for your Vendors to request updates to their Vendor record, you can set up this simple workflow from our Best Practice Templates library:
The Vendor Portal Dashboard
This Dashboard sits at the very front of the Gatekeeper Vendor Portal application. When you log in to the Vendor Portal you will automatically be directed to the Dashboard.
It's designed to give Vendor Users an overview of all data, events, and notifications that have been sent or shared between themselves and their customer.
The Dashboard is split up into 4 key sections:
- Quick Links Toolbar
- My Open Forms
- My Open Events
- My Messages
Quick Links Toolbar
The Quick Links Toolbar (pictured below) can be found at the very top of the Dashboard. The Quick Links toolbar contains 4 Links:
- Update Profile
- Add Contacts
- Send Message
- Contact Support
Update Profile
The Update Profile link will direct Vendor Users to a window entitled Profile Manager (Pictured Below).
Within the Profile Manager they will be able to edit their own profile data, allowing them to self manage name/email changes.
The following fields are available by default within the Profile Manager:
-
- *First Name
- *Last Name
- Job Title
- Telephone
- Mobile
*Fields with an asterisk are Mandatory and cannot be left blank
Add Contacts
NB. Only Vendor Users with the Role of "Administrator" have access to the Add Contacts option
The Add Contacts option is a great way for the Vendor to add in their Colleagues as new users or to edit/update any existing contacts that have been added to a Vendor Record within Gatekeeper.
This means they can self-manage inviting collaborators to whichever processes they're performing without needing to request assistance from you!
At the top of the Add Contacts module, Vendor Users will see a list of Contacts that are currently listed under their Vendor record.
The Vendor User will have the option to enter data in the following fields when adding a contact, such as:
- Email - if you have enabled Autobuild, Gatekeeper will use the Email Address and attempt to populate the rest of the Profile details automatically
- First Name & Last Name
- Job Title
- Role - This refers to their permission as a Portal User
- Invite Into Gatekeeper?
To grant a new user access to the Vendor Portal, you must check ☑️ Invite into Gatekeeper
Contact Us
The "Contact Us" option allows a Vendor Portal User to send a message to all internal Vendor Portal Administrators.
You could consider these as "Support Request" type messages. Therefore, their Vendor Portal Administrator recipients should be the Gatekeeper users who oversee Vendor Interactions & workflow
To set up a user as a Vendor Portal Administrator, follow these steps here:
📖 Configuring the Supplier Portal
If you want to have these 'support requests' drop into a Slack or MS Teams channel, you could consider setting this up too:
My Open Forms
The Open Forms module will display a list of all open forms that are currently visible to the Vendor user.
To read more about Forms click here.
💡 Forms will be visible to a Vendor user if:
a) They are currently assigned to that Vendor user
(these forms will also display a large "UPDATE THIS FORM" button)
b) They have previously been assigned to that Vendor user
c) The Vendor user has been tagged in a message thread for the form
My Open Events
The My Open Events view will display all open and live events that are linked to the Vendor User.
To read more Events click here.
My Messages
The My Messages module will display any live messages that the Vendor User is currently included in.
The User can also filter the My Messages view to display Archived Messages or All Messages (a combined view of Archived and Live messages).
To read more about Messages click here.
