Many exciting projects lie ahead of us in 2022. But before we get started, let’s take a look back at what we have achieved in the past development period. The following projects turned out to be particularly exciting:
Visibility & Analytics
In response to increasing customer requests, a Capacity Management solution was developed in the area of Visibility & Analytics. It enables a comparison of demands with production capacities. In the first step, demands are imported from the existing Supply Chain Management solution. In the new solution, the responsible parties at the supplying company are now able to specify: which products can be produced in which time period and in which quantity. This alignment of demand and capacity enables bottlenecks to be identified at an early stage.
Portal
The Portal team has implemented a proof of concept that will enable suppliers to quickly and conveniently transmit proof of the validity of their own bank data to their customers in the future.
For this purpose, the supplying company receives digital proof from its bank in the form of so-called “verifiable credentials”. This proof confirms that the company is the owner of a specific bank account. On the one hand, this proof is stored in a “wallet” on the SupplyOn platform. On the other hand, the metadata of the transaction is saved in a blockchain. On the customer’s end, the information is then also stored as “verifiable credentials” in a wallet and verified together with the metadata recorded in the blockchain.
This function is based on self-sovereign identity (SSI) technology and brings benefits for all parties: for the customer, there is no need for time-consuming, manual processes to verify the bank data provided by the supplier. The supplier, on the other hand, has the advantage that the evidence can be stored digitally and thus easily shared with his customers. The supplier retains control over which of his credentials he shares with which of his business contacts.
Supplier Quality Management
We also have exciting new developments in the area of Supplier Quality Management. In the past three months, the following helpful functions have been added to the Technical Review solution:
- It is now possible to assign a role with reduced editing permissions to a team member. This means that individual configured fields can be unlocked for editing with the particular role.
- From now on, the answers of a supplier questionnaire can also be used or evaluated in the customer’s own backend system.
- Furthermore, in the Technical Review solution it is now possible to quickly and easily download an overview of all filtered objects as an Excel file.
There was also an update of the Problem Solver, where 8D reports can be created and printed as PDFs. The reports now feature a new structure and layout, providing a clearer overview. Team members who do not have SupplyOn access can thus interpret a supplier’s 8D report even more easily.
Invoicing
The Invoicing solution is being completely modernized:
From various interviews with SupplyOn users, potential for improvement in the solution was identified. In combination with the new material design, an exciting concept was developed for the new user interface of the invoicing solution, which will now be rolled out gradually.
In November 2021, the first step was to convert the self-billing invoice screens of all supplying companies on the platform to the new design.
In addition to improved navigation, all functionalities have been standardized and enhanced in appearance.
This improved self-billing invoice page marks the first stop on the journey to a holistically modernized Invoicing solution. In the medium term, all user interfaces for suppliers will be revised.
As you can see, all development teams have once again worked hard, always keeping in mind the ultimate goal of the SAFe approach: delivering value to the customer. Therefore, stay tuned to keep track of how SupplyOn solutions evolve, because after the PI is before the PI.
