We're excited to share a focused but important update to our Advanced Evaluations module. This release sharpens the scoring workflow to uphold the highest standards of accuracy and fairness in your consensus process. Based on client feedback and best-practice insights, we've adjusted a core behaviour to ensure only fully completed individual evaluations contribute to the final consensus score - boosting the reliability and rigor of your decisions. 

We are thrilled to announce a significant update to Advanced Evaluations, designed to give you even greater flexibility and control over your procurement process. This upcoming release introduces a new scoring methodology, the Cost Effective Ratio, providing you with more options to tailor your evaluations to the unique needs of your organisation.

This release also include UI/UX changes to the shortlist and final decision stages to streamline decision making. 

Please note that this change will come into effect on Wednesday the 24th of September. 

🚀 New Feature: The Cost Effective Ratio

Every organisation has different priorities. This release introduces a new scoring methodology, the Cost Effective Ratio (CER), as an alternative to our existing Weighted Cost Scoring. This approach is inspired by procurement guidelines that treat price as a variable of the overall value, allowing you to choose the method that best aligns with your objectives. 

• You now have two distinct scoring methods available that can be configured at an organisation level: the new Cost Effective Ratio and the existing Weighted Cost Scoring.
• Admins can change this from Weighted Cost Scoring to Cost Effective Ratio under the General Advanced Evaluations settings. 
• When using the new CER method, the cost criterion will no longer have a weight assigned to it, as the ratio inherently accounts for its impact on the overall value.
• On the Shortlist and Final Decision screens, a new column will dynamically appear. It will display either the Cost Effective Ratio or the Weighted Cost Score depending on the method you've selected for your evaluation.
• We've updated the visual reports and mail merges to seamlessly accommodate the new Cost Effective Ratio data, ensuring all your documentation is comprehensive and accurate.

🎯 Enhanced Decision-Making Tables

We've completely overhauled the tables on the Shortlist and Final Decision screens to provide a cleaner, more intuitive user experience. While the core functionality remains the same, these visual improvements will make it even easier to analyse and compare offers at a glance.

• The refreshed table design provides a cleaner, more modern interface for reviewing and comparing respondents.
• You can now sort any column in the table, giving you the flexibility to organise data however you need whether by score, cost or respondent.
• New badges now highlight the respondents with the highest score and the lowest cost, making it simple to quickly identify top performers and budget-friendly options.

We believe these updates will significantly enhance your ability to run fair, transparent, and effective evaluations. Your feedback is what drives our progress, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think of the new features!

We're delighted to present a new release focused on optimising your analytics experience. This update delivers key enhancements to your analytics platform, including the introduction of Global Filters and other powerful improvements. We've also made a crucial refinement to the evaluations module to further streamline your procurement process.

🚀 New: Global Filters

We're pleased to introduce a fundamental feature to our Analytics platform: Global Filters. Previously, you could only apply filters to individual reports, which made it challenging to analyse your data holistically. Now, you can filter across all reports at once, making it easier to gain a complete view of your data.

• Filter Across All Reports: The new Global Filters button at the top of your Sourcing and Contracts Analytics page allows you to apply filters across your entire reporting suite.
• A Clearer View: Once you apply your filters, every report on the page will automatically update, ensuring you can quickly and easily analyse a specific data set.
• Customise Further: While the Global Filters provide a great starting point, you still have the flexibility to apply additional filters on individual reports if you need to drill down further.

This new feature is a core component of a modern analytics tool, built to give you effortless control over your data.

🎯 Enhanced: Analytics & Evaluations

We’ve also made several other key enhancements to improve your overall experience:

• Searchable Dropdowns: All dropdown menus within the Analytics module are now fully searchable, saving you time and effort when looking for specific values.
• Match Requests & Responses Report: The filter section in this report is now expandable, providing you with more space and a better user experience for interacting with the filters.
• Refined Evaluations Logic: We've updated the logic for creating requests from Procurement Planning. If you select Advanced Evaluations during planning, the system will now automatically set this as the default evaluation method with Go To Market, saving you a manual step.
  • UPDATE: An issue was found with this update and was rolled back. It will be re-released in a future release

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

• Resolved an issue that caused discrepancies in cost avoidance values
• Resolved an issue that caused validation errors to persist after unlocking a stage in Procurement Planning
  
  

We've released a new update to help you gain more insight and accountability in your evaluation process. While this may seem like a small change, it's designed to bring greater clarity to how scores are provided and a more transparent evaluation journey.

💬 New! Mandatory Comments for Evaluators

Based on valuable feedback, we've added a setting to the advanced evaluations that allows you to require evaluators to provide a comment for each score they give. This ensures that every score is backed by a clear rationale, giving you the context needed to justify final decisions during consensus scoring.

This setting is off by default. If you want to use it for your evaluations, you will need to enable it in the advanced evaluation module settings.

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

We've also included a number of other improvements and fixes to enhance your experience across the platform.

• Mail Merge Codes: We've updated the mail merge codes for evaluation document generation to accurately show both initial and consensus scores.
• PDF Generation: We've resolved an issue where KPI labels were overlapping other text when generating a PDF document, ensuring a cleaner layout.

We hope these updates help to make your evaluation process more effective. As always, we appreciate your feedback on how we can continue to improve.

Welcome to the next wave of enhancements for our Advanced Evaluations (AE) module! Continuing our mission to uplift the platform based on your direct feedback, this release introduces a powerful new report and major upgrades to existing screens. These changes are designed to help you build consensus faster, navigate complex data with ease, and gain clearer insights.

🚀 New! Zero in on What Matters: The Significant Discrepancies Report

Running a consensus meeting can be challenging when trying to spot major scoring differences on a screen filled with data. This brand-new report is designed to eliminate the noise and guide your team through resolving only the most significant scoring variations, one by one.

• The report automatically isolates and displays only the scores for a single supplier and a single question where evaluators are in significant disagreement.
• This focused view allows your panel to discuss and resolve each discrepancy in a structured, step-by-step manner.
• It is designed as a powerful alternative to the all-encompassing Comparative Scoring screen, giving you the choice of how to best run your consensus phase.

This report streamlines your consensus process by turning a mountain of data into a manageable, actionable checklist.

🎯 Enhanced! A More Powerful & Readable Comparative Scoring Screen

The Comparative Scoring screen is a data powerhouse, and we've just given it a major upgrade to make it more intuitive and insightful. Based on your feedback, we've added new functionality and improved the layout to help you analyse and compare responses more effectively.

• Navigate with ease using new collapsible criteria sections to group related questions.
• Focus your analysis by temporarily hiding and showing specific respondents for direct, side-by-side comparisons.
• Instantly see who's leading, as respondents are now sorted by their overall rank instead of alphabetically.
• Get the complete picture with a new total weighted score displayed at the bottom of the screen.
• Maintain context during blind reviews: the price weighting is now visible even when the specific price details are configured to be hidden.
• Experience a cleaner, more intuitive layout designed for improved readability during complex reviews.

These enhancements give you more control to dissect evaluation data, allowing for richer analysis and better-informed decisions.

🎨 New Look! A Clearer, More Insightful Consensus Hub

The Consensus page is your central hub for finalising scores, and we've redesigned it to be more intuitive and transparent. Acting on feedback that the previous layout could be confusing, we've uplifted the user interface to make the workflow clearer than ever.

• The page layout has been reorganised to more clearly distinguish between actions you can take and the information you are viewing.
• Respondent rankings are now displayed directly on the page, giving you an immediate understanding of the current standings without having to open a report.
• This hub is your clear entry point to both the new Significant Discrepancies Report and the enhanced Comparative Scoring screen.

With a more logical layout and at-a-glance rankings, the redesigned consensus hub makes managing the final stages of your evaluation a breeze.

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

We've also included a number of other improvements and fixes to enhance your experience across the platform.

• Administrators now have the flexibility to include or exclude respondents at any stage of the evaluation, right up to the final decision.
• Strengthened validation rules when submitting a Purchase Order for approval to prevent errors.
• Vendors now have visibility of the 'Refresh Schedule of Rates' action on payment certificates for improved transparency.
• The remaining budget calculation on Purchase Orders now correctly accounts for all receipted amounts from other POs within the same contract.
• Resolved an issue that prevented procurement-specific custom fields from being added to tabular reports.
• Ensured that sign-off steps are now correctly included when configuring custom reminders.

We are thrilled to deliver these powerful new tools and look forward to your feedback as we continue this journey of improvement together.

We're excited to announce our latest update, which marks the first of several releases dedicated to enhancing our Advanced Evaluations module. After conducting numerous client interviews, we've developed a roadmap focused on making Advanced Evaluations easier to use and understand. This first release delivers on that promise with highly requested features that save you time, increase flexibility, and improve visibility. Let's dive in!

🚀 New! Auto-Assign All Evaluators by Default

We heard you loud and clear: setting up evaluation panels could be a repetitive process. To fix this, we've streamlined how evaluators are assigned to criteria, saving you valuable time and clicks.

• A new "All panel members" checkbox is now available when configuring evaluation criteria.
• This box is checked by default, instantly assigning all evaluators to the criterion.
• Need to customise? Simply uncheck the box and use the multi-select dropdown to remove specific evaluators or teams.

This simple but powerful update significantly speeds up your evaluation setup process, letting you focus on what matters most.

🎨 Design Your Perfect Scale: Now with Configurable Responses

Tired of manually creating the same 1-10 scale or yes/no options for every single question in your evaluation? We heard you. Re-entering identical response options dozens—or even hundreds—of times was a significant drain on your time and prone to inconsistency. This powerful update is designed to solve that permanently.

• Administrators can now manage the complete list of response options from the Advanced Evaluations settings screen.
• Easily create new options (like the much-requested 1-10 scale!), edit existing ones, or remove any scales that aren't relevant to your organisation. Build a custom scale once, save it to your library, and it will be instantly available for your team to select when creating any new question. 
• All the default options you're used to (e.g., Quality Scale, Likelihood) are still available right out of the box.

Now you can shape your evaluation questions with response scales that perfectly match your organisation's unique processes and standards.

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

We've also included a few other key updates to improve your day-to-day experience.

• Improved COI Visibility: Procurement Officers will now receive a notification when a panel member completes their Conflict of Interest (COI) declaration, even when no conflicts are declared. This provides complete visibility into COI progress without needing to manually check the evaluation record.
• Fixed Document Validation with External Links: Resolved an issue where document validation would fail when using links to an external document management system (EDRMS). The validation logic now correctly recognizes these links, ensuring your procurement process proceeds smoothly. As part of this, we also fixed a visual bug where long EDRMS document names now display correctly.

We're incredibly proud of these enhancements and believe they will make a tangible difference in your workflow. As always, we welcome your feedback as we continue to improve our platform.

Hello everyone,

We're back with a minor release focused on refining your experience and responding to your feedback. This update introduces key enhancements for better visibility during procurement planning and more flexibility in your mail merges, alongside a few important fixes to smooth out your workflow.

🎯 Enhanced for Clarity & Efficiency

1. Clearer Required Document Tracking

We noticed that it wasn't always obvious which documents were required during a procurement planning stage until you tried to proceed. To solve this, we’ve made required documents visible directly within the step you are working on. You can now clearly see a list of mandatory documents and their current attachment status (whether they have been provided or not) at all times.

This update ensures you have all the information you need upfront, preventing validation errors and streamlining your planning process.

2. New Extensions Summary for Mail Merge

You now have more control over how contract extension details are presented in your documents. We've added a new mail merge code that allows you to output a concise summary of extension options, in addition to the existing option for full details.

This gives you the flexibility to create more tailored and streamlined documents for your specific needs.

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

We've also addressed a few issues to improve system stability and remove points of confusion:

• Zero-Value Sub-Contracts: We have resolved an issue that prevented the creation of a sub-contract with a $0 value.
• Default Role Clarification: The "Procurement Owner" role, which had no active function, has been removed as a selection to prevent confusion.

Hello! We're thrilled to announce our latest update, designed to give you more granular control over your processes and introduce smarter, more reliable automations. This release focuses on delivering greater flexibility for your approval workflows and ensuring your contract statuses are always accurate and up-to-date.

Let's dive in!

🚀 New! Approval Workflows, Tailored to Your Contract Types

Ever wished you could apply different approval processes for different types of contracts? Now you can. We recognised that a variation for a major construction project shouldn't have to follow the same approval path as a minor services agreement. This update introduces the ability to configure unique approval workflows for each contract type.

While the approval experience for end-users remains seamless and familiar, administrators now have powerful new tools to ensure the right people are involved at the right stage, for every kind of contract.

• Granular Configuration: Define distinct approval workflows for contract creation, variations, and extensions and more based on the specific contract type.
• Increased Compliance: Easily map your internal delegation of authority and ensure the correct stakeholders review and approve high-value or high-risk contracts.
• Process Efficiency: Streamline approvals by creating simpler workflows for low-risk contract types and more robust ones where needed.

Learn more about configuring approval workflows using this Help Centre article. 

This gives you the power to configure approval processes that match your business needs, enhancing both compliance and efficiency.

🎯 Enhanced! More Robust & Flexible Contract Status Updates

Keeping contract statuses accurate is critical for effective management. Previously, the system would only update a status (like 'Expired') on the exact day it was due. This could cause statuses to become outdated if a contract was entered with an end in the past date. This is particularly common when importing historical contract data.

We've overhauled this logic to make it more resilient and flexible. With our new options, you can ensure statuses are updated automatically and reliably, no matter what. Status updates trigger options now include:

• "Anytime On or After": This new setting will update the status of any item that has met its due date. For example, you can now automatically expire all contracts with an end date in the past. 
• "Anytime On or Before": This option provides flexibility for statuses that need to be triggered leading up to an event.
• Configurable Offsets: Add a time buffer to your status updates by setting an offset in days, weeks, or months, giving you even finer control over your automated processes.

With this update, now you can define whether a contract status should update to ‘Expired’ at the start or end of the final day of the contract; configuring the status updates to meet the specific needs of your organisation! Reach out to our Support team if your preference is to have contracts expire at the end of the day rather than the start.

Please reach out to support if you would like to use any of these new logic options.

Now you can trust your contract statuses to be consistently accurate, reducing manual effort and ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes

We've also rolled out several other improvements and fixes to enhance your experience:

• Editable KPI Descriptions: You can now edit the descriptions of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) after they have been created.
• Clearer KPI Identification: The KPI table within a contract now displays the concise KPI Name instead of the full description, making it easier to scan and identify items.
• New API Endpoint: A new, out-of-the-box API endpoint is available for developers to programmatically update the spend against a contract.
• Accurate DocuSign Signers: Signer fields for DocuSign envelopes will now correctly display the signer's name, providing a clearer audit trail. The generic "DocuSign Signature" will only appear if signers are manually changed within the DocuSign platform.
• Correct Extension Durations: The duration for all contract extensions is now calculated and displayed correctly on the contract record.

We are confident these updates will help you streamline your processes and manage your contracts with even greater precision. We love hearing from you, so please don't hesitate to share your feedback.

We're thrilled to announce a significant update to our contract management platform, designed to give you more power, flexibility, and precision in managing your contracts. This release introduces a brand-new Contract Admin Area and major enhancements to our Custom Reporting Fields. This will be released, and available tomorrow morning Let's dive in!

🚀 New! Contract Admin Area: Empowering Administrators

We understand that sometimes, administrators need the ability to make direct adjustments to contracts that fall outside standard workflows or require correction. The new Contract Admin Area, accessible via the "Go to Admin Area" button located above the contract title, is a dedicated toolkit designed to provide authorized administrators with the power to efficiently manage and rectify contract details, reducing the need for external support and streamlining your processes.

This secure area allows administrators to:

• Modify Initial End Dates: Correct or adjust the initial end date of a contract, even after it has been activated. This is invaluable for rectifying data entry errors or accommodating pre-agreed changes that weren't captured at activation.
• Update Imported Values: For contracts brought into our system during your initial implementation, administrators can now directly amend those imported data fields, ensuring historical data accuracy.
• Re-assign Vendors: Seamlessly update the vendor associated with a contract. This is particularly useful for internal restructures or when a formal novation process isn't required, but records need to be accurate.
• Adjust Approved Extensions & Variations: Make necessary modifications to contract extension or variation details that have already been approved. This allows for corrections or minor agreed adjustments without needing to undo and redo entire approval processes.
• Link to Procurement Plan: Directly associate contracts with their corresponding procurement plans. This enhances visibility and creates a clear audit trail from planning to execution.
• Link to Market Request: Establish a clear connection between a contract and its originating market request (e.g., RFP, RFQ). This further solidifies the contract lifecycle breadcrumb trail, making it easier to trace contract origins and context.

Self-service corrections and direct administrative control mean faster resolutions and more accurate contract data, all managed securely within your team.

🎯 Enhanced Custom Reporting Fields: Tailored Insights, Your Way!

Our Custom Reporting Fields feature has always allowed you to capture specific data points relevant to your unique business needs. We've now taken this a step further by introducing granularity by Contract Type!

Previously, custom fields were global, applying uniformly across all contracts. Now, you have the flexibility to:

• Define Custom Fields by Contract Type: Create specific sets of custom reporting fields that are relevant only to certain types of contracts (e.g., "Software Licenses" might have different custom fields than "Service Agreements"). This means more targeted and relevant data capture.

• Mix and Match: You can choose to use:

  • Only global custom reporting fields.
  • Only contract-type specific custom reporting fields.
  • A combination of both global fields (that apply to all contracts) and type-specific fields for further detail.
• Selective Application: You now have the option to turn off global custom fields for certain contract types if they are not relevant, or disable custom fields entirely for specific types, preventing unnecessary data entry.

This enhancement means more relevant data, less clutter, and reporting that truly reflects the nuances of your different contract categories.

Contract Module Settings

Construction Contract Type Settings

🛠️ Other Enhancements & Fixes  

In addition to these major updates, this release also includes a number of under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes to enhance the stability and performance of the platform. We are continually working to refine your experience. These include:

• DocuSign File Validation: Ensured only valid file types can be uploaded for DocuSign integration, preventing potential errors.
• Expanded Contracts API Fields: Added more data fields to the GET endpoint for the Contracts API, allowing for more comprehensive external integrations.
• Go to Market Data Editability: Resolved an issue where data points for Go to Market requests were uneditable even when the associated Procurement was unlocked.
• Approval Button Access: Corrected an issue where some buttons within approval workflows were clickable by users with read-only access.
• Long Approval Title Handling: Improved the display and handling of long titles within the approval workflow to prevent text overflow or truncation.
• Manual Number Entry: Addressed cases where users were unable to manually enter procurement or contract numbers.
• Pre-Market COI Completion: Fixed a permission-related issue that prevented some users from completing pre-market Conflict of Interest (COI) declarations.
• Read-Only Resubmit Button: Ensured the "Resubmit" button is no longer active or clickable for users with read-only permissions.
• DocuSign Failure & Approver List: Rectified a problem where approvers listed for an approval were incorrectly removed if the DocuSign integration failed.

We're confident these new features and improvements will provide significant value, offering you enhanced administrative capabilities and more precise, flexible reporting. As always, we welcome your feedback as you begin to explore these new tools!

We've recently introduced the ability to make the External Reference field in the GTM Request Wizard a mandatory field.  This can be very handy if you're needing your buyers to enter in a particular reference against their requests.

This is controlled Local Group by Local Group.  Please contact Support if you wish to have this turned on for your enterprise.