Managing Supplier Tags

The supplier tagging system in Supplios is a powerful tool for categorizing and classifying suppliers, keeping track of their capabilities, status, locations, and more.

It is fully configurable, and designed to be setup to match how your company categorizes and classifies your suppliers.  All of the tags, the groupings of tags, and which suppliers have which tags can all be managed by your team, without requiring any assistance from Supplios.

Use-Cases for Supplier Tags

Supplier tags are useful for the basic function of keeping track of various supplier information — status, capabilities, risk level, locations, and more — and managed in a centralized, easy-to-use system that is accessible to everyone in your company who needs such information.

But more powerfully, tags can be used to control the activity of a supplier in other parts of the Supplios platform.  These logical controls can essentially be used to control the lifecycle and limitations of a supplier in your supply-chain and across the functional teams that work with suppliers.

Some example use-cases for supplier tags include:

• Control conditional logic in workflows (Claims, Onboarding, Sourcing Awards, etc.) — the presence or lack of a tag for a certain supplier can be used in workflow branching logic, requiring extra approvals for new or on-probation suppliers, skipping certain workflow steps if suppliers already meet certain criteria, or similar.
• Setting Compliance Requirement Rules — Tags allow you to define which compliance requirements apply to different vendors. For example, you could require a Welding Certificate from suppliers who have a tag Welding.
• Blocking Suppliers from Sourcing Event invitations — The platform has a feature where you can block suppliers from being invited to Sourcing Events (RFQs, RFPs, etc) if they have or do not have certain tags.  For example, you could set a rule to block any suppliers from being invited to an RFQ who have the Disqualified tag.
• Bulk invites for Sourcing Events — you can easily filter your list of suppliers based on which tags suppliers have or do not have when doing a Bulk Invite to a Sourcing Event (RFQ/RFP).  For example, in just a few clicks, you could invite all of your qualified injection molding suppliers to an RFQ who have ISO9001 and Injection Molding tags, but do not have Disqualified tag.  (if you have those tags)
• Apply tags automatically during workflows — in addition to tags being checked during workflows and other places in the platform, custom workflows can also be configured to add or remove tags to/from suppliers automatically.  This is commonly used in the Onboarding, Performance, and Compliance modules to add or remove tags related to their status.  

How to Create Tag Categories and Tags

To create and manage supplier categories, go to More → Company Settings → Vendor Data Settings → Vendor Categories.

From there, you can view and manage any existing categories or create new categories with custom names, descriptions, and permissions. There is no limit on how many categories and tags you can create.

When creating a New Category from the top right corner, you will have to select a few things:

• Name: Give a meaningful name to the tag category / group that reflects the information you are tracking. Some examples include Status, Capabilities, Risk Level, Plant, Lead Buyer, and Supplier Spend.
• Internal description: Here you can optionally add some internal instructions, for example, provide definitions for the tags.
• External description: If you have allowed vendors to view this tag group, you can optionally add some vendor-facing description for it.
• Is featured: Featured tags will be shown in the header of a vendor profile. This is often used for highlighting key information, such as Supplier Status.
• Can vendors view: You can choose whether vendors can view this category and its tags. If you allow vendor viewing, they will be able to see all the tags of the category and which tags are applied for them.
• Can vendors edit: You have the option to allow vendors to edit their own tags in the category. This could be useful if you want the vendors to manage their own capabilities. Below you can see an example of how it would look like on the supplier side:

Once you have created a category, you should add some tags to it. Simply click on New Tag and give it a name. If it is a featured category, you also have an option to choose a color for the tag to help you identify information more easily.

How to Add Tags to Vendors

To add tags to a vendor, open the Vendors page, pick a supplier, scroll down to Categories & Capabilities, then hit Edit. From here you can easily manage all tags for this supplier.