GUIDE: Managing Supplier Contracts in the Compliance Module

If you want to collect and track supplier contracts and automate their renewals, this guide is for you.

Supplier contracts, such as NDA, Supply Agreement, and Code of Conduct are key documents that define your company’s relationship with suppliers. These contracts often require periodic renewal, and missing an expiry date can lead to compliance risks or operational delays.

With Supplios Compliance module, you can easily collect and manage supplier contracts, define which suppliers need which agreements, and set up automated renewal workflows so responsible users (internal or external) are notified to upload updated documents.

This article walks you through the step-by-step setup of contract management in Supplios, helping you eliminate manual contract tracking and eliminate or significantly reduce manual follow-ups.

Creating a Document Type for Contracts

To create a new document type, go to Compliance in the left-side menu of the Portal. Then, open the Document Types section and click the green Add Document Type button.

In the pop-up window, you’ll be asked to define several key properties of this Document Type.

Document Category

Document Categories are organization-specific and depend on your company’s configuration. Categories can be grouped by department or document purpose, for example:

• Procurement Agreements
• Legal Contracts
• Quality Certifications
• Sustainability Documents

For example, for Supply Agreements, a suitable Document Category could be Procurement Agreements or simply Vendor Contracts.

By default, all Supplios customers start with at least two categories, typically Vendor Contracts and Vendor Certifications, but additional ones can be added easily (contact the Supplios team if you want to add additional document categories).

Kind of Document

Kind of Document refers to the document format. Supplios provides a predefined list: Contracts, Certificates, Policies, Acknowledgements, and Forms.

For supplier contracts, select Contract.

Document Name and Single vs Multiple Documents

Give the document type a clear, descriptive name (e.g., Supply Agreement) and specify whether a supplier can have one or multiple documents of this type.

• Most suppliers will have a single document per Document Type (or none, if not applicable). Note that you can still add multiple document versions even if the Document Type is set to allow a single document per supplier.
• However, some suppliers may have multiple documents, such as several Supply Agreements for different plant locations.

Expiration Tracking

Supplier contracts can either have a fixed validity period or remain valid indefinitely until terminated by either party.

To monitor contract validity and automate renewal reminders, enable Expiration Tracking. By default, when Expiration Tracking is enabled, setting validity dates for supplier contracts will be optional. However, after creating the Document Type, you're able to change the configuration to make validity dates required or not applicable for the specific contract type.

If a specific contract type doesn’t have validity dates, you can also just leave Expiration Tracking disabled - the contract will remain active indefinitely until the document version is removed or superceded by another version.

For more information on Document Categories, Kinds of Documents, and multiple vs. single document setup, see Compliance Module – Key Concepts.

Setting Requirement Rules

Once you have created your Document Type, you may want to set the Requirement Rules for which suppliers need this document. That will (1) provide you with a visual overview of who needs what, and, (2) if you enable Auto-Pilot for this document type, it will collect new documents from suppliers that have this document set as required (see Auto-Pilot section).

To configure Requirement Rules, go to the Compliance page on the left-side menu, select Document Types and choose the document type you want to manage, then open the Requirement Rules tab across the top. If requirement tracking isn’t enabled yet, click Enable Requirement Tracking.

You can then define which suppliers have this Document Type Required, Optional, or Excluded.

These rules are based on supplier tags, and you can add multiple rules - the system will evaluate them in order until one applies. If no rule matches a supplier, the default rule is used, so make sure to configure that.

For example, suppliers with tag Final Assembly may have the document Required, while all other suppliers may have it Optional.

After saving the rules, the summary bar will show how many suppliers have the document type marked as required, optional, or excluded.

For more details on setting the Requirement Rules or viewing the Requirement Status Grid, see GUIDE: Setting Document Requirements in the Compliance Module.

Visibility, Uploads, and Automations

In most cases, you as the customer will probably be the one uploading the contract between your company and the supplier. However, there may also be situations where you want suppliers to upload certain contract types themselves, or at least have visibility into the existing contracts.

To configure supplier visibility, submission workflows, and automations (for supplier or internal users), open the Settings tab of the Document Type. This tab includes several configuration sections, but in this guide, we’ll focus on the most relevant settings.

Supplier Visibility

In the Supplier Access section, you can enable supplier visibility. By default, suppliers cannot see their documents. However, you may want suppliers to be able to view their contracts. To allow access, enable visibility for all supplier users or Supplier Admins only. These users will then be able to view the uploaded contracts.

Note that suppliers can only ever see documents related to their own company, never documents from others.

Template and Reference Files

In the Template Files section, you can upload any files to be used as templates and/or reference documents, which will be available to the user submitting this document (internal or supplier).

Supplier Submissions

In most cases, your internal team will upload new supplier contracts, and you may not want suppliers to upload contracts themselves. If that’s the case, you can skip this step, as well as the next one (Supplier Assignees).

However, if the contract should be uploaded by the supplier, you can enable supplier submissions. To do this, go to the Submission Workflow section and enable Supplier Submissions.

By default, the workflow includes two steps: Supplier Upload and Internal Approval. This means that an internal user must review and approve the supplier’s submission before it becomes valid. If you don’t require an internal approval, you can disable the internal approval step, and the supplier's submission will automatically become valid upon the submission.

Supplier Assignees

If you enabled supplier submissions, you can configure which supplier contact types should receive upload tasks and reminder notifications. You can configure this in the Supplier Access section, where you previously enabled supplier visibility.

You can assign tasks to Supplier Admins, Sourcing Contacts, and/or Quality Contacts. Any supplier user with at least one of the selected roles will receive tasks. We also recommend enabling Fallback to all supplier contacts, in case no supplier users match the selected roles.

Internal Team

In the Internal Team section, you can manage Document Type Admins - users who can configure document type settings, requirement rules, and (by default setting) review and approve or reject supplier submissions for this Document Type.

You can also create additional custom Roles / User groups, and add internal users to those roles. These Roles can then be set as the assignees for Approval tasks, or as the recipients of Internal Reminder Tasks and emails for this Document Type.

Validity Date Settings

In the Validity Date Settings tab, you can define how validity dates are handled. By default, contracts have optional “Valid From” and “Valid To” dates. You can adjust this to make dates required, or mark them as not applicable, if needed.

You can also control who can edit validity dates, if corrections are needed.

By default, only Internal Document Admins can edit validity dates, however, you can enable other internal users and supplier users to edit them as well.

Automations

In the Automations tab, you’ll find the Expiration & Auto-Renewal Settings, as well as options for adding Reminder Tasks & Emails.

Auto-renewal can only be set when supplier submissions and document validity dates are enabled. For most contracts, you’ll probably not enable supplier submissions and auto-renewal. Instead, you may want to create reminder tasks and emails for internal users. For example, you could create a task for the Document Type Admin to review and extend the contract with the supplier one month before expiration.

If supplier submissions are enabled, then you may want to turn on auto-renewal.

Auto-renewal is a feature that will automatically start the process of collecting a new version of this Document from suppliers a certain amount of time before the previous version expires.

Supplier will get an initial email notification with their task, which will live on their dashboard in the portal until it is completed.

Additionally, Supplios can send regular Open Task emails (for example, daily/weekly/bi-weekly) to all internal and supplier users about the tasks waiting on them. To set up Open Task emails for your account, please reach out to the Supplios team.

You can also add extra reminder tasks and emails to internal or supplier users.

For example, you could create a task for the Document Type Admins or any custom User Group (created in Internal Team section) to call the supplier if the document hasn’t been uploaded 1 day before the expiration.

Auto-Pilot

Auto-Pilot is a feature that automatically starts collecting a contract from suppliers who don't yet have an existing version on file (for suppliers who already have a version, expiring-document collection is handled instead by the auto-renewal setting described above). Auto-Pilot can currently only be turned on by the Supplios team.

Once Auto-Pilot is turned on, it starts collecting contracts from suppliers for whom the document is required, based on your Document Requirement Rules. See GUIDE: Setting Document Requirements in the Compliance Module for more on managing those rules. Suppliers will then receive upload tasks, and the process will follow your existing Submission Workflow settings.

As a Document Type Admin, you can turn Auto-Pilot off at any time - and you'll need to, if you want to change the Requirement Rules for that Document Type. To turn it back on afterward, contact the Supplios team via the blue Help button at the bottom right of the portal.