Vendor account structures and inviting vendor contacts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview of vendor accounts in Felix
• Centralised vendor accounts - merging and email domain claims

Overview of vendor accounts in Felix

Vendor accounts in Felix are created in one of two ways: 

1. signing up as a paying marketplace vendor to receive targeted business leads; and/or
   
   
2. being invited by an Organisation to onboard to their business and to possibly receive tenders.

Organisation invitations are delivered via email, hence email addresses are a key identifier to route invites to vendors.

Currently in Felix, an email address can only be associated with one account. An email address cannot exist on multiple vendor accounts.

This also impacts email addresses that wish to represent both a vendor and an organisation in Felix. See here for more detail.

Vendors commonly can have large employee numbers and divisional or branch type structures. Felix therefore deliberately supports this by allowing vendors to setup multiple accounts (even with the same unique business number) to mimic these structures and control their customer relationships and tenders in an organised fashion. This flexibility also provides Organisations the ability to connect ("invite") with any email address at a vendor as needed.

Some vendors, however, prefer to maintain a centralised account and do not want additional accounts being created. They wish to have full visibility over all organisation relationships and tenders, in one place.

Centralised vendor accounts - merging and email domain claims

For vendors that prefer single, centralised accounts, Felix offer some functionality to achieve and maintain this setup - account merges and "domain claiming".

If a vendor has multiple Felix accounts with the same business number ("ABN" in Australia), they can choose to merge these into one account. Merging combines their organisation relationship data, user bases, and tender lists and is of no consequence to Organisation users typically - with the exception that the account is larger and centrally managed, so the impact of that change in culture/management approach might be felt early on.

For more information, see this article for vendors about account merges.

Vendors that have this preference for single, centralised accounts also have a feature available to them that we call "domain claiming". Whether a vendor has gone through a merge or not, under certain conditions they can "claim" an email domain (e.g. @acme.com) and have all future organisation engagement directed to a single Felix account. This ensures that the single account is maintained and removes the need for future merges, as additional accounts are not possible to be created with that email domain once the domain is claimed.

This feature (domain claiming) removes some flexibility that Organisations used to have to just invite any email address that they wish to engage with (e.g. for urgent tenders). To minimise this impact, Felix offers a "suggest a contact" workflow so that any new contact desired can be suggested to the central vendor account to be added as a user. This workflow can be triggered from the "invite" screens in the Vendor Relationship Management module, as well as Step 4 of the RFQ process in the Sourcing module.

For further details on the "domain claiming" feature, see this article for Vendors.