This quarter has seen the release of our new module, Supplier Sustainability Management, along with a number of new exciting tweaks and updates to existing functionality in the Vizibl platform to improve user experience. Read on to discover what we’ve been up to.
As ever, our product and engineering team has been beavering away on updates and improvements to our industry-leading Supplier Collaboration and Innovation platform over the course of this quarter.
While Q1 saw extensions to our Supplier Innovation Hub, a complete refactor of the platform navigation, and what we dubbed Reporting 2.0, this quarter has seen a brand new module release in addition to some enhancements to core areas of Vizibl’s functionality.
All updates to the platform are designed with our core mission in mind: to enable large enterprise organisations to manage every aspect of their relationships with their suppliers and partners more effectively.
So without further ado, read on to discover the exciting new and improved functionality our product team has released for Vizibl customers…
July saw the release of our brand new module, Supplier Sustainability Management.
Expanding our existing sustainability functionality, this area of the Vizibl platform joins our existing modules: Supplier Relationship Management, Supplier Collaboration Workspace, and Supplier Innovation Hub.
We designed SSM to provide enterprise organisations with the tools they need to accurately assess and improve sustainability performance across their supply base. This is becoming ever-more crucial as pressure rises on these large businesses to operate more sustainably across their entire value chains.
With Supplier Sustainability Management, Vizibl customers can now:
This release ties in with our recent partnership with CDP, the global non-profit that runs the world’s most prominent annual environmental disclosure programme.
The unique and powerful combination of this new module – underpinned by Vizibl’s existing Supplier Relationship Management, Supplier Collaboration Workspace, and Supplier Innovation Hub – enables our customers to align on sustainability targets, collaboratively problem solve with their supplier ecosystems, open source innovation for sustainable transformation and business growth, and gain priority access to scarce green goods & services.
This combination of features and benefits unlocks the ability to collaborate with suppliers on sustainability goals – systematically, and at scale.
Our product team is working hard on ongoing expansions to the Supplier Sustainability Management module, in concert with feedback from our existing customers. Some features that are in the works include:
We knew that Vizibl only being available in English was a barrier to our aim of facilitating collaboration across borders.
So as a result of the work done by our product team, Vizibl volunteers, external translation consultants, and some feedback from our customers, Vizibl has now reached polyglot status!
The platform is now available to use in English, French, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Vietnamese.
In the coming months we will also be adding Japanese and Simplified Chinese to make Vizibl even more accessible to our global customer base.
A key area of Vizibl’s functionality lies in performance management. Here, our clients can track supplier performance across time according to their own custom KPIs, and roll these KPIs up into a blended performance score based on their own needs and priorities. This performance data can also be pulled into reporting dashboards and widgets.
To ensure that this core area of our platform is as easy to understand at a glance as possible, August saw the release of a few changes to the “logic” of performance in Vizibl. The key updates are:
Now, we no longer count KPIs with no data towards the overall score for that KPI group. This means a more accurate overall blended score, and no artificial lowering of the average. Empty KPIs are, however, no longer hidden. Instead, they are now displayed in the overview page as ‘N/A’, making it easier for Vizibl users to see where performance KPIs are missing and take remedial action.
To do collaboration at scale correctly as a large organisation, it is necessary to onboard numerous supplier stakeholders into the technology you use to manage your relationships, collaborations, innovations, and performance.
As our clients have grown their use of the Vizibl platform over the last year, we discovered that the process for approving new supplier users was becoming unwieldy – instead of being centralised, supplier users awaiting approval were buried in each individual relationship. And given the size of enterprise organisations’ supply bases, that was a lot of relationships to sort through individually.
Now, administrators can manage all supplier users, agnostic of what relationship they belong to, from one single tab in the Suppliers area of the platform. This preserves the security of the existing approvals process, but saves time and improves ease of use for organisations with a long list of suppliers by centralising this process.
Vizibl has long had functionality which enables open discussions between our customers and their suppliers about their work together. These discussions were tied to particular objects in the Collaboration Workspace such as a particular Project, Event, or Task. As a result, there was no specific space for broader conversations about the relationship.
Now, all Vizibl customers now have access to a dedicated Discussions space with each supplier. Anyone with view permissions for the Relationship can post into the discussion, and when a new post is created, all users with assigned roles in the relationship are notified.
These changes make it easier to discuss broader issues that might affect the relationship, and to ensure that all relevant stakeholders have visibility over the contents of these discussions.
Reporting dashboards are a powerful tool in Vizibl, allowing our customers to collate a wide array of information about their relationships and performance from across the four different areas of the platform.
Sometimes dashboards benefit from a written description to contextualise what other users are seeing. The ability to add a description has existed for some time in Vizibl, but was hidden behind an icon. In order to increase its visibility and utility, we have now placed the description at the top of the page in-app, above the widgets, allowing users to more easily interpret the insights the dashboard gives without having to dig into other menus.
To learn more about our industry-leading Supplier Collaboration and Innovation platform and how it helps our large enterprise customers tap into the value of their supplier relationships, visit https://www.vizibl.co/platform
