Welcome back to another edition of the release notes!

This second release note of 2023 is filled with added-value functionality that helps procurement professionals get more work done faster while still keeping everything tidy and well-organized!

In this release, we have included additional security measures that can be toggled for your procurement team, more ways of managing the data in your RFQs to suit the many styles of procurement operation, and more tools to collaborate with your peers and suppliers!

Collaboration is inherent to the sourcing process, it is a team exercise at the inter and intra-company levels. Making it easier to collaborate while keeping good data traceability makes procurement work easier for everyone.

Two Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication was a big step towards completing our cyber security certification (SOC 2) milestone this year. 2FA will ensure access to your account rests with you! We also heard you didn’t like being logged out of your active sessions so we made some fundamental changes to keep you logged in!

RFQ Collaboration

We all know you can’t always be there to manage your requests and rely on your colleagues to back you up when you are away from the office. Now, you can collaborate by sharing the request; giving them full visibility to view, manage and take decisions while you are on the beach(or under the weather).

Supplier Distribution List Management

In order to be sure the right people are being tagged on your requests, you can now view and manage who shall receive notifications on your requests as well as invite new contacts in case there are changes.

Filtering and Sorting your active listings

When you are looking for a specific request amongst your ongoing requests quickly, it can be time consuming to search manually. We have introduced sorting and filtering so you can narrow down your search!

RFQ split import

If you have a lot of parts to contract and want to optimize your savings to split a big contract between 2 suppliers, awarding on a part-per-part basis is time-consuming. Now, you can import your BOM with your selection and we will split your RFQ in one click!

And more!

Keep your internal part fields hidden from your suppliers!

When managing a BOM, there can be administrative or sensitive information you want to keep internal. We have introduced the ability to mark those fields as internal so they are hidden from your suppliers when exporting your quotation template!

Currency Conversion Preferences

Having trouble comparing quotes because your suppliers quote in different currencies? With our currency converter, your suppliers can quote in the currency of their choice and we will convert them to your desired preference.

Improve Email Notifications

We are continuously streamlining our email notifications to clarify and ease the first contact for suppliers when receiving requests from our buyers. It is as easy as 1, 2, 3!

With some more work in the Catia file extraction, we are now able to batch-process large amounts of files and pick up the important features that suppliers and buyers are looking for during an outsourcing process.

This tech is currently being beta tested in a large aircraft manufacturer and the result looks very promising.

Being able to extract the information from the Catia files in aggregate allows us to get the following benefits:

• 92% faster data extraction with 0 copy-pasting errors

• More precise part list makes the sourcing less error-prone

• Enriched knowledge base for a more accurate supply chain monitoring

• Suppliers love the workflow as the parts have much more information

• The drawings don’t need to be kept after the part's enrichment

Ultimately being able to extract features from drawing and enrich the parts list with information that is locked into these drawings allow us to gather more fine-grained information about the outsourcing dynamic in a given network.

This in turn allows buyers to cluster suppliers based on their quoting history and understand their supplier base.

Additionally, we have made more headway into other forms of data extraction from the typical file format being sent back and forth by buyers. Mainly we improved quote data extraction from PDF generated by ERP systems of major suppliers of our customers.

This later functionality is still in beta, but it’s working well! It allows buyers to spend less time interpreting quotes in different formats and quickly aggregate all the info they need to do quote comparisons efficiently!

Great work team!

In this month’s release, the team really fine-tuned the CATIA file extractor.

In a nutshell, this allows the extraction of metadata included in the CATIA files/ drawings, the information is highly technical and takes time to process manually. This feature permits a huge time saving for both the buyer and his supplier, it largely simplifies their work and has the added bonus of elevating their user experience on Axya.

I personally believe that such features will, over time, shape the new norm of a simplified sourcing process in the aerospace industry. Complex does not have to be complicated and this is proof that complex can become simple with the right tools.

Yasmina Head of Customer Care

I almost waited to put this release note out because the work that is coming out of the product oven is truly a wonder to behold.

I’m not going to spoil the surprise, but let’s just say that you might never ever have to send a follow-up email on an RFQ ever again really soon. 👀 👀 👀

If you have questions about any of the features of our source-to-pay solution, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at question@axya.co or you can hit me up at yacine@axya.co!

See you next in the next release! 👋

Yacine Mahdid