Welcome back to another edition of the release notes!

This first release note of 2023 is jam-packed with work we did all throughout January to start the year with a bang!

In this release, we have improved many aspects of managing an RFQ lifecycle by giving more tools to flexibly modify and codify requests state across time.

To operate procurement well, staying organized with project management best practices is crucial.

You now have the tools to do so digitally within a solution tailored for procurement professionals in the manufacturing sector.

Improved Request Lifecycle Management

Keeping track of all your requests can be difficult especially when engineering requirements change. You can now organize your requests that are on hold and leave a note for yourself to follow up later.

It can also be tough to remember which of your contracted requests have been exported into your ERP after you have taken a decision on the request. We have introduced the ability to mark your contract as done so you can be sure the transfer is complete and you haven’t missed anything.

We also improved the experience when managing whole request project

Custom Part filtering

We noticed your sourcing requirements often require submitting multiple RFQs on a supplier per supplier basis. We have introduced the ability to filter your part list based on your custom classification to send each RFQ package quickly.

Part Import from ERP for Large List

The platform can now handle large part list imports with ease in order to better support our enterprise clients. You will be able to see the progress in real-time so if it is really big you know how much time you have to grab a coffee!

The Much More Part

Our development team is always on the lookout for extra polish we can bring to our strategic sourcing solution, here are a few examples of improvements we added to the platform for this run:

1. Custom quote data export is being tested out with some enterprise customers (PDF, CSV, Excel). Facilitating the interconnection between our customers’ supplier quoting systems and their ERP systems.

2. Accept supplier quotes prior to a decision being taken

3. Put all company members in CC of a supplier communication to increase off-app visibility

4. Send email notification when a supplier is added mid-RFQ to keep colleagues in the loop

5. We also improved our notification clearing to clear even if you do not reply back to a message simply because you need time to respond or the message does not require a response.

6. Suppliers can now provide confirmation to buyers if they will quote or not and centralize the response on Axya for buyers.

Take a sneak peek at our advanced research leveraging AI and feature extraction, which fuels future platform improvement!

Picture this, you send requests to 10-30 different suppliers on average in a week. Each one of them has their own quoting system attached to their ERP system which outputs the quote in a specific format.

The suppliers each give you their quotes in different formats like PDF, excel and CSV via email. On top of that even the type of quotes within a similar format have widely different information or layout.

It’s up to your buyer team to manually input this information back into a master excel spreadsheet in order to make a decision on who to award the contract to.

This aggregated information then needs to be fed back into your own ERP system and the cycle continues for the next request.

The problem with this situation is that it:

1. Increase the manual work of your buyers, which are already overloaded.

2. Increase the risk of errors being introduced in the aggregated spreadsheet.

3. Decrease the number of suppliers you can send requests to, as each new supplier adds to the total manual work overhead.

At Axya, our research team is implementing quote data extractors for the major suppliers’ ERP output that can read with the help of computer vision various data formats.

This information is then structured and pooled within the application to automatically do the aggregation.

We are currently fine-tuning these quote data extractors with major, high-volume suppliers within our network. More to come!

Keep up the great work Nikita on this one!

Here is a word from our ops analyst extraordinaire Damien on this new improvement:

For the month of January our product team really refined the user experience on the platform , from misc bug fixes to updates improving the platform overall like the bulk delete for the project manager or the ability to confirm a contract is fully done.

Everything was done to make the user experience more smooth and enjoyable, my personal favourite is the changes made to the project manager as it is one of the features I use the most

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