Admin can send jobs directly (or indirectly see 3b below) to Suppliers.

1. First you have to have a supplier in the system. A Supplier can be anyone, inside or outside the company, who is given an order to fulfil. Using a network of Suppliers, Admin can delegate jobs or ‘farm’ them out. One example is where a printer wants to offer thermographic work but doesn’t have the tools to do it themselves. They can farm this work out to another company.

2. When a job arrives with Admin, Admin can award the job to a Supplier and send it on. Once this is done, the Supplier will get an email and be able to see the job, produce it, and mark it as completed and dispatched. (By the way, at any time, Admin can change his mind and award the job to another Supplier or do it themselves.

3. Some products have a default Supplier assigned to them. If, for example, a thermographic business card product is always handled by a chap called Tony at Michigan Printers, then Admin can assign Tony to this product as the default Supplier. Admin then has two options:

(a) admin can receive the job as normal in the order manager, review it, and then send it to the supplier via the order manager ‘More options’ or via the ‘Send to Supplier’ in the job view page.

(b) Admin can opt to send orders for this product directly to the Supplier without forwarding it manually. To do this, Admin must select the appropriate option when editing the product. This option appears on the edit product page below, where Admin selects a default Supplier. If a job arrives this way, it will go to the ‘With Supplier’ tab immediately. Admin can still review it, change its status, or re-assign it to another Supplier etc. (By the way, Clients will not be told or be able to see that their Orders are being carried out by Suppliers).

4. When any job comes in, Admin can ask Suppliers to quote for the job. Suppliers will receive an email asking them to quote for the jobs, and their quotes will be returned to Admin. If Admin likes a quote, he can award the job to that Supplier via the timeline button ‘Accept this quote’ or the normal ‘Send to Supplier’ button. The winning Supplier becomes the ‘Supplier’ for this job, though not the default Supplier for future orders of this product.

5. When a Request for Quote (RFQ) comes in from a Client, Admin can review it before forwarding it to a list of Suppliers for some quotes. When a Supplier returns a quote, Admin must review it (and can add a $$ margin) before sending it on to the Client. Admin can also quote directly to the Client. Any number of quotes can be forwarded to a Client. A Client can accept any number of quotes (though a quote acceptance represents a ‘contract to purchase’). When a Client accepts a quote, a new job is created and immediately awarded to the winning Supplier and marked ‘With Supplier’ (just like a normal job). Admin can still reassign the job or cancel it etc. If Admin has quoted directly, and the Client accepts this quote, a job is created with no default Supplier. Once a quote is accepted, the RFQ will be marked as ‘Closed’ or ‘Concluded’. A link to the winning job will be placed on the closed quote page, and a link to the closed quote page will be placed on the job.