Suppliers

The Suppliers section in Silkline provides buyers with a centralized view of their suppliers, allowing for seamless management of supplier relationships, performance tracking, and streamlined communication. The page is designed to help procurement teams efficiently oversee their supplier base, track order fulfillment, and address supplier-related issues.

Skip sending

For suppliers (such as DigiKey, ULINE, McMaster-Carr, and Mouser) where buyers place orders through an eCommerce website, you can toggle on "Skip sending" on the supplier page to automatically mark orders as sent when the order is opened. When this setting is enabled, open Orders for that supplier will bypass the "New" tab and will automatically advance to the "Unconfirmed" tab where they can be marked as confirmed as applicable.

Editing a supplier

Silkline helps companies maintain important master data on suppliers such as their approval status and notes and required documentation.

For customers whose supplier master data comes from an external system (such as a connected ERP), some supplier fields may not be editable in Silkline.

To edit a supplier, click the pencil icon next to the Supplier's name in the title bar:

Approval Supplier Lists

Silkline helps companies maintain an Approved Supplier List (ASL/AVL) and track the approval status and notes for each supplier. Approval statuses show up as badges throughout the app, such as when selecting a supplier on a Request.

Approval statuses

Approval Status	Explanation
Approved	Suppliers that are fully approved.
Restricted	Suppliers that are conditionally approved. This is useful when a supplier is in an onboarding or probation period, or if the supplier is only approved for certain pedigrees / quality levels.
Prohibited	Suppliers that are prohibited from future orders.
(None)	Supplier approval status has not been set

Approval notes

Add notes documenting the rationale or details of the supplier approval status. Notes show up in the tooltip when overing over the approval status badge:

Preferred status

In addition to approval status, approved vendors can be marked as preferred, which is indicated with a plus icon next to the approved status badge:

Only approved vendors can be marked as preferred. Downgrading a vendor's approval status to Restricted, Prohibited, or none will automatically turn off the vendor's approval status.

Tags

Supplier tags are a useful way to categorize and organize suppliers. Tags are flexible and can be used for several purposes, such as:

• Categorizing suppliers by capability / commodity group (e.g., services, sheet metal, 5-axis machined parts)

• Indicating supplier approval scope or quality level (e.g., Tier 1, Tier 2)

• Indicating compliance status (e.g., ITAR)

Tags can be used to select multiple suppliers at once when entering suppliers on a request. For example, a buyer could select the tag "sheet metal" to populate all suppliers with that tag.

Supplier Data

Supplier data provides a flexible way to store and track important data for a supplier, like contracts, NDAs, W9/payment details, certifications, etc. Each supplier data item includes the following fields:

Field	Description
Type	NDA, Certification, Financial, Contract, or Other
Name	The name or title of the supplier data item
Notes	Internal notes or additional details you wish to record for the item
Effective date	The date the item is effective (particularly useful for contacts)
Expiration date	The expiration date for the item (particularly useful for contracts)
Files	One or more file attachments

Several customers have requested notifications when a supplier data item (like an NDA) is expiring soon. We're planning to add this capability in the future!

Supplier Scorecard

Silkline automatically tracks key performance metrics for suppliers across four categories:

Responsiveness

Metric	Definition
Response Time	The time it takes for suppliers to confirm POs; in the future this metric may be expanded to include other actions
PO Confirmation	The percentage of POs the supplier confirms
Check-in Completion	The percentage of check-ins that are completed, excluding canceled check-ins

Competitiveness

Metric	Definition
Time to Quote	The amount of time it takes for a supplier to submit a quote, measured as the difference between the creation of an RFQ and the issue date of a linked quote.
Bid Rate	The percentage of RFQs marked as complete, excluding canceled RFQs.
Win Rate	The percentage of RFQs where a quote was converted to a Purchase Order, excluding canceled RFQs.

Schedule

Metric	Definition
Original OTD	The percentage of line items where the first receiving event occurred on or before the Need Date
Latest OTD	The percentage of line items where the first receiving event occurred on or before the current ETA

Quality

Metric	Definition
Issue rate	The percentage of line items that have an issue ticket associated with the line.

Some metrics require configuration to display. Contact [e-mail] if you would like certain metrics enabled for your account.

Contacts

Store key contacts for each supplier, including primary and secondary points of contact. Primary points of contact as used as the default contacts when sending RFQs through Silkline.

Use tags to organize and identify contacts. For example, you could use have tags for billing, sales/quoting, quality, etc.

Silkline automatically attempts to enrich contact data such as name, job title, photo, and LinkedIn using third-party data sources. When creating a contact, you can simply enter the contact's email address and we'll attempt to fetch the rest of the contacts data. You can always manually input details by selecting "Enter Manually".

Transaction history

Silkline shows a transaction history for suppliers including:

• Orders

• Request for Quotes

• Check-ins

See an overview of transaction data for a supplier and navigate to a particular item.