Webinar recap: Product Showcase March 2024

On 19 March we hosted our third webinar in the series – Evolving Felix, a Product Showcase. 

Since 2012, Felix has been developing software to ensure our customers gather more meaningful insights on their supply chains to enable safer, smarter and more efficient downstream processes. 

With the ever-growing reporting requirements demanded by government, asset owners or your clients relating to compliance and ESG, the team at Felix are working with our customers every day to ensure we’re building a better way to facilitate vendor management and source-to-contract. 

Everything we do at Felix is designed to create an efficiency within those traditionally paper-based and siloed processes, and our Product Showcase webinars are an opportunity to show Felix users what’s recently been released and what’s next on our product roadmap. 

You can watch the full webinar here or take a look at what was showcased in the recap below. 

Release snapshot: What’s new in Felix  

Steve Atkinson, our Head of Product, provided a summary of new functionality that we’ve delivered since our previous Product Showcase seven months prior.  

Here are some key areas highlighted by Steve:  

Vendor Management:   

• As faster onboarding is key for our customers, we’ve introduced an option to enforce a sign-off template when inviting a vendor to Felix to enhance efficiency of this process.  This means that when an enterprise organisation receives a vendor’s submission, the assignments are already done and in progress. 

Sourcing:  

• You could always perform an evaluation from an RFQ, but you couldn’t easily access this from the RFQ itself or see how many were created. Now you can see the number of assignments and we’ve added a shortcut to the evaluations feature so users can easily look much deeper.  
• We’ve also improved communications for addendums, quote updates and RFQ messages to streamline coordination on time sensitive RFQs and have introduced rich text editing. 

 We also keep our Release Notes page up-to-date so you can see what we’re delivering to market on an ongoing basis. 

Feature spotlight: AI-powered compliance document recognition (Vendor Management Module) 

Kristy Dale, our Product Marketing Manager at Felix, showcases new AI-powered technology that provides users with faster and more accurate compliance data during onboarding.  

As part of the onboarding process, vendors are required to upload compliance documents into Felix, and then manually enter information from those files into required fields within the platform.​  

This is a duplication of effort and when manual data entry is required – mistakes can happen. ​If the submitted information isn’t correct, this means you as a user must contact the vendor, ask them to make corrections and have them resubmit their application.  

Not only does this delay the onboarding process, but it could also potentially cause friction in the relationship with that vendor. 

The solution? We’ve implemented AI-powered technology to process the most commonly uploaded insurance types, extract the relevant data and pre-populate these details in Felix. 

So far, the results have been: 

• Reduced duplication of effort – vendors are saving up to 85% of the time in dealing with compliance documents. 
• Increased data accuracy – pre-populated information means less manual input.  
• Faster vendor onboarding – as we’re reducing the amount of administration that’s expected from a vendor to onboard in Felix.
  

Feature spotlight: Eftsure integration (Vendor Management module) 

Lachlan Magee, our Product Manager for our Vendor Relationship Management stream provides a walk-through of our latest native integration with Eftsure payment fraud protection software. 

Most Felix customers who utilise our Vendor Management module are capturing bank account details during onboarding. Separate to this, we’ve seen a rapid uptake of Eftsure from our customer base to add a layer of protection when collecting these details as banks don’t check BSB or account details for B2B payments.  

Incorrect payment details entered during vendor onboarding can be due to either human error, potentially leading to misdirected payments, or, in more concerning cases, a deliberate attempt at cybercrime or fraud. 

The Felix-Eftsure integration solves this problem. Vendors get instant feedback on their payment details when submitting this into Felix, validated by Eftsure, instead of organisations having to do manual checks themselves.  

See how this integration works. Lachlan provides a demonstration in the webinar at around the 12.05 minute mark.  

Feature spotlight: Managing Pricing Schedules as controlled documents (Sourcing module) 

Back to Steve Atkinson who presents one of the more major enhancements of all our recent releases, allowing pricing schedules on RFQs to be managed as controlled documents. 

Pricing Schedules are a critical document in RFQs, as they are a key interface in receiving data on inputs to the project and category managers. There are often changes in scope or documentation, and we were seeing the need for the pricing sheet to stay formalised and be version controlled for responses. We were also hearing that there are maturing expectations around using the data in a pricing sheet to drive and report on procurement objectives such as value and sustainability.  

We worked on the scope for this release closely with one of our customers, where the focus was on: 

• Flexibility – by providing the ability to edit all columns and rows, add notes in the schedule and to create drafts in preparation to send to vendors, even offline. 
• Versioning and formality – by allowing for new versions to be sent to vendors as an Addendum, and providing functionality to toggle between vendor submissions and apply adjustments against each version. 

There’s a lot to how this works, so it’s highly recommended that you get Steve’s run down by tuning into the webinar around the 21.45 minute mark.  

Sneak peek: Coming soon to Felix 

In the last part of the Product Showcase, Steve, Kristy and Lachlan provide an insight as to what’s on the horizon for Felix: 

Further enabling data collection through the Pricing Schedule for insights on categories and ESG (Sourcing module) 

• Vendor pricing schedule importer – Pricing schedules can often be 100-200 line items so manual entry is suboptimal for vendors. We’re working on an importer for vendors so they can upload their responses into Felix as Excel or CSV files. 
• Best and final offer – Negotiation can often take place after the Recommendation for Award (RFA). We’re exploring how, once you’ve closed an RFQ, you can select what vendor you’d like to negotiate with and formalise these requests and responses within Felix, for a traceable and connected experience.  

Automate more, manage more, and build richer insights for all stakeholders with new APIs (for API users) 

We’re introducing new API endpoints so that users can do more with their data: 

• Automate more: New API endpoints with our Contract Management and Vendor Management module (for payment details and branches) will mean you can synchronise this data with your ERP. 
• Manage and administer Felix better: Monitor permissions of those staff members that access Felix, and export data about sign-offs and contracts. 
• Get richer insights:  Externally report on questionnaires and evaluations.  

Get more of your vendor database in Felix (Vendor Management module)  

We’re adding a new type of vendor profile that can be managed internally, without the need for vendor input. This will help you improve the coverage of your vendors and increase visibility of your supply chain. 

To hear what’s coming next straight from the Felix Team, start the webinar from the 34 minute mark.  

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Keep an eye out for our next Product Showcase webinar in late 2024!