Webinar recap: Product Showcase February 2023

At Felix, our product and roadmap are driven by user feedback and market need. We’re continually evolving our platform to help solve customer problems and build a better way.

The Felix Product Team invest a lot of time and energy into talking to customers to better understand what obstacles they face in their day-to-day roles to further enhance Felix to make work-life easier.

Our first Product Showcase webinar was an opportunity to highlight this and demonstrate some of the recently released optimisations so that you, our customers, can get a closer look at what’s new in Felix to ensure you can derive even more value from the platform.

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

Release snapshot: What Felix has released over the last six months

Mariia Starikova, our Head of Product, provided a summary of the new Felix experiences and enhancements we’ve delivered over the last six months.

Mariia summarised what’s been released in Felix and explained what the Product Team has focused on:

• In Vendor Management, we are helping you to gain visibility and manage your vendors more efficiently.
• In Sourcing, we hear from you all the time about how mission-critical document handling is for you, so we’ve brought you a range of document improvements.
• In Procurement Schedule, our newest module, we want you to feel empowered using it, so we’ve worked on improving the user experience with updates to the UI and also better interactions with the tool.
• In Contracts, we’ve evolved the contract repository to give you greater control over organising agreements, but also to help you drive value for the visible and actionable contracts that are no longer stored in shared folders.
• For vendors, an exceptional vendor experience is paramount, so we’ve been improving vendor onboarding and simplifying the RFQ quoting experience.

You can see the full list of enhancements below. Don’t forget you can always check our Release Notes to see what we are delivering to market on an ongoing basis.

What’s new in Felix. A snapshot of recent releases from the last six months.

Feature spotlight: Responding on behalf of vendors (Sourcing module)

Harrison Milne, our Product Designer, explained the discovery and design process for recently released functionality that allows you to respond to an RFQ on behalf of a vendor.

Before providing a demonstration of what this feature is and how it works, Harrison explained some of the benefits of using Sourcing and the RFQ feature, to provide a background on why the RFQ feature is important.

“Our Sourcing module allows you to seamlessly create, manage and award RFQs in one platform. You also have vendors with an account that allows them to receive RFQs, communicate and submit a quote directly back to the RFQ that you have invited them to participate in. Having all this information in one ecosystem allows you to monitor the engagement and progress of all invited vendors of an RFQ. From this, you can create and release RFQs quickly and execute an award in a few clicks upon approval.”

So, in a perfect world, the Sourcing module allows vendors and RFQ managers to communicate and collaborate in Felix. However, our Product Team were recognising that some vendors weren’t responding in platform, and this was creating a problem for users.

Before jumping to conclusions about why this was happening and what was causing the problem, Harrison explains how the team connected with several customers and through these conversations they learnt a number of insights that influenced the design for new functionality.

The team learnt that the number one reason that vendors aren’t responding in Felix is because they have tight schedules and don’t always have the time to submit a quote in Felix. If this problem wasn’t addressed, it may result in missing information for RFQs, inefficient RFQ management or lack of visibility on the response status of vendors, so RFQ managers wouldn’t know the progress of the RFQ.

With all this newly found information, it helped the Product Team understand the problem deeply from a user perspective, and they were able to ask themselves one carefully curated question to help design the new functionality in a way users would want:

How might we support vendors who are short of time and allow our RFQ users to effectively support these vendors through this period of time?

The solution was that vendors needed some more flexibility in how they can respond to a quote. So, Felix released a feature that allows for all quotes, no matter the source, to be stored in one place – whether it’s a phone call, text message or email. You can now add quotes from offline sources to the relevant vendor and RFQ, so that Felix remains your single source of truth.

If you want to see a live demonstration of how this feature works, watch the webinar recording and tune into Harrison’s segment from the 5.15 minute mark.

Feature spotlight: Key dates and reminders (Contracts module)

Steve Atkinson, Product Manager, demonstrated how you can deliver more value from your stored contracts in Felix with the Key Dates and Reminders feature.

Steve explains why the Key Dates and Reminders feature is an important enhancement to Felix.

“We know teams put in a lot of work to draft and negotiate contracts, and delivering on the value post-execution requires focus. When talking to our customers about contracts, we hear that missing even one action can sometimes have a significant downside for your business. A particular expiry date, or rates review, are some common key date examples that are easily missed.”

So why does this matter? At Felix, we want to see our users:

• Drive success of contractors and projects by planning out mobilisation tasks, which is a critical risk period as you bring contractors onto a project, over multiple stakeholders.
• Increase the use of contractor evaluations at mid and end points of projects.
• De-risk the offboarding process for an incumbent and maintain a good relationship.
• Avoid financial risks by correctly closing out a contract.
• Setup to extract the most value from category management around mechanisms like innovation, extensions, renewals, rebates, options, price reviews, or going back to market ahead of time.

To achieve this, Felix has added functionality to the Contracts module that brings key dates to life and allows you to connect reminders for your team to act. The Key Dates feature allows you to store and track key dates in one summary view for your team and stakeholders to access quickly, without having to search the large contract document. Using the Reminders feature, you can stay on top of important contract management deliverables by setting email reminders for yourself or other team members.

If you want to see the Key Dates and Reminders functionality in action, watch the webinar recording and tune into Steve’s segment from the 20-minute mark.

Feature spotlight: InEight Document integration (Sourcing module)

We hear again from Mariia Starikova, our Head of Product, who showcases our newest native integration with InEight Document.

Felix has partnered with the InEight team to bring you a best-in-class experience across document controls and tendering.

We know that many of our customers use Felix for tendering, and a big part of this includes document control, not just for procurement but for the full project lifecycle.

InEight Document is a popular Document Management System (DMS) used by many, to capture, review, distribute and store document in a central repository throughout the lifetime of a project. Using Felix and a DMS such as InEight is important for effective tendering and project management but maintaining documents between two systems can cause additional administrative work. For example, downloading documents from one system and manually importing them into another takes time, and staying on top of revisions can create risk if a critical revision is missed by a vendor and they provide an inaccurate quote.

This is why we’ve integrated with InEight Document, to help you maintain documents with ease, communicate with vendors through a single interface in Felix, and never miss a revision.

Here is an outline of how the Felix and InEight integration works:

Integration points between Felix and InEight Document to help you manage document control with ease.

However, if you want to see for yourself how InEight Document integrates with Felix, watch the webinar recording and tune into Mariia’s segment from the 40-minute mark.

Product Roadmap: A sneak peek

Before concluding, Mariia Starikova, our Head of Product, provides a glimpse of what you can expect from Felix in 2023, so you can get more value from Felix day-to-day.

Upcoming enhancements include:

A sneak peek of what’s coming soon in Felix.

Mariia explains these upcoming features in more detail:

ABR integration for enhanced data capturing (Vendor Management module)

“We’re always looking for ways to streamline onboarding for vendors. With the ABR integration, vendors can onboard directly with critical business details such as Entity Name, Business Name and ABN, pulled directly from the ABR. This minimises the risk of errors and helps you build confidence that the details in Felix are accurate and current.”

Vendor status improvements for more flexibility (Vendor Management module)

“We’re looking to bring you new vendor status’s such as ‘Registered’ to help you better differentiate between vendor onboarding stages and accurately convey a vendor’s pre-qualification progress. For example, we have heard from you that the ‘Approved’ status that currently exists doesn’t accurately communicate if a vendor is registered or pre-qualified.

We’re also adding more flexibility by allowing you to change a vendor’s status at any time giving you more control over your vendor base.”

RFx to centralise all sourcing events in one tool (Sourcing module)

“Those familiar with our Sourcing module would use the RFQ feature. We’ve heard from you that you would like to capture all sourcing events, such as Expressions of Interest, Estimations, or Project Work, in Felix. We’re building functionality that allows you to bring all sourcing events into one intuitive tool, while upholding best-practice. It will feature custom, reusable templates to capture a wide variety of sourcing event types or projects, allowing you to issue RFx faster with a streamlined two-step approach.”

Sealed Bidding to help probity in your sourcing process (Sourcing module)

“Sealed Bidding ensures vendor bids can’t be opened before the RFQ is closed and helps prevent unfair play in the bidding process. You might already be using Sealed Bidding within the Sourcing module that’s applied to the whole organisation, but we understand not all projects want to be governed this way. We are bringing you a new setting to control which projects are to use Sealed Bidding, so that you can choose between more flexible quote access or a strict process to unseal bids after the RFQ is closed.”

You can also get a recap of the questions asked from our audience throughout the Product Showcase in our Webinar Q&A blog post.

And for now, that’s a wrap!

Watch the full webinar here.