What has been developed in the last three months? The results of the Program Increment (PI) 2020-3

As an important part of our agile software development, we not only plan the next steps at the end of each quarter, but we also look back: What has been developed? Which progress did the different development teams achieve? What has actually been implemented?

That’s new as of PI 2020-3

As we did in our last blog post, here we summarize the new developments of the past 12 weeks:

Supplier Management

Enhancements in the area of Supplier Management primarily relate to the “Flexible Survey” survey tool: By migrating current certificate queries to the latest version of our survey tool, we were able to provide even better support to suppliers in updating their data. In addition, the creator of a survey can now define up to five reminders for the suppliers—resulting in a significantly higher response rate.

The survey reports have been supplemented with other valuable information, such as the aggregated response status for the entire company. Also, the selection of suppliers can now also be based on the customer’s internal supplier number, making it much easier to create the recipient list for a specific survey.

Visibility & Analytics

The integration of the dashboard, the heart of the Visibility & Analytics area, with all other SupplyOn Services has been further advanced: For example, improvement measures in the service Action Management can now be triggered directly from the dashboard. This saves time and increases efficiencies.

Quality Management

In the area of Quality Management, an ambitious customer integration project has been further advanced: The internal APQP/PPAP system was connected to the SupplyOn Quality Suite in such a way that the entire process from supplier search, feasibility study, awarding of contracts and advance quality planning (APQP) to PPAP documentation and release can be controlled directly from the customer’s back-end systems, saving him a lot of time.

The Technical Review solution has been extended to include the option of adding customer-specific data at the parts and material level. This now enables everyone involved to access all relevant project data.

Supply Chain Collaboration

When it comes to new developments in Supply Chain Collaboration, there are three of them:

1. Suppliers connected to SupplyOn via EDI can now automatically receive information on goods receipts and integrate this information into their internal systems.
2. As with the shipping notification, certain documents can now be requested in the pick-up notification for the forwarder, such as quality certificates. By doing so, these are then digitally available at goods receipt. This considerably simplifies and accelerates the receipt of the goods.
3. Both, the pick-up notification for the forwarder and the supplier’s shipping notification (ASN), now feature information on hazardous goods. This makes it very easy to identify them, especially in the case of an incident.

Portal

Since efficient process handling via SupplyOn relies on correct, up-to-date master data, the portal development team focused last quarter on functionalities to further improve master data quality. In addition, ease-of-use has been enhanced when setting up new companies and users.

This is new:

• Administrators are guided step-by-step through the assignment of authorizations and settings at company and user level
• Invalid email addresses are marked, enabling immediate detection as incorrect by the administrator
• Customers are automatically kept up to date on the current registration status of their suppliers
• The process of checking new users’ email addresses has been improved

It is exciting to see what the different teams have achieved in the past three months. But as agile software development is a continuous path, we are already working on the next enhancements in PI 2020-4.

So, stay tuned!