Vendor Collaboration in Dynamics 365 enables seamless communication and collaboration between your organization and your external vendors. It allows vendors to interact with your
system in a secure and user-friendly environment, ensuring smooth order processing, invoicing, and other essential functions.
The vendor collaboration interface exposes a limited set of information about purchase orders, invoices, and consignment stock to external vendor users. From this interface, a vendor can also reply to requests for quotation (RFQs), and view and edit basic company information.
Key Features:
- Vendor Portal Access: Vendors can access a portal where they can view purchase orders, track order statuses, submit invoices, RFQ’s and manage
- Purchase Order Management: Vendors can acknowledge purchase orders, provide updates on order status, and communicate any changes directly through the
- Invoice Submission: Vendors can submit invoices directly through the system, helping to streamline the invoicing process and reduce
- Document Exchange: Key documents such as purchase orders, receipts, and invoices can be exchanged electronically, improving efficiency and record-keeping.
- Request for quotation: RFQ in Vendor Collaboration is a feature that enables your organization to solicit bids or quotations from vendors for specific goods or This process helps streamline procurement and ensures you get the best price and terms from vendors before making purchasing decisions.
- Vendor Performance Tracking: You can monitor vendor performance, including delivery times, quality of goods, and invoice accuracy, allowing for better vendor management and decision-making.
- Secure Communication: All interactions and data exchanged are encrypted and securely stored, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of vendor-related
Benefits:
- Improved vendor relationships through easier communication and
- Streamlined order processing and
- Reduced manual data entry, minimizing errors and improving
- Enhanced visibility and control over the supply
Vendor Collaboration portal setup for existing vendors
Before setting up Vendor Collaboration in Dynamics 365, make sure the correct security roles are in place. These roles control the access vendors have when using the Vendor Collaboration portal.
Navigate to External Roles Setup: Go to System administration > Security > External roles.
External roles define the access that users (in this case, vendors) will have when collaborating with your organization through the Vendor portal.
Configuring Workflow for Vendor Collaboration
Navigate to Workflow Configuration: Go to System administration > Workflow > All workflow configurations.
In the list of workflow configurations, find and select the desired record related to Vendor Collaboration.
The workflow configuration you select defines the approval process and other related steps for vendor collaboration tasks such as purchase order approval, invoice submission, and user
access provisioning.
Activate Vendor Collaboration for the Vendor
After setting up the security roles and ensuring that the necessary workflow configurations are active, navigate to Procurement and sourcing > Vendors > All vendors. Find and select the vendor you want to activate for collaboration. Ensure that the Vendor collaboration access is enabled for the vendor.
Once Vendor collaboration is changed to Active click on contacts tab of the same vendor and click add contacts to create contact for the vendor user.
Enter the contact details and save the contact information.
Once the contact is added, click on Provision vendor user to create user profile for the vendor in the system.
In the Email (user alias) field, enter the vendor’s email address (the email will be used for sending collaboration invitations). Provide a Business justification for why the user is being provisioned (for example, to access purchase orders, submit invoices, etc.).
After the vendor user is provisioned, select the Vendor collaboration access allowed
checkbox to ensure that the user has permission to access the vendor portal.
And assign user roles to the provision vendor user, after assigning the role and provisioning the user, submit the request for approval. The request will go through a workflow for approval by the system administrator or the relevant person in your organization.
The Vendor collaboration access has been successfully applied and the request to create new user will get submitted to the workflow, and once the user request has been processed, the status of the user request will be set to completed.
Checking the Status of Vendor Collaboration User Request
Navigate to Vendor Collaboration User Requests
Go to Procurement and sourcing > Vendors > Vendor collaboration requests > Vendor collaboration user requests.
This will open a list of all the vendor collaboration requests that have been submitted.
After locating the user request open the details page where you can see the status of the workflow. To check the progress of the request through the approval workflow click on workflow tab.
Vendor request workflow:
As part of the first step of the workflow the Azure AD B2B user invitation file will get generated which contains Signup and registration URL of the D365 for the vendor
After the Azure AD B2B user invitation is generated the workflow needs to be submitted again and upon completion of the workflow status will be completed.
Once the Vendor Collaboration user request workflow is completed, the vendor user will be available in the Vendor collaboration users list.
Navigate to Vendor collaboration users Go to Vendor collaboration > Contacts > Vendor collaboration users.
And with instructions on how to log in and start using the collaboration portal vendor can
access their purchase orders, invoices, RFQ’s and other necessary documents directly within the portal.
Alternately, you can use the automated task for provisioning the Azure AD B2B user account. If you chose to use the automated task, you need to make sure to complete the below setups.
- Register the D365FO app within Azure AD in Azure
- Complete the required setup for the API permissions for Microsoft Graph for the D365FO The automated task of the user setup workflow will invoke this to provision the user account in Azure AD.
- Setup the Client ID, Application Keys within D365FO B2B invitation configuration page of
