Supplier Compliance, Contract Service Levels and Match Exceptions

Every supplier’s page has a documents panel, and Supplier documents in Procurement lists them all with Awaiting your review, Requested and Expired filters. Types cover the usual compliance set: certificate of incorporation, tax compliance certificate, bank details, business permit or trading licence, insurance, quality certificates such as ISO, health and safety, professional or regulatory licences, signed contracts and other. Ask the supplier for a document names the type, an optional name, Needed by and a Note to the supplier, such as “Must cover at least KES 10M”. File a document you hold covers a copy you already have.

Suppliers answer from Company documents in their portal: they upload what was asked for, with Valid until if it expires, and press Send for review. They can also add one nobody asked for, such as a renewed insurance cover. Your reviewer opens it in the file viewer, sets Valid until, and presses Approve, or writes a Reason to send back, such as “Certificate is for a different company”, and presses Send back.

Expiry is watched for you. A required document entering its last 30 days, lapsing, or a request passing its due date puts it once in a digest to the people who manage suppliers and warns the supplier separately, by an email that follows their Document requests preference. In practice: a Kigali construction firm requires current insurance from every subcontractor. Thirty days before a roofer’s cover lapses, both sides are told; the roofer uploads the renewal from the portal, and the site manager approves it before the old one runs out.

A supplier contract’s form has Lead time and service levels: Agreed lead time in days, an On-time target and a Fill-rate target as percentages, and Other service terms in words. Each catalogue line on the contract can carry its own lead time. A call-off carries the lead time to its purchase order, so the order’s expected delivery reflects what was agreed rather than what someone guessed.

The contract page measures service on the orders raised from its call-offs: On time is the share delivered within the order’s lead time, Fill rate counts orders delivered or past due, and Average lead is the real figure. Late orders are listed, so a supplier conversation starts from orders rather than impressions. A document filed against the contract and marked required becomes a condition: if a required document is missing or expired, a call-off against the contract is refused until a current copy is approved.

Compliance also feeds the supplier’s score. Once any document is required of a supplier, document compliance counts for 10% of their risk score, and an expired or overdue required document puts them Under Review whatever the rest of their record says. Suppliers see the same scorecard in their portal under My scorecard, figure for figure, with the documents they need to attend to.

Exception queues, opened from Receipt matching on the Purchase Orders list, split receipt-matching problems by who has to act: Price variance and Quantity variance are the buyer’s call, Missing invoice is accounts payable’s chase, Late delivery is the expediter’s, and Receiving damage is a claim. Each row names the order, the vendor, what is wrong and since when. The tolerances come from Procurement Defaults under Receipt and bill matching, which also sets Missing invoice after (14 days unless changed) and Late delivery grace (0 days unless changed).

Rows are written whenever an order is opened or re-checked, and a daily sweep adds the two that appear with time alone: an order becoming late and a bill that never arrives. Re-check fixes a row when the order has been corrected. Resolve asks Why is this acceptable?, such as “Supplier credited the difference on the next bill”, and needs the permission to approve purchase orders. A resolved row stays resolved while its facts are the same; a new bill price, another short delivery or a moved delivery date reopens it, and a problem that goes away by itself is marked cleared so the trail shows nobody had to decide it.

Damage now has a home: the Damaged column on the receive screen books the units in and puts the order in the Receiving damage queue with a note, such as “2 cartons crushed”. In practice: a Nakuru dairy’s payables clerk opens Missing invoice every Monday, phones the three suppliers whose goods arrived more than 14 days ago with no bill, and the queue empties as the bills are captured.

Procurement Spend Analytics is in the system reports under Procurement. It shows ordered spend by supplier, item category, department, requestor and budget for the period you choose, with CSV and PDF exports. Alongside the spend it shows cycle times from request to order to receipt, so a slow approval step shows up as days rather than complaints.

The report is one currency at a time. An order is in its quotation’s currency, and orders with no currency label count as your base currency. Figures in different currencies are never added together and never converted; choose the currency at the top. That is the house rule across AWRA reports, because a total that adds shillings to dollars is a number nobody can act on.

Negotiated savings come from the sourcing workbench: for each award, the supplier’s round-one total minus the awarded total, summed per currency. In practice: the procurement head of an Addis Ababa manufacturer runs the quarter in ETB, sees spend concentrated with two packaging suppliers and an average of nine days from request to order, then switches to USD to read the savings from the imported-machinery tender.

On an application in Supplier Prequalification, Run AI evaluation gives an advisory suitability score and risk flags from the details the supplier typed, and now also an AI read of each uploaded document against those details. The read flags a file that is not the kind of document it was uploaded as, a file that is hard to read, a company name, tax PIN or registration number that differs from the application, and a document that is expired or about to expire. It runs in the background when a reviewer opens the application, and again when they press Run AI evaluation.

It is advice, not a decision. It never ticks a document as verified and never approves or rejects anything; the reviewer still opens the file and decides. It follows your workspace’s AI switches and its monthly AI allowance, so a workspace that has switched third-party AI off sends nothing anywhere. Attachments on RFQs and items now open in the in-app file viewer, so checking a document does not mean downloading it.

Keep rejected (months), on the prequalification settings, deletes rejected applications and their uploaded files that many months after the decision: 12 unless you change it, and 0 keeps them indefinitely. Applications that became suppliers and copies saved to the Vault are never touched. The public apply form follows your plan: on a plan that cannot approve suppliers it is not shown, and when the plan’s monthly number of applications is used up, the form tells suppliers you are not taking applications this month.