Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations “Vendor collaboration”

Inviting vendors to collaborate directly in Dynamics 365 for Operations improves the vendor’s visibility of purchase orders and ensures a shared view on responses to purchase orders. This reduces the miscommunication and misunderstandings that can occur when the PO is exchanged by mail or fax.

The functionality for collaborating with vendors has been expanded in this release. External vendors can now respond to individual purchase order lines and suggest changes, such as new dates, quantities, split a line in new delivery dates, or substitute an item with a new item.

The Purchase order confirmation workspace allows vendors to see which POs they need to respond to, which POs are awaiting confirmation by the customer, and which POs have been confirmed but not yet processed with product receipt.

Vendors can suggest changes on lines and exchange documents.

Customers can share notes and documents that are related to purchase orders with vendors, for example, to describe requirements. The vendor can also share notes and attachments with the customer when they respond to the PO. When a vendor responds to a PO, there are different messages that are shown when they Accept, Reject, or Accept with changes. These messages can be customized to better support the business processes of the buying company.

A new external vendor administrator security role enables vendors to add new contacts and update information about contacts and to request new vendor collaboration users.

Users with that role can also request that specific vendor user accounts are inactivated, or that security roles are modified. The same functionality is available for users at the customer company.

Vendors can monitor the consumption of consignment inventory to see when the customer takes ownership of inventory. The On-hand consignment inventory page shows the vendor the actual stock level of the inventory that the customer has not yet taken ownership of. The Purchase orders consuming consignment inventory page shows a list of the purchase orders that were generated  hen a transfer of ownership took place.