Introducing Contacts

A primary supplier manager is internal to your organization and is typically a person who is familiar with or interacts with the supplier. Each supplier can have one primary supplier manager. In sites that use modular supplier management questionnaires, the primary supplier manager can receive notifications of expiring or expired questionnaires. In sites that include the Supplier Management dashboard, you can filter supplier searches and the information in the My Suppliers dashboard area by primary supplier manager.

A primary supplier manager is added to a supplier when:

• An administrator imports primary supplier manager data into your site
• Someone in your organization who has the required permissions manually adds a primary supplier manager to the supplier

Supplier contacts are the external people you interact with while doing business with a supplier. Each supplier organization can have multiple supplier contacts. These contacts have logins that allow them to fill out questionnaires, participate in events, negotiate contracts, and perform other tasks in your site via SAP Business Network.

Approved supplier contacts are added to a supplier when:

• An administrator imports supplier contact data into your site
• An approver approves a supplier request, which always includes an initial contact for the supplier
• Someone in your organization who has appropriate permissions manually adds a contact to the supplier
• Someone in the supplier organization creates a login to the supplier's SAP Business Network account, and your site is configured to automatically synchronize them to the supplier's contacts in your site
  Note

  Your site can be configured to auto-approve synchronized supplier contacts.

Supplier contacts created in your site are private at first. They're not synchronized to the supplier's SAP Business Network account and exist only in your site until you invite them to participate in an activity such as a sourcing event or an external questionnaire. When you invite a private supplier contact to participate in an activity, links in notification emails prompt them to either log in or create an account on SAP Business Network. If that contact doesn't exist in the supplier's SAP Business Network account, the supplier account administrator must approve the contact before they can participate.

After the contact creates or logs into their SAP Business Network account, they become a public supplier in your site, and the AN ID of the linked SAP Business Network supplier account is visible in their profile.

Once a supplier contact is public, their first name, last name, email address, and phone number are no longer editable in your site. The information in those fields is synchronized from SAP Business Network, where the supplier contact maintains it. Any updates the supplier contact makes to those fields in SAP Business Network show in your site. You continue to maintain the other information associated with the supplier contact, such as type, whether they're the primary contact, and associated commodities, regions, and departments.

In some cases, it's necessary to unlink a supplier contact’s SAP Business Network account from your site. For example, a contact may be unaware that their organization has an existing SAP Business Network account, and they mistakenly create a new, duplicate account for their organization to respond to an external questionnaire. A customer administrator in your organization can perform the steps to unlink a public supplier contact's SAP Business Network account.