Location Level Supplier Preferences

Modified on Tue, 3 Mar at 12:51 AM

Introduction

Tango Maintenance now supports the ability to define Supplier Preferences at the Location level. This option will override any Region/Market Supplier Preference data for the Trade and allows clients to define a lower level of granularity when auto selecting/assigning Suppliers or Internal Maintenance to Service Requests and Work Orders.

Background

Supplier Preferences is a well-established concept within Tango Maintenance where predefined "providers" (Vendors or Maintenance Leads) are automatically assigned to work based on the Trade associated with the Problem Code. The legacy Supplier Preference data is set up per Trade and Region/Market combination. ("Market level Supplier Preferences")

Market-level Supplier Preferences allow up to 3 Vendors to be auto-selected or auto-dispatched to, in order of preference. Vendors will be given the opportunity to Accept the Work Order or not before it is routed to the next Vendor in the list.

Supplier Preference can also be set as "Internal Maintenance" which will instead assign the SR/WO to an internal Maintenance Lead. Selecting Internal Maintenance will also disable the Preference 1-3 fields and ignore any previously selected suppliers.

Example Market level Supplier Preferences:

The Market level Supplier Preferences are not going away, but with the introduction of the Location-level Supplier Preferences, they can be overridden based on data setup.
For instance, it can be the case that a certain building must use the Landlord’s selected vendors; in these cases, we must use the location-specific vendors and ignore the market preferences.

Location Level Supplier Preferences

The "Supplier Preferences" tab can be enabled on Location (Store) and Building screens.

This tab allows the configuration of "Location level Supplier Preference" data, where users will set up a single Vendor per Trade that will be auto-assigned for this Location (or mark the Trade as Internal Maintenance), overriding any existing Market-level Supplier Preferences.

For example, we have a "Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX" Market level Supplier Preferences for the HVAC Technician Trade that is set to route to qawovendor1, then QAWoVendor2, then QAWoVendor4.

We also have a Location level Supplier Preference on the Tango QA HQ Building (which is in the Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX Market) for the HVAC Technician Trade, assigned to QAWoVendor.

A new Service Request for HVAC Technician Trade for the Tango QA HQ location will be assigned to QAWoVendor and not qawovendor1, QAWoVendor2, QAWoVendor4.

Vendor Select/Auto Dispatch

Within Edge, this Supplier Preference data is visualized on the 2nd step of the Service Request (or Related Work Order) in the Select tab.

Given the example above, the Location level Supplier Preference for the Tango QA HQ building and HVAC Technician Trade overrides the Market level preference, and the QAWoVendor supplier is selected by default.

Note: The Vendor selected from the Location level Supplier Preferences will be displayed as Level 0. The only time a Level 0 option will be displayed is when the data comes from a Location level Supplier Preference.

By un-selecting the Level 0 Vendor (clicking anywhere on the row), any Market level preferences will be applied.

The application will only auto-select the Location level Preference or the Market level Preference(s). There is no option to Dispatch to all 4 options.

The user can still apply filters or "Show All Vendors" and select up to 3 Vendors manually.
If there was a Location level Preference initially selected, the manual selections will show as 1 and 2 (The 3 selections will be 0,1,2 instead of 1,2,3).
The user will see an error message when trying to select any additional vendors.

At any time after applying filters or changing the default selections, click the Reset Search button and the selection will be set back to the initial defaults.

Auto Dispatch

For Problem Codes that are configured to Auto Dispatch in the Matrix, the Location level Supplier Preference Vendor will be dispatched to, and the Market level Supplier Preferences will be ignored.

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