Supplier activity

Supplier activity

The Activity tab on a supplier’s page answers two questions: what is waiting on this supplier now, and how has work on their lines gone lately. It is the tab a supplier’s page opens on.

Top to bottom it shows:

1. Trading cards: sales, GP%, sellable units, days’ cover and the open-task count, over the Trading period chosen in the page header (1w, 1m, 6m or 12m).
2. The decision pipeline, with decisions on their lines under it.
3. Open tasks.
4. A consolidated order, only when you are reading the whole business and the supplier spans more than one remit.

Everything here is scoped to your remit. A task counts for a supplier when at least one of its lines is a product that supplier provides, in a remit you can see. Several buyers often share a supplier, so two people can see different counts on the same page. An owner or admin sees every remit. See Suppliers for how remit scoping works across the supplier pages.

Open tasks

Open tasks lists every task on this supplier’s lines that has not been decided or dismissed. Each one is a single row:

• the task type icon: a cart for a purchase order, a tag for a price change, arrows for a transfer;
• the title, then a short summary such as “4 lines · warehouse purchase recommendations”;
• on the right, how many of this supplier’s products the task touches, and when it was last updated (or checked);
• an arrow that opens the task.

On a supplier’s own page their name adds nothing, so a task whose title is just the supplier’s name (common for purchase orders, which are raised per supplier) is shown by its kind instead, as Purchase order. Hover a row to see its exact created, updated and checked times in Melbourne time.

History in the section header opens the tasks that are already settled: decided, dismissed, or superseded by a newer recommendation. Documents goes to your artefacts library.

The list shows the 50 most recently updated tasks. When there are more, it says so.

Decision pipeline

The pipeline counts the tasks raised on this supplier’s lines and where each one ended up. Two controls sit in its header.

Period: 30d, 60d, 90d, All

The period picker narrows every view in the section at once: the facts, the table, the flow and Over time. A task belongs to a period by the date it was raised. All includes everything, including tasks raised more than 90 days ago.

The period is kept in the page address (?period=30d), so a link you share opens on the same period.

The facts strip

Four numbers lead the section, for the chosen period:

A dash means there is nothing to measure yet, not zero.

Table

The table is the pipeline in numbers. Each row is a window by the date a task was raised: Last 30d, Last 60d (31 to 60 days ago), Last 90d (61 to 90 days ago), and >90d. The windows do not overlap, so the rows add up to the total.

• Items is how many tasks were raised in that window.
• POs, Price and Transfer split those tasks by type.
• Open, Dismissed and Decided split them by where they stand now. A task raised 50 days ago and decided yesterday counts as Decided in the Last 60d row.

The small arrows compare a window with the one before it: an up arrow on Last 30d means more was raised in the last 30 days than in the 30 before. The >90d row has no arrow, because it is not a window of the same length.

Flow

The flow shows the same counts as the table, drawn as a flow from the type of work raised (left) to its outcome (right). The width of each band is the number of tasks. Use it to see at a glance whether, say, price changes on this supplier mostly get decided while purchase orders sit open.

Hover a block for what it means. Flow and table always agree, because they are read from the same counts.

Over time

Over time puts each task on a date axis, so you can see when work was raised and how long it waited.

When there are 15 tasks or fewer in the period, each task gets its own row:

• on the left, the task-type icon, its title and its size (“Purchase order · 4 lines”);
• in the middle, its life on the axis: a dot where it was raised, and a line to where it ended;
• on the right, where it stands, in words: Open 5 days, Decided same day, Decided after 3 days, Dismissed after 12 days.

Open tasks come first, oldest at the top, then settled tasks, most recent first. Select any row to open the task.

The line tells you how it ended:

A dot and a square side by side means the task was raised and decided on the same day.

With more than 15 tasks, rows would not fit, so the view folds them into one lane per type (Buy, Price, Transfer, Exit) with the same marks and a legend underneath. Hover a mark for its title and dates.

Over time is drawn from the same lists as Open tasks and History, so it shows at most the 50 most recently updated of each. The facts and the table count everything. If the counts differ from the rows you can see, that cap is why. It is also why Raised can be higher than the number of rows: Raised counts every task in your remits, while the rows list the tasks the open and history lists return.

Decisions on their lines

Under the pipeline, Decisions on their lines counts the individual lines that have been decided on this supplier’s tasks, over all time:

• followed the recommendation: the line was decided at the recommended quantity or price;
• went against it: the buyer changed the quantity (on a purchase order or transfer) or the price (on a price change) before deciding.

When lines went against the recommendation, the reasons recorded for doing so are listed with how often each was given. A supplier whose recommendations keep being overridden for the same reason is usually a supplier whose settings need correcting, for example a lead time or a minimum order. See Suppliers for those settings.

This section counts lines, not tasks. One purchase order with 12 lines can add 12 here.

Consolidated order

Several buyers can each have purchase-order lines for the same supplier. When you read the whole business (the All view) and the supplier’s buying spans more than one remit, the Consolidated order card shows it as one order to that supplier: how many buyers and remits it covers, each remit’s part and who owns it, and how many have signed off out of how many, by value.

Each buyer signs off their own lines. How the whole order completes is a workspace setting, shown on the card and changed in Settings → Projects:

• Every buyer signs off: the order completes by itself when the last buyer signs off.
• An owner may raise it early: an owner can Sign off the whole order before every buyer has, and the card records that it was an override. A signed-off order that gains new lines reopens, and can be signed off again.

Tasks that were dismissed or superseded are left out of the roll-up, and the card says how many.

Asking Twelfth AI

Twelfth AI can read the same supplier figures. Useful questions on this tab:

• “What is waiting on All Interactive Distribution, oldest first?”
• “How long do our purchase orders for this supplier usually sit before we decide them?”
• “Why do we keep overriding this supplier’s recommendations?”

If a number in an answer does not match this page, check the period picker and the Me / All view in the app header first: both change what is counted.