Security & Permissions

Security

Robust security is essential within any Buying Group.

Rebates and discounts are highly sensitive, and undermining the trust the group has with each supplier/vendor can be seriously detrimental to the group and it's trading relationships.

When agreements, spend, and rebates are "digitized" and made available on-line, security becomes even more important if you wish to expand the range and scope of the available information in order to grow the group and help the groups' members benefit fully from the range of discounts, rebates, and offers available to them.

In addition, staff within member companies have different roles, and therefore require access to different information. Therefore simple security (i.e a generic "password protected area") is usuallyinsufficient.

Instead, groups needs granular security so different users have access to different levels and types of information. For example:

1. Financial Information
   Finance staff within member companies generally require access to earned rebates and levels of spend, but generally they only need access to their own information - i.e their own company's spend, and their own company's rebate earnings.
2. Discounts and trading terms
   Branch managers and procurement staff/buyers (and potentially sales staff) need access to discount information, so they can sell and get the best deal for their customers and their member company. Generally, access to potential rebate information is restricted, in case they trade these rebates away, not fully understanding how they work.
3. Group health and standings
   Directors and senior management within member companies generally require access to overall group spend, other members spend and rebate earnings, so they can see their position within group and get an overall picture of the market-place and their commitment levels .
4. Access to minutes and documents
   Minutes from meetings are generally only available to the attendees of the meeting, but in some cases they need to be extended to others within the group.

Our system has a fully flexible granular security system, which can grant access to individual documents, agreements, appointments and events - and can even grant permissions to specific terms within an agreement. This means that two users can view the same purchasing agreement and see different data depending on their security credentials.

In addition to view security, administrators can also set "edit" permissions, "delete permissions", and "permission management" permissions, meaning they can allow non-administrative staff to add documents to a directory (for example), but not change the document or delete it once it's been added.