Within VendorPanel, Departments are your various teams, groups, areas, divisions, etc, in your organisation. In-system, they are assigned to both a specific record (the department that owns the contract/procurement) and a user's profile (the department the user belongs to). It is mandatory to assign a record to a department so these must be set up correctly.

These selections drive user permissions, as a specific user will be able to see all records in the system that are assigned to the same department they are. You can find more information on that here: User Permissions. They can also be utilised for approvals, where the system can find a user in a specific department.

Positions can be assigned to a user in their profile and their primary function is to be utilised for approvals, where the system can find a user who is assigned to a specific position and also in a specific department.

You can find more information on how approval definitions use both of these values here: Managing your Approver Definitions.

Departments and Positions are both managed centrally in the Control Panel and then assigned to records and users through a dropdown list of the defined options.

Accessing the Control Panel

Administrators can access the Control Panel by clicking on the cog icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen. From there, they can select System Entities from the menu to the left of the screen - this is where Departments and Positions are managed.

Creating and Managing Departments

To create a new department select the 'Add' button at the top of the table.

Refer to the below for the available fields:

• Name: Give the department an appropriate name.
• Parent: When you have set up more than one department already, you can assign a department to be a parent of another. This is the department that is the next level above in the organisation's hierarchy. This can be utilised for permissions and approvals in the following ways:
  • Permissions: When a user is assigned to a department that is a parent to one or more departments, they will be able to see all records assigned to those 'child' departments. This effectively extends their permissions.
  • Approvals: Where the system needs to reference a user's department to identify who is required to approve a submission (as set in your Approver Definitions), the system will check the specified department first (e.g. the submitter's department, or the department which owns the plan / contract record), then if it cannot find a suitable approver it will escalate up to look at the assigned 'parent' department.

All other fields against setting up a department (i.e. Type, Description, Location, etc.) are for information purposes only. They can be left blank or filled out if desired, but they do not have an impact in the system.

Select the 'Create' button when completed. It can then be assigned to a user in their profile (see Managing User Access) and assigned to a record.

Once Departments have been created you can then find them in the list and select the 'Edit' button on the right to make changes to it.

Creating and Managing Positions

When looking to create and use Positions, please consider the following:

• They are only useful to be created and assigned to a user if they are going to be referenced for an approval definition. See here for more information: Approver Definitions.
  • For example, the system can find who should approve a record by finding a user in a defined position in a specific department.
• They don't necessarily need to be a person's job role title. 
• They should be created as basic and consistent as possible to be best utilised.
  • For example, you should not be including a department name in the position (eg. Director of Procurement). Instead, it should just be named 'Director' and then assigned to all users who should have this position. Their department is set as per the above, so does not need to be repeated in the position name.

To create a new position select the 'Add' button at the top of the table. Then, you just need to define the name of it and select the 'Ok' button.

Once the position has been created you can then assign it to a user in their profile. See more information here: Managing User Access.