The following terms and concepts are important to understanding how permissions and roles work:
Subdomain: A private area represented as a new branch in the Connections and Projects tree. When an organization decides to use Iasta SmartSource, they are allocated a private area for setting up their own environment with companies, users, projects, contracts, etc. This private area is called a subdomain. A subdomain is administered by a single organization.
Company: Organizational unit for grouping and identifying users and projects within a single subdomain.
Company Type: There are two types of companies: sponsor companies and bidder companies. Sponsor companies are part of the organization that owns and administers the subdomain. Bidder companies are generally supplier companies who are competing with other suppliers to win sourcing contracts with sponsor companies. Bidder companies can also represent supplier companies with contracts with the sponsor organization.
Contract: A collection of fields, forms and documents for storing, organizing and managing contract information. Contracts are created and viewed in the Iasta SmartSource Contract Management module.
User: An individual with a name registered to a company in a subdomain. Users have a unique log-on name and password for accessing Iasta SmartSource.
Permission: Rights to a specific action in Iasta SmartSource. Each permission has two parts which can be assigned to users:
Access: the user can perform the action
Grant: the user can assign the permission to other users/roles.
Eligibility Permission: Rights to make users eligible for permissions at a lower level. Each eligibility permission has two parts which can be assigned to users:
Access: the user is eligible for roles that include permission to perform the action described by permission
Grant: the user can assign project/survey roles that include the permission to other users.
Role: A collection of permissions that are assigned to users. Roles enable you to create standard sets of permissions and apply or modify them quickly and easily. For instance, if you have several project administrators in your company, you can create a project administrator role and assign the same set of permissions to all project administrators. Users can be assigned more than one role. Users are assigned a single system-wide role when they are created but they can be assigned a different project role for every project where they are a team member and a different survey role for every survey where they are a survey participant.
Project: A collection of sourcing activities and artifacts created for the general purpose of assisting a company in sourcing commodities or services. Iasta SmartSource projects have a named list of participants and usually revolve around scheduled data collection or bidding activities. Projects may include:
Lots & Items
Live Events (forward or reverse auctions or sealed bids)
Surveys which can be used as RFIs, RFQs and/or RFPs
Documents containing instructions and other information about lots and items, the sponsor company, quality standards, delivery requirements, etc.
Forum for attendees to exchange questions and answers
Project Management tasks/Project timelines.
Survey: A structured electronic document that is associated with a project. Surveys are composed by a sponsor company for the purpose of collecting information. Most frequently they are used to collect information from bidder (supplier) companies but they can also be used for internal data collection. Iasta SmartSource provides features and permissions to support the complete life cycle of a survey:
Users at sponsor companies create, edit, and publish surveys.
Users at bidder (supplier) or sponsor companies respond to surveys by answering questions, attaching supporting documents, and submitting them for evaluation and review.
Users at sponsor companies evaluate responses by scoring individual questions according to metrics put in place by the survey creator.
Users at the sponsor companies review responses and evaluations.