Adding Third Party Contacts & Suppliers.

Graham18 · ‎06-15-2015

Hello!

I am in the process of configuring our Service-Now instance and would like to query the best practise for adding our Third Party Suppliers & Third Party Contacts.

My guess was to create 'Third Party' under groups and add the companys/contacts through this way?

Any help/suggestions would be apperciated

Thanks,

Graham

Uncle Rob · ‎06-15-2015

I'd put the organizations in the Company table and ensure the vendor field is set to true. This is where more advanced features like vendor performance management and vendor ticketing will look for foundation data. As for dealing with the contacts, there is a table for that ("vendor contacts"), but you have to enable the Vendor Performance plugin in order to get access to it.

Remember! Unless you lock it down manually, anyone in the User table has at least the possibility of logging into the system.

Is your intent for these 3rd parties to log into and interact with your ServiceNow instance?

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Uncle Rob · ‎06-15-2015

Sounds like you're putting the companies in the right spot. Even though the module says Vendors, you're still putting it in the core_company table, It should just have the attribute "vendor = true".

I'd still advise taking a prototype or demo system and see if the Vendor Performance route is better just to leverage Vendor Contacts. Though I'm not a huge fan of the Assessments module, this is 90% of what the Vendor Performance module installs, and it IS an interesting if difficult to use capability in the tool.

Oh, another thing I just remembered about putting these people in the User table. They'll be selectable as the "consumer" for any Task type that links back to sys_user.

Graham18 · ‎06-15-2015

My plan is to have either a UI Action type Button such as 'Add Third Party Contact' or within the creation of a new user have a True/False field to identify said person.

As alot of the inforamtion in the 'Users' table wont be needed against a third party contact.

The contact will only be one person per third party for the time being, but will be able to add a related table for sys_user to add multiple if needed.

Uncle Rob · ‎06-15-2015

If you're already thinking multiple contacts per Vendor, I'd strongly advise turning on Vendor Performance plugin just to leverage hte Contacts table.

Graham18 · ‎06-15-2015

Ive activated the Plug In for 'Vendor Contacts' how can I make this table pull from sys_user?

Or does this add the contact under the sys_user table when created or are these two seperate tables not related in any way.

Uncle Rob · ‎06-15-2015

Vendor Contacts is its own stand-alone table. This is on purpose since for any one vendor you may have multiple contacts, and could therefore "pollute" your User table with hundreds of entries that aren't really users at your company.

Remember, User Table = capacity to log in. You might personally remember to control that rigidly, but that control knowledge has to survive your tenure as ServiceNow lead for your company. There's also the problem of keeping the user info up to date. As Vendor contacts most of the data about their activity and contact info is stored in some other company's directory. Generally its best to reserve User table for *your* company's users.