Floriday for buyers Developer Stef takes you along with the development of the purchasing dashboard 

Developer Stef is continuing his work from home during the corona-crisis, and works on the development of Floriday for buyers. He develops the purchasing dashboard. He does this together with JEM-id colleagues Remco and Noah. We asked him a couple of questions to provide more insight into the status of the purchasing dashboard and how this dashboard is created with input from customers. 

What is the purchasing dashboard?

You, as a customer, will be able to use the purchasing dashboard to fill out your orders digitally. After that, the purchasing dashboard links your orders to supply lines that have been set up in Floriday. Supply lines are the supply of flowers and plants that growers have available online. When there is a match between your orders and the supply lines, an order is immediately created. This will be the case for about 80% of the orders. The remaining 20% of the orders, that do not match, will be displayed in the purchasing dashboard. Using the purchasing dashboard, you can then very easily find alternatives for these non-matching lines or request a specific supply from a grower. The grower will have limited time (a deadline will be provided) to reply to a request. 

You can put your orders in your purchasing dashboard in various ways. You can put them in by hand, upload an Excel list and add orders from your own system Florecom and make API-links between your own software and Floriday.

In the future, you will be able to follow your orders in the purchasing dashboard with track and trace. You can see the exact status of your order. In addition to this, you will also be able to easily cooperate with colleagues. You can see which of your colleagues is working on which supply line. This ensures you don’t do double the work. 

The purchasing dashboard is one of the functionalities that are being developed in Floriday for customers. This will allow customers to conduct business 100% Digital. In addition to the purchasing dashboard, we are also developing other functionality for customers; we will provide more information regarding this later.
 

Why is the Floriday purchasing dashboard being developed?

The Floriday purchasing dashboard is being developed to allow purchase orders that do not perfectly match the supply of the growers, to continue and change into a valid sales order for the grower. The purchasing dashboard will, among other things, allow you to conduct business 100% Digital.

The purchasing dashboard in practice

Sometimes, a customer places a purchasing order on something from which the supply is just expired or the prices have been changed. To make sure that this does not result in rejection, these purchase orders will be visible in the purchasing dashboard under the tab ‘action required’. In this tab, you will find the order lines that differ from your request based on: price, load or availability. The customer then has several options to process the purchase order: 

• You put out the purchase order to a grower with the adjusted values.
• You make a request based on the purchase order, which the grower will approve and make sure that there is an accurate supply line to place the purchase order.
• You find an alternative supply line to then place an order. This can result in a purchase order on a different product from a different supplier.

In addition to processing the placed purchase orders through the API-link or Florecom orders, it will also be possible to input your own purchase orders through the purchasing dashboard. You can do this by hand, or by importing an Excel file based on a template.

How is the Floriday purchasing dashboard for customers being developed and tested?

We have started to organise ‘ideation sessions’ with various customers from the industry. During these sessions, we have run or ideas and designs of the purchasing dashboard by future users. Feedback from these sessions was incorporated in a new version of the designs, which we then used as the template for our technical developments. We want to develop an efficiently working system through the interaction and testing with future users, so customers can immediately work with the dashboard. In every development stage of the purchasing dashboard, different customers are involved.

Which functionality of the purchasing dashboard do you expect that customers will use the most?

There will be customers who won’t need the purchasing dashboard at all. They have a link through API or Florecom, which allows them to only place accurate purchasing orders. The working method will remain the same for them. The purchasing dashboard is mostly interesting for smaller to medium-sized customers or road carriers. They can use the Floriday purchasing dashboard to create purchase orders themselves, without having to use an external software package. In addition to this, customers will use the purchasing dashboard to change a purchasing order into a request for the grower. Or to change purchase orders, which supply is no longer available to a purchase order for a different grower. That means there is always a fitting supply available.

Do you have any tips for users of the purchasing dashboard?

We have various ideation sessions on the agenda where we will show the purchasing dashboard so that future users can provide feedback. So this is more of an invitation than a tip: Would you like to contribute to the refinement of the purchasing dashboard? That’s possible! Sign up for an ideation session. During an ideation session, you and other customers will provide feedback on the functionality that Stef, Remco and Noah have developed for the purchasing dashboard online. You will receive a sneak peek at the purchasing dashboard and test it. Sign up here for an ideation session for the purchasing dashboard.

And finally, the following question: When will customers be able to use the purchasing dashboard?

At the end of the first quarter, we delivered the first live version, a ‘minimum viable product’, or in other words, a base product, in which it is possible to process Florecom orders and search for different purchase orders as an alternative. During the second quarter of the year, we will be asking several customers step by step to test the functionality and refine it to a cohesive whole.

More information 

• Would you like to contribute to the refinement of the purchasing dashboard? Sign up here for an ideation session.
• Do you want to contact a Floriday expert directly? Contact us at: info@floriday.io or call +31 (0)174 352070.