Over the past few years, I have been working a lot in the Procurement portion of SolarWinds. I track all of our licenses and subscriptions including start/end dates and financial values. I have noticed a few things that could be improved.
- The search functionality in contracts is lacking. If I do a partial word search it often does not bring up anything. For example, if I am looking for the contract for our SolarWinds licenses, which I titled "SolarWinds Annual Subscription (2022-2023)" if I type in just "Solar" nothing comes up. I need to type in "SolarWinds" before the contract will pop up in the search.
- The purchase section of the contract allows you to add in the vendor when entering an invoice. This seems to be the end of that relationship as the vendor portion is not clickable. I think it would be beneficial to make this a clickable field that would take you to the vendor record. Currently, if I am in a contract and I need to look up the vendor contact info I need to leave the contract module and click on the vendor's module to get this information.
- In the vendor section, it would be great if it showed a list of contracts and POs related to the vendor. Why are we connecting the PO or Contract to a specific vendor if it cannot be used to aggregate data in the vendor record?
- The reports I download from Purchase Orders do not give me useable data. For example, I have a PO with 42 line items. When I downloaded the report instead of showing me a list of the line items for the PO it added them all in a single cell block as one big text string. This makes it difficult to work with the data outside of the system. The other columns did not fare any better. For example, the "Purchaser" column listed not just the purchaser's name but all of their profile data including title, last login, manager, etc.
Overall I would like to see the search functionality updated, more connection between Purchase Orders, Contracts, and Vendors, and better reporting capabilities.
