Gatekeeper Webinar Series: Success Hours

Transcript | 13 December 2022

Daniel Barnes: So, hey everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

This is our first ever Success Hours session here at Gatekeeper.

I'm Daniel Barnes, I'm Gatekeeper’s Community Manager, and I was also a former customer in my previous role in the Fintech sector.Today, we're going to be covering off some of our recently launched features, giving you an insight into how they're being used by some of our customers already, and the benefits that they're getting from them.

And hopefully that you'll soon be able to get from them as well.

This should give you some inspiration for how your own processes can be improved or made more efficient.

We'll be providing a sneak peak on a forthcoming feature release for which we'll be looking for beta customers to help us test in the New Year.

If you're interested in this, then, please contact your customer Success Manager after this session.

I'm joined today by Gatekeeper's Head of Product, Sam Pavitt. And he's going to be on hand to help with your questions. So this session today will be split into two sections.

The first is a recording of a conversation between Sam and I, where we go through some feature demonstrations and the practical scenarios where those features can help you in your day-to-day work.

And the second part is a live Q&A, where we'll be answering questions submitted during the session.

So, if at any time during this webinar, you want to submit a question, you can do so via the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. You don't need to wait until the end.

As soon as the question pops in mind, put it into the Q&A area, we'll probably get back to you as the webinar is running.

Your questions can be on topics we cover today, or relate to any other points of interest you have with Gatekeeper as well as features you like to see covered in future Success Hours.

So, without any additional pause, let's get into this.

Hey, everyone! Welcome to our first ever Success Hours here at Gatekeeper. In this Webinar we're going to cover 5 specific features and updates on our platform that we think will make your lives a little bit easier.

And they may be updates and features that you've not come across yet, so we want to bring some awareness to those.

My name is Daniel Barnes, and I'm the Community Manager here at Gatekeeper. I'm joined by Sam Pavitt, who's Head of Product.

Throughout this webinar, you can leave any questions in the Q&A. We'll come to those at the end of the webinar depending on time, the type of question. We may need to get back to you after the webinar.

We can always look at producing some content around that to help you as a reference point afterwards. But let's kick this off.

Sam, do you want to get started here?

Sam Pavitt: Thank you, Daniel. It's great to be able to share some of these exciting new features with you all. We’ll be taking you through some powerful enhancements we’ve added to the platform and we'll give you the context and information you need on how to get the most out of Gatekeeper.

Let's get into it.

Let's start with the powerful reporting capabilities in Gatekeeper that will give you visibility of your contracts and vendor records to make the most of the data you have.

We've added contract data to the vendor repository to give you a consolidated view of both records in one common report.

You can now merge the two data sets into a single view and export the new customer report that you've built.

Like in this example, you can now customise the views in your repository, as well as workflow list view to organise the information however you like.

Filter the data to display what's most relevant to you, and save as many views as you like.

Toggle between the views to quickly get the data you want to see.

What we realised, when we looked through a huge amount of ideas on the Ideas Forum, spoke to a load of customers, and looked into their reporting requirements.

We realised that, actually, it was the workflow form data that they wanted to get out.

So by creating that Kanban list view and allowing you to add all of the columns, including custom data and export it, we solved the whole host of reporting issues with that one huge feature.

DB: Yeah, because you want the data as you're doing in the work. And it's great afterwards as well.

SP: Yeah, exactly, even if the contracts are mid-flight on a workflow.That's kind of helpful for SOC audits and things as well, because it's a snapshot and that's a reality. It may not yet be in the repository.

But you still want that snapshot at the point that the request comes in on it, right?

DB: Yeah, and on those SOC reviews. Fundamentally, they're like, what are you doing right now with every supplier / vendor contract that you're putting through? Are they following the policies and processes that you've told us last year that you are going to adhere to? Can you show it?

And you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I can show it.

And you want to just be able to go into Gatekeeper and be like, hey, here you go, but you want to be able to export it. And that's a really good point.

Because when I was doing the SOC audits earlier this year, maybe like January/February time, that feature wasn't there yet.

SP: Yeah.

DB: So effectively, what I had to do was sit on a video call with the auditor, and just like, show them the Kanban. And then they were like, oh…

SP: Click, click click.

DB: Yeah, can you screenshot all of this? And I was like, oh no, I don't want to screenshot every card, every phase and more.SP: I forget if I spoke to you at that time, but had we spoken to you, you probably would have come up with kind of your exact reporting requirements, without realising you just needed to actually get your hands on all that workflow data and export it.And that's what happened. We spoke to so many customers.

They each had a fully understandable but kind of unique report that they needed. Or like, oh it'd be great if you could structure this exact report for us.

And we looked at them, before we know it, it would almost be like doubling, trebling the size of our already extensive reports.

Whereas by creating a list view, the saved views and the export functionality, you know the world is your oyster in terms of exactly what you need to create and export.

Next up, we've given our Employee Portal dashboard a fresh new look, with some general usability and visual improvements.

As you can see, there is a new tile format for company forms with some extra information about particular workflows, if you hover over the ‘i’ icon. We've also made the My Open Form section clearer and the columns can be sorted.

We've replaced the percentage bar under ‘Progress’ with these orange and green pills, showing the total number of phases and the exact stage of each Open Form, so it's nice and clear.

Next up, is a new enhancement to our Touchless Contracts forms, and how they can improve your ability to safeguard compliance, which is crucial for businesses that want to succeed.

We've added a new way of generating customised links for internal users that allows you to generate fully compliant records ready for e-signature with minimal manual input.

With Touchless Contracts, you can enable the business to self-serve, issue contract templates like NDAs or influencer agreements, that have already been approved by legal, and therefore speed up commercial conversations with vendors.

This helps your legal team move away from low value work and focus on any redlines when they come back in, which is where their expertise is better suited.

This functionality has been a huge success, but many of you provided feedback that when the Touchless Form is submitted onto a workflow, there was no way of knowing who the internal requester was.

Now, using individual personal links, Gatekeeper will capture and store the initial Requester as the Internal Contract Owner for any record generated via Touchless Contracts, so that they can be assigned to the workflow cards as they come in.

It also gives you a record of how a contract was initiated, as well as managed and signed throughout the whole process.

You can easily access and present this information to your compliance team and auditors.

When we first shipped Touchless Contracts, it was really well received.

But you know, people are saying, we're getting all these requests coming in. We don't actually know from the business who initiated this request.

And so we developed the Personal Links to solve that. Now when they land, you know, they're assigned to the owner on the workflow that initially requested it.

Let's move on to a new feature that will empower you to take control of your contract approval process.

Workflow approvers can now instantaneously approve or reject workflow cards with a single click via email.

It makes life much easier. If you're the approval of a workflow card, you'll no longer have to log into Gatekeeper when you receive an email asking you to action the card.

You have all the information you'll need in the body of the email, such as the request or the contract type, and the value to help you make a decision there.

Did you ever have a scenario where you were kind of on the road or something, or in a meeting, you wanted to approve a card but you're having to log into the application? Or you just don't have time?

DB: Yeah, it's a good question. Actually, my CFO was someone who, effectively, would just work off her phone for large portions of the day. Like in the evening, she would just be on her phone working.

And she, effectively, had 2 requests from Gatekeeper, which was being able to approve stuff that she needed to. If she had… If her team didn't do it for her.

So could she do that on a phone, and could she sign contracts on her phone? That was kind of her 2 main ones.

For me, like if i'm being honest, I was a remote worker using Gatekeeper. So I was just like plugged into Gatekeeper at all times.

Didn't travel too much with Covid restrictions. Couldn’t go to see my suppliers and vendors, sadly.

But just thinking a little bit broader, I think it's a really good use case. And one thing which is great is typically when you're working in Procurement, Legal, Contract Management, you're always talking to one another.

So you always know what's coming through, in terms of what needs to be approved, or what needs to be signed off to get through to like the next phase, and that might be in your 1:1s, your team meetings. Things like that.

SP: And that's the key point that we found with this one, you know.

Previously, we thought, well you know, of course, you need to log into the application, and look through all the form data to review everything before you make a decision.You know, it's almost bad practice just to be able to approve like that without logging in. But then we realised, to your point, you know you might have been in meetings all morning talking about this stuff.

You're fully aware of it, you know all the details. and so in those scenarios where you can just go ahead and click ‘approve’.

You know, with the limited data that we give in the email there, you've got everything you need to make a decision and just go ahead and click for mobile or whatever it is. One click approval.

DB: Yeah, I think the basic information there is more than enough to just remind you of like, oh, in that call earlier today or that slack message, I know that this is coming my way. I need to approve it. I don't need to check in. I trust my team. They've done everything.

I'm just gonna hit ‘approve’ whether that's, you know, via a desktop browser, or on my phone when I'm out and about.

Yeah, I really like it. Another thing - this might sound silly in some ways, but it knocks off that little bit of time.

And time is, for me, the most valuable thing, because high volume work that might add a… Logging into Gatekeeper, going into the Kanban, going on to the card. That might be 20 to 30 seconds.

And if you're doing approvals. I mean, I'm just trying to think, some days it felt like I was doing 10, 20, 30 approvals.

SP: Manual and laborious stuff. We call those features ‘quality of life upgrades’ in the Product Team at Gatekeeper.

DB: Yeah.

SP: Yes, small features that make a huge difference.

DB: Yeah, I like that. Quality of life upgrades, did you say? Quantity of life upgrades.

SP: Yeah. Quality of life upgrades.

DB: I like that.

SP: Last but not least, is an extension of our integrated market intelligence tool, Market IQ. For those of you that are not familiar with Market IQ, it's our integration with Creditsafe, the world's most used provider of online business credit reports.

Vendor credit scores are pulled from thousands of data points across multiple vetted financial, industry and news sources.

It gives you visibility into how your third party vendors are doing in terms of their financial and credit performance without having to manually check for these updates.

With this new extension, you can now trigger vendors onto a workflow, for example if they have a sudden drop in their credit rating.

Our feed tracks real-time updates to credit risks, which can be used to automatically begin a mitigation process as soon as a change is detected.

It helps you spot the warning signs early, so you can take mitigation measures before it's too late.

The Market IQ Financials. So the triggers that were released for this, in terms of like in your previous life, when you first onboarded a vendor.

Did you conduct initial financial checks? And then, if so, you know, how did you monitor those ongoing?

DB: Very good question. And I think the very traditional way of doing it before you have, like these continuous monitoring data feeds, is that almost everyone will use something like Dun & Bradstreet, right? Like a very basic report. So you'll get a Dun’s number, and you'll get some sort of document that will tell you, in as much detail, what's going on.

But largely to Procurement teams, when they read it, it means absolutely nothing.

And you can spend your time.

SP: Is this good? I think it’s good.

DB: Yeah, you kind of pretended that you understand it. And then you might have to go over to Finance. But like, hey, Finance, can you just double check this? Make sure you're happy with it.

And truth be told, Finance typically don't have much time to be then doing something that really should be with a Procurement, or Supplier Management, or Vendor Management team.

Because it should be easy.

SP: And also what you are asking at that point it's like it's almost a non-question, isn't it? Because you're saying, hey, we're about to onboard this vendor at this current point in time.

Their financial standings look okay, I think. Is that all right?

You know, but not nothing to say next week or the next month or next year. They don't take, because, as we see from these live feeds.

We have thousands of data points all coming in every day, all these triggers going off across the network of feeds that we monitor.

And financial scores are often like this, even on some quite large companies that you'd think you wouldn't even have to worry about.

DB: The bigger companies seem to have quite large fluctuations at times. But then it dips down, and it shoots back up within like a week at times, and it could be like expired documentation or something very basic that hasn't quite pulled through yet.

But yeah, the continuous monitoring is actually where the value is on all of this.

So doing that point in history is okay. It offers very little value apart from a very top-level risk check at that onboarding phase. So yeah, like, go back.

Primary to your question. Yes, we do some sort of finance check. It would be very basic.

It would take a lot of time, and it would only tell us if they were good up to that point. And then afterwards, there's nothing.

It'd be like depending on your renewal cycles or your procurement policy, you might have in there that you would renew a finance check every year, and that seems very alien, right?

Because I know, for example, I use Monso for my personal finances, and I like to check my credit score every month, almost.

Just to get a read out, and when it's in business and you're wanting to ensure continuity of supply, a resilient supply chain, you need to know like every day.

If their finances are in good order.

SP: You need to be monitoring it 24/7. And just go back to you. You'd get the you'd manually pull this D&B report, check it with Finance, and then presumably, you'd add that to what the vendor record in Gatekeeper? Manually upload that file?

DB: That's it, Sam. Gatekeeper, right? As well. But yeah, it's like a…Yeah, yeah, that is exactly so pre-Market IQ. That's what I was having to do, or my team was having to do.

I'm just thinking about like I was dealing with vendor onboarding when I first got into procurement back in 2015.

We literally had one person in a commercial team in the government, in the Ministry of Defence. He was responsible for doing these vendor and supplier credit checks with Dun & Bradstreet. That was literally they paid someone to do it.

SP: Just to say, yeah, look them up and download them. And again, it's a point in time, isn't it? With Mark IQ, it's the other thing.

When we spoke to customers, they're really helpless. Saying, you know we need an audit history record of what's happened here.

So we automatically pull in the credit report from Creditsafe, store it against the vendor object.

And as soon as any of those data points change, let's say, credit rating goes from A to C overnight, we automatically pull in the new PDF, but keep the old one as well.

So we add those to the repositories for that snapshot. And yeah, like in your prior life. If it's someone's, some poor soul’s job to manually be doing that. It's a, it probably is, a full-time job.

DB: Yeah, yeah, it's painful where I think at that point we had 1,200 different suppliers. I seem to recall, and there's more. Can be on different entities within, like the same company.

Yeah, super painful and to your point about the updated record.

That's an auditors dream, right? To see all of that being stored automatically, and then having the workflow that will trigger, say, like you said, the score goes from an A to a C.

And then have it in the remedial steps like, oh, Procurement, I've reviewed this. Finance has reviewed this. Maybe we're going to monitor them for a month or so and keep them in this live, this live process.

Just to see, does that score go back up, or does it go down?

And do we need to communicate this with them, or do whatever.

SP: That's a pertinent point. Yeah, we found this out the hard way. So we developed that initial workflow trigger. To say, you know, trigger this vendor onto a workflow if the financial score is D, E or F.

And what happens is we get this almost like a recursive loop, where they go for a mitigation workflow. And a D, they might improve a bit to a C, and they'll trigger on again.

So we had to add this additional trigger in, which is essentially a trending up or trending down.

So now, if you stack those, we have - hey, trigger this vendor onto a workflow if the financial rating is D or F, and is trending down.

You mitigate that kind of recursive loop that can happen.

So there we are. I hope you found the overview of these features useful.

For more information on anything you've seen today, please do reach out to your Customer Success Manager, who will be happy to help.

Before we wrap up, I'd like to give you a very quick insight into a Market IQ enhancement that will be landing very soon in the New Year.

We've partnered with SecurityScorecard to connect each of your vendor to their live cybersecurity monitoring service.

You'll be able to view the cyber rating of your vendors directly in Gatekeeper and trigger any poor-performing vendors onto a workflow, as well as link through to the full details of their individual factor scores in SecurityScorecard.

For any of you interested in getting early access to Market IQ Cyber, please do let us know, and we'll be happy to add you to our Beta customer list.

DB: Hey everyone, thanks so much for checking out the webinar. So far we've got a few questions, and I thought it'd be useful just to go through some of them.

For everyone's benefit, because they're pretty pertinent to a whole raft of people listening in.

So to start with, for a user to access the Employer Portal, do they need to be added to Gatekeeper in advance?

So that's say, someone in your business that you want to use that. Yeah. So the simple answer is yes.

And you can invite anyone within your business to the Employee Portal, and you do this by going into Settings, and then go to Users, and from here you need to choose the correct permission.

So the correct permission for an Employee Portal user is to select ‘Employee Portal Only’ under the ‘Role’ section.

And that way, they won't have access to the rest of Gatekeeper, maybe, like you do already.

They’ll have a much more simplified view. That's probably more than enough for them to use.

Question 2 that we have here.

There's a question that says once I've added Market IQ to a vendor. Can I remove it later?

So to remove a vendor already linked to Market IQ.

So, for example, if it's the wrong vendor, if you no longer wish to track them, you can scroll to the bottom of the Market IQ page and click.

There's a button that says ‘Remove synchronisation with Creditsafe’ and that way that will pause that link to your server, and they'll no longer be synced up with the Market IQ feed.

SP: I’ve got one here, Daniel, around Saved Views.

DB: Sure, Sam.

SP: Which says, can I share my Saved Views with someone else? The answer is no, currently you can’t. Although, good question, because we are working on that. So stay tuned for that next year.DB: Yes, that’s a good point, Sam. I was just thinking, as we will go through that, if anyone has any ideas or any suggestions about Gatekeeper.

We've got the Ideas Forum that you can access at the top of the page in your Gatekeeper Dashboard or tenant view.

And you can suggest any updates or changes to the platform that we can then review.

Just checking in. Sam, were there any more questions here?

SP: I’ve answered several throughout. There’s one other good one that's just come in, around expiring files. So someone's got an issue at the moment where they're struggling to, essentially, see any attachments that are expiring.

We do have a workflow trigger available for that. So you can absolutely automate that process.

DB: And just actually that’s a really good point. That is fundamentally one of my favourite uses of Gatekeeper.

SP: I know you’re a fan, Daniel.

DB: Yeah! I'll give a quick story here whilst we've got a couple of minutes. In terms of the team that I was in and my team members.We were, at times, chasing up hundreds of documents a month, and we did that manually before we had Gatekeeper.

And we set up a file expiry workflow which triggered a file onto that workflow. So it could be a SOC 2 document and ISO 27001 document.

They were the two very precious documents that I was concerned with, sort of 30 days before their end date, and it would notify the point of contact at the vendor.

It’d pull them into the workflow and they would update it.

And we would build in some review phases within, like our Supplier Management team and also within the InfoSec team for those kinds of documents as well.

And I'm telling you now, I wish I knew how long it was taking before we started. At times it felt like it would be months, and it just made it super efficient and freed up the entire team's time to go, and actually, you know, engage with the vendors, have good conversations, build relationships, and do all of that exciting stuff.

SP: Yeah. Great great story, Daniel. We will also reach out via the CSMs to help you guys set this up.

So don’t just take our word on the chat for this. We're not going to leave you to configure it completely for yourself.

We'll reach out and show you exactly how to get your hands on that trigger to implement this for yourselves.

DB: Yeah, I appreciate it, Sam. Sam, any last words for you on this webinar?

SP: I'm just looking here. It looks like a few people are typing questions now.We'll actually wrap up here, but again feel free to send them in. If it's anything that you haven't asked during the webinar, reach out to us at any point by email. And of course we'll get back to you and answer as best we can.

DB: Yeah, thanks for joining everyone and see you hopefully on the next one.

SP: Thanks, guys.