Success Hours Webinar Series: Custom Data

Success hours Webinar: Custom Data

Transcript | 27 May 2023

Daniel Barnes: Just as everyone's coming in, I'm just going to plug something real quick that I think all of you will find useful. We have a podcast called Procurement Reimagined.It launched in February. Episodes go out every two weeks.

And we just had a really good episode drop today with Michelle Vita who's-- I'm going to butcher her title but she's Senior Vice President, Director of Procurement / Strategic Sourcing at Datadog.

I think that's it. It's a very long title that she has. And we discussed agile methodology regarding procurement so agile procurement, how it can work, how it can benefit you.

I think a whole bunch of you will probably find it really useful even if you're more on the legal contract management side of things. It's a really good listen so check that out if you have a spare 30 minutes or so.

Maybe we'll just give it maybe like 30 more seconds.

Lucy Chu: Yeah. I was going to say I see the participants kind of slowly stopping coming in so we'll get started in a couple of seconds here.

DB: Sounds good.I think we're good now, Lucy. It looks like numbers have sort of stopped coming in. So let's make a start for sure.

LC: All right. Perfect.So hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the third webinar in the Success Hours series. My name is Lucy Chu. And I'm the learning experience lead here at Gatekeeper.

And I'm joined by James Ince, our learning experience designer, and Daniel Barnes, our community manager.

So this series of webinars will help you upskill in all areas of the Gatekeeper platform.

And before I get started, I wanted to review the three pillars of Gatekeeper, which are restore visibility, take control, and safeguard compliance.

So restore visibility is focused on where your data is, how people can view it and use it, and ensuring that you know everything that is happening with your vendors and contracts. And today we're finishing up the visibility pillar with our custom data webinar.

Second, take control is focused on your vendor and contract processes. And this is where we ensure that you have the digital processes in place to vet your vendors, and get the most out of your contracts, and ensure that everything is trackable.

Now these two form the foundation for safeguarding compliance, which is based on a combination of third party and contractual risk management. And this is where you can automate your vendor compliance, identify and track risks, and move from a more reactive to proactive way of working with risk management.

The webinar series will follow each of these three pillars, encompassing all that you need to know about each one before we move to the next.

So today's webinar is going to be about custom data. And we're going to cover the following topics.

What custom data is and how you can use it. How to better create-- sorry-- how to create custom data for your vendor and contract records for better visibility. And how to add the custom data to a workflow so you can take control of your vendor and contract processes.

Now the next session that we'll be holding in June will be focused entirely on workflows. And we want to show you how custom data bridges the visibility and the control pillars and will come full circle to show you how data collected and workflows will be visible in your vendor and contract records.

So before we get started out, we have a poll. And I'll pass it over to Daniel to launch that poll.

DB: Hey everyone. So this poll that we're launching is pretty much the same as I think all the other sessions. And really what we're trying to understand is the level of skill or understanding that you have around Gatekeeper.

So just if you can let us know. And what this enables us to do is, as we're going through it, we can kind of tailor what we're showing you in certain ways just to help you out.I'm just going to add this webinar episode is kind of like a slightly weird one in that it kind of bridges that visibility to control pillar. And some of the stuff we are showing you today does dive in to workflows.

And we will cover it way more on workflows in all the next sessions. We're going to really focus in on getting the most out of Gatekeeper via workflows.

But the stuff we're going to show you today is quite simple, quite basic. James is going to walk you through it. And James is an absolute pro at workflows. I think he kind of lives and breathes it in that way.

James Ince: You're too kind, Daniel.But yeah, you're right. We are going to be showing workflows today just because, like Lucy said, we're going to show some ways you can use custom data. And it would be odd to not show one of the most powerful tools there. But yeah.

I guess it's worth mentioning that we'll be going into a lot more detail in the webinar take control part of the series. So don't be worried if there's some things that maybe you don't get straight away because we'll cover them later on.

DB: Yeah. And we're going to be diving into sort of like the settings of Gatekeeper. And for some of you, you may not have seen this. And how I would think about this is if you're just like an everyday user of Gatekeeper-- you use it for data, you go and do some stuff in workflows, that's great.

What we're going to show you today is hopefully going to allow you to feel way more comfortable with using our platform so that you can become effectively like a super user.Well, probably within the next few months, you would have such a detailed understanding of how to use this platform you'll pretty much be able to do just about everything you need to do with it.

And just to add to that, if you are someone who isn't currently an admin within Gatekeeper, and you see this webinar content and feel like you could do it, definitely give it a go. Try it out. It's definitely not as hard as it can sometimes seem. And James will kind of show that.

Connie, can we close this poll now?

And then we can just have a quick look. Great. So James, just for context-- I'm not sure if you're seeing this on your screen. 52% of people are beginners and learning the basics. So I think this is actually a really good session for them. And then moderate level is primarily the next one, 42%. So newbies to get used to it.

So yeah, this should be a perfect episode for everyone here. A couple of responses for advanced and expert users, which is great as well. Hopefully, you'll learn a thing or two there. But yeah, Lucy, back over to you.

LC: Wonderful. So yeah. Let's get started with today's custom data webinar. To start, Daniel, could you briefly go over what custom data is to really set that foundation for today's webinar?

DB: Yeah, sure. James, can I just ask, can you get a tenant up and maybe we can show on screen some of the stuff I may go over? And when I start talking about custom data, it's really hard to talk about it in isolation so I'm going to talk about three things here, which is core data, custom data, and workflow form fields.And I don't want to make this too complex to start with so core data is all the core data fields that we have in Gatekeeper. James, could you maybe just show this? It's probably very self-explanatory but it's great to have this as a visual.

And this is typically everything that you have from the vendor name, the status of the vendor or the contract, whether it's been approved or not.

James is sharing everything on screen here. I think this is in the record, right, James?

JI: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

DB: Yeah. So these are fields that, effectively, like how I look at it, they're out of the box. They're out of the box data fields within gatekeeper. Now custom data is anything you want to create.

And we'll show you how to create it in just a moment. But any data point that you want to track, or run reports against, or do something with, you can create your own data point around that. So in the last two sessions, we've showed you a couple of custom data points around ESG and also kind of at the GDPR data privacy point.We had some custom data points around that. And it's really useful there. And then the final one we have is form data. And this is data fields that only show up in your workflows. And I appreciate we haven't covered workflows just yet.

We will do a little bit on that today and in the next sessions. But just think of this as data points that you only need when you're running, say, your vendor onboarding process or your contract review process.

And what I typically use these for is potentially using them for review comments. So when my team, or maybe the InfoSec team, or risk team has reviewed maybe a vendor's SOC certification, they've left some comments within the workflow around that.

We don't necessarily need to have that shown on the contract or the vendor record point but is a very useful point to capture as we're going through working out whether or not we want to onboard a vendor.

James, anything else you want to add? I know you love this stuff here as well.

JI: Yeah. No. That last example you gave was actually a really good one, like review comments, because that's a really common one we see but it also has a foot in both camps, isn't it, because it is something that you generally you might only want to see as part of a process. But there is an approval status field in the core actual metadata Gatekeeper model.And sometimes our clients do add additional status flags depending on, like you just said, SOC audit approvals and things like that. So yeah. There's arguments for where fields should just be contained within a workflow because they're only relevant whilst the process is undergoing all of its steps. But there are some that you maybe do want to report on at a high level.

And it's worth mentioning custom data can perform both of those. You can have custom data in your workflow forms. And obviously, you can report on it and having your data model. But form data is just that more restrictive one. It's only relevant and only visible in the system as part of a workflow.

LC: James, could you actually show us how to create either a vendor or contract custom data field and highlight the different areas that are available to our users

JI: Yeah, definitely. I mean I'm in the perfect screen already to be doing this. And just because Daniel called out ESG that, yeah, we've shown in a couple of webinars because it's a big topic at the moment in the compliance and vendor management world, I guess we can create a group for that in this Gatekeeper environment.

So it's one of those that, like Daniel mentioned, you have to be a high level administrator to get this.You'll need to be able to see in this sidebar menu option settings configuration. And when you go there, you can navigate to the custom data view. And from here, if you're adding custom fields to your data model, you can potentially choose an existing grouping that already exists in your data models.

So I can see in my contracts data model, I've got quite a few that I could choose from.

And similarly, over on the vendor side, I've got some other data groups here. But let's assume we are creating a brand new set of metadata that we want to store about our vendors in this case.

You can go Add, Custom Group, and then give that a name. So I'm just going to-- no use being coy. I'll call this ESG Data.

And then here once, I've named my new group, I just want to say which record I want to attach this to. So contract and vendor are generally the main choices of customisations you want to make to your data model in Gatekeeper.

So once you choose vendor and then you can hit Save at that point. That will create that grouping so you can start building fields.

There's obviously a few different configuration bits below. I guess we can quickly cover that, Daniel, because I think you--

DB: Yeah. Yeah.JI: It's quite interesting for different scenarios.DB: Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say I really like these. And I was just going to just put a reminder, if anyone has any questions as we're going through this, just please let us know in the Q&A.We can spend more time around whatever it is we're showing you.

We're more than OK with doing that. But yeah, James, when I was a Gatekeeper user creating custom data points, I really liked the description field. And I also like some of the other bits that you'll probably show in just a moment.

So yeah. It'd be great to cover some of these.

But maybe just whilst we're here, something that was a little bit newer compared to when I was using Gatekeeper is those bottom three tick boxes under editable locations. Could you maybe break down that and the relevance here to creating a custom data point?

JI: Sure.And this will be a nice segue to when we start talking about the purpose of workflows. Maybe we'll come to this properly when we get into the Take Control series. But when you create data fields in Gatekeeper, you can choose who can populate them and when.

So it's the case that, by default, any new group you add will just be anyone can populate it in any of these places as long as they have the right permissions.

But it might be the case you have certain fields that you don't want anyone to be able to change the values in the repository because you want to lock them down so that people have to follow your designed policies and procedures, like they have to go through a structured vendor onboarding workflow, for instance, to populate these ESG values.

And then, similarly, if you have maybe Gatekeeper as part of a tech ecosystem for you where some things take place in another tool and automatically propagate through to Gatekeeper via an API, you might want to do a similar sort of thing where you lock down this group to say these fields that were populating here can only come from an external system. They can't be fudged within Gatekeeper if that's the right word to use.

DB: Yeah. I think it is.

JI: These are the options you can take to say whereabouts the new fields you're about to create can actually be populated in the system.DB: That's great.And James, just to be like super specific here as well, as always, the editable end repository specifically references what's on the left side of the menu where we've got vendors and contracts.

And you go through to that specific view with regards to whichever vendor or contract you're looking at. You can go and edit it in that area, right?

JI: Exactly. So administrator users, when they're browsing the repository, will be able to edit either populating, changing values, or removing values from those fields directly there. They wouldn't have to go through a workflow process to get those updated.There's one more checkbox I just want to call out here because it's one that back when you were a Gatekeeper user, Daniel, this was-- I keep referencing this making it seem like you were a massive [INAUDIBLE] asking for features all the time, but it was quite a relevant one.

And there's an update I guess we can talk about later. But this feature is quite a cool one, the ability to say collapse by default. And it's especially relevant for forms like ESG forms, which only certain subsets of users in your Gatekeeper environment I guess will really want to be seeing.

And we'll show what this looks like when we go and open up a vendor record in a little bit, just a nice UX update to make your vendor records a bit cleaner when they're being browsed by regular users.

DB: Yeah. That's great.JI: So once I hit Save here, I've got my group ready to go. Obviously, it's empty because I haven't added any fields to it yet. But once we're in it, now we can hit Add New Custom Field. And we'll be able to start building out these additional points we want to start capturing in our data model.So the first step you have to take is choosing the label, the name of a field. And then once you've labeled it, then you can choose the type. And there are quite a few different field types like valid input types that you have available.

There are some free form type ones like single line and multi-line text. And then you get to specific data types like numbers, percentages, and dates.

You also have the option for files in here. But then what we get as well-- and there's quite a few. There's quite a long list in here. I don't want to go through them all one by one because we'll be here all day.

But once you start getting to the bottom of this list, you start arriving at more fixed options. So you have the ability to choose existing vendors, categories, and teams from your Gatekeeper repository.

But these two ones are really useful. So these ones are basically fixed input type, so drop-downs and multi-pick drop-downs that only allow your users to choose from predefined options that you've decided in advance, which are basically-- these ones-- the opposite to the single line text, which is just freeform.

DB: Yeah. I was just going to say those ones are great for like any legislative or regulatory elements that you're thinking about where you're prescribed to do things in a certain way.

So for example, like we used to track data privacy elements. So are they a processor, sub-processor, things like that, and just give a prebuilt list, that little bit of guidance which you can potentially come on to via the description box or for any of these other options here. It's a really good one.JI: Yeah, sure. And yeah. Before I save this field-- and I've just made a simple field here just to confirm what we're doing called ESG plan in place, which is just going to be a yes/no just so we can flag that in our repository whether there is a plan in place with this vendor or not-- you have two options basically for adding guidance to particular fields or context depending on what your users will be seeing or doing when they view this field.DB: So the description option, if you type something in here-- and I'll just think of the word example description because I'm drawing a blank on something interesting to put here-- will basically appear as like subtext underneath the field.

So that's something that's instantly visible to your users. They'll see ESG plan in place. And they'll also immediately see example description below it.JI: Text, however, is a slightly different UX experience. This provides like a hover over eye circle next to the field. So this makes the field look a lot cleaner, either in a form or in your repository.

But it means that users, if they want that additional context, they have to directly go and hover over something to see it. And I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm going to put example text this time just so we can see that happen.

And within both of these, you can embed links to things. So ESG might be something that maybe a regular user or one of your vendors might not understand what qualifies as an ESG plan so that might be something you might want to link to certain standards, either something you have on your own website, like a supplier operating terms and conditions, or maybe some industry standards, definitions of ESG.

So you can put hyperlinks in there so that if users are filling out your forms or viewing information in your repository and your context, maybe you don't want it to be "War and Peace" in here, you can link to external resources directly from this field.

DB: James I was just going to bring up-- we were talking about this, maybe a couple of days ago. I struggle to remember.

But I was saying to you about the description box, and the text and link areas can be a really good way to provide so much guidance to your vendors, your suppliers, because we all know that we all have slightly different ways of talking about things or asking for information, and to ensure that you get the right information just having a one liner to maybe elaborate on what you're after can really help you get the correct information.

And I always think back to vendor onboarding which can, at times, be painful and especially if, for example, procurement teams, vendor management teams, aren't asking very clear, specific questions about that. This is a really good way to speed up your onboarding times.JI: Yeah. You don't want that back and forth like, well, what qualifies as this and what do you mean by that.

DB: Yeah.JI: You can have that comeback, so.DB: We're just-- yeah. No one wants an email or a message in Gatekeeper saying what am I meant to be doing here.That's just instantly a waste of time. So this is a really good way to avoid that.

JI: Mm-hm.Cool. So I mean, basically, they're the only things you need to configure. And technically, you only need to configure when you're adding a field, the label, and the type.

We're just adding this in just as an example of what you might want to give your users to improve their experience and avoid those issues like you just mentioned there, Daniel.

So once you've done that, you can hit Save. And now that field is in my data model. And I'll just add a couple more because we don't want a single question ESG section just to show you some of the field types that we might want to add in here. So I'll add a second one called ESG copy. And I'll make this one a type of attached file.

So this will be that case that people can upload files to vendor records and contact records very easily directly via the files tab. But especially if you have a specific form for collecting information about a specific thing, like ESG, SOC, ISO, or anything like that, it makes a lot of sense if you're going to be building this into a workflow form to have a specific attached file field so that users know where they need to be providing that.

DB: James, on the attached file format, this was the one where the other day I noticed that we have attached file with expiry date which could be used in conjunction with a file expiry workflow, say if your vendor uploads one of their insurance documents or their ISO certificate, something that you know every single year you're going to have to go back out to that vendor and get from them.This is a really good way to remove effectively any manual input because I think I shared a story with you that I did not know that this existed when I used Gatekeeper. And what I would have to do and the team would have to do is go in and add the expiry date manually.

And that little activity maybe takes two or three minutes. But when you're dealing with hundreds of vendors, that soon adds up. And I was like gobsmacked that this was just there staring me in the face let's say. So I'm a big fan of this version.

JI: Yeah there's. So many things like that that can just be small but very big barriers to scaling your team or scaling how many vendors that you are able to assess and on board.

So yeah. We have a specific file type where when the file is provided, the user will also have to provide an expiry date for that file. And like you said, yeah, we have a best practice template workflow for this.You can spin this up in a matter of minutes. We have a workflow process which will, when those expiry dates of files are approaching, begin a review and renewal process, where it can even involve the vendor again to say, you know, your ISO certificate that we have on file for you is expiring, can you give us a new one?

And it doesn't need someone like you, Daniel, manually uploading files, then checking a tracker, and then emailing people. It's just you can put a lot of it on autopilot.

DB: Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

JI: One thing I want to set before I leave this field, this field conflict screen, is these two options that have been added. So because the previous field type we entered was a fixed input option.

So we could have added a dropdown list or a multi-pick but we added a yes/no, which would have worked the same way-- and because we added that, we can say that this field, this ESG copy appearing either in our workflow forms or in our repository, will be dependent on what this answer to this field is.So basically, we want to say only actually show the ESG copy field either in workflow forms or when browsing the system if there is an ESG plan in place, just to remove a bit of clutter and make forms as dynamic and simple as possible for users when they're filling them out or viewing them because, obviously, if you do have an ESG form that ends up being 50 plus questions.

If it's the case that you can easily hide half of those based on previous answers, that would be a much nicer user experience for people viewing it and filling it out in the first place.

So it's very easy to set up. You just say this field we're creating depends upon this previous one we've added being yes and then I can hit Save.

DB: That's probably my favourite feature. Like it sounds so minor in so many ways but just if you take it from vendor experience management, it's kind of how I think about making sure that our vendors have a really good experience when they come onto the platform because if there's any tension, or it's hard to use, or our questions are just like a giant list, or they're--

JI: It'll be so sticky to adopt. Yeah.DB: Yeah. Like, well, they're just going to get to off doing it in the first place and then the relationship kind of starts off in a less than ideal way. So it's a good way, like you said, just gets rid of some of the clutter upfront.JI: And I think everyone will have, at some point in their career, like Gatekeeper, we've had to fill out loads, filled out like an Excel spreadsheet that has a question. And then the next line will say, if you answered yes to this previous question, please explain.

And you might just be like, well, I could have hidden that cell. And this is exactly what the design behind this is, to not have loads of if yes, if no questions. You can just present them based on that logic, like if a user answers a question in a particular way.Cool. I'll just add one more field because I don't want this form to get too long. So I'm just going to add another one that's more freeform based. This is going to be a multi-line text field just called ESG monitoring procedures. And I'll apply the same logic there. We only want to capture this if there is an SD plan there, and hit save.

Cool. So that's basically it. Now we've actually configured those fields in our data model now, and I can very easily go and show all the places this instantly becomes available to our users. Yeah.

DB: And once you--

JI: I was going to say, do we want to go to the workflows, or do we want to quickly cover that off before we jump-- before we segue over?DB: I feel we should go into the vendor record here, for sure. Maybe we can-- maybe after, we're going to give a slight demonstration as our vendors completing this information in a moment. But maybe we can come back to the vendor record afterwards, and you'll see the difference in how the record is when it's been updated.JI: Yeah, sure. So I'll click into it. Sorry.DB: I'm just going to say, it's going to look very, very scarce on information at this point, but it's still good to see.JI: Yeah, definitely. But it's worth noting where it is up here, for sure. So in a vendor record now, last year a software vendor. This is the UX bit that I wanted to highlight here. So we'll see we've got some of our other groups above, like the core data model, some legal and compliance bits.Because we selected that this group should be minimised by default, ESG data needs expanding if someone wants to read information around this vendor's ESG questionnaire that they filled out, which is that bit that is super useful, especially if you have lots of different compliance forms in Gatekeeper if you're very due-diligence focused, you don't want this page to end up being several reams of data that sometimes people only want to see who's the key stakeholder here.

And I don't want to have to scroll through several pages to get to it. That collapse by default means whenever I open this up, ESG data is just a slither of the page rather than a load of it.

And yeah, we can see, because of those dynamic settings we had, only one of those fields is available, which is that top one, the yes/no.

I can edit this from-- edit this from here, because remember, we left all of those editable settings available. So if I do decide to put yes as that answer for is there any SG plan in place, ESG copy and ESG monitoring procedures immediately pop up and are available to be populated.

And yep, those description bits that I put in that you highlighted earlier, Daniel, this is what they look like. So a description will appear in this grey subtext box, just to instantly visible.

Users don't have to do anything to see it. If they can see this field, they can see the description. But if we wanted to embed something that's a bit more hidden, you can see the example text requires us to navigate over to this hover of a little I here. So it depends which you prefer.

For longer forms, it might make sense to have more of these I's so that the longer forms don't start ballooning in length if you're adding lots of long descriptions. But both have their merits, for sure.

DB: And that's where the hyperlink will be, right? So in the I example text, if we wanted to hyperlink that part or any part of the content that's in there, we can hyperlink it, and you gave some good examples already. So we won't cover that again.JI: Yeah. Technically you can hyperlink in the description, as well. You just have to use a bit of an HTML snippet. But we have stuff on that.DB: Very well.JI: We won't go into detail.

DB: No idea.JI: Cool. That's for our more tech savvy users on the call.DB: Yeah, I'll stay away from that part.JI: If I go back to the vendor record, vendor repository, I just want to show this, as well. So currently, we have a saved view to do with-- this is to do with market IQ data and financial.DB: These are the ones we made last time, right?JI: They are. These are the saved views. But if I just go back to my default one, because I don't want to mess with those right now, what I can do is hit configure columns, and there's that group we just created. I can expand this and hit select all.And at this point, when I hit save, all those ESG fields will be added to my repository table view. Obviously, like you said, they're really scarce. They're just entered. I've just created the data, so there's nothing going to be in there.

But I can add this here and create a view so that either if I populate it or if it starts getting populated over time as we onboard or re-onboard on vendors to take them through these procedures, I'll start seeing values in here.

DB: And James, just to jump in just as a reminder, we can get rid of the direct spend and the other columns here. If we just wanted to really narrow in on ESG for the safety, we can just deselect everything else and just have that show in, and then create as a new saved you. Just go back to the last webinar, just to reinforce that.JI: There you go. Just for you there.DB: That's great. Love it.JI: And yeah, I guess this is one point to mention, that if you have added a lot of fields to your repository, and maybe you don't like this, that they're instantly empty, as you add them, they instantly become part of your bulk import data model.

So if you're an admin who has access to this screen, the bulk import one, first off, the template that you download here, the Excel sheet that it gives you where you can start import importing files will have them in.But also, the field by field import rules will have them in there, too, just in case either someone else has added them or you need a refresher of the valid data points that you can enter in there.

And what you can also do is bulk export your repository in order to go through line by line in Excel, because it's a bit quicker to then re-import that into the system, to get something fleshed out in here if it's possible.

Not necessarily-- that doesn't apply very well to any ESG section, because that generally should be information coming from the supplier, but it applies to custom data in general.

LC: Great. James, could you actually show us how this works in a workflow for our customers' operations?JI: Sure.And yeah, this is going to-- so if you've seen workflows before, we're going to be going under the hood a bit. Like Daniel said, we're going to be getting a bit techy. But yeah, I'll try and be as-- try and make it as simple as possible.

So ESG will embed this in our vendor onboarding workflow form, just because it's a quite relevant place to show it. So if you do want that data to be provided as part of your vendor onboarding process, it's a really simple, simple thing that you can do to add it to this workflow form.

What you want to do is open up your workflow that you want to embed this in, edit the start phase, because that's where the form originates and where you do all the interesting config. And we want to navigate to the bottom, and then hit add section. And we're going to give this one a name.

And there's one thing I'm going to do with these questions that we add. I'm going to actually change them from what's in our repository. What you might have thought whilst I was adding those fields was, these are really simply named fields.

Suppliers are never going to know what ESG copy means, and things like that. So I'm going to change what is visible in the workflow so it's slightly different to what's in our repository. And we'll explain why in a minute. So I'll call this ESG questionnaire.

And then in order to find that section we've just added, we'll choose the record type, and I associate it with vendors. And then we'll find it from this dropdown list. There we go. ESG data.

And I can hit save. And that's all you need to do to add it to the form. So at this point, these fields are in here now. And users can see and interact with them on this workflow, but we've got a few extra config bits to do here.

And the first one is that relabeling so they're a bit more user friendly for people filling them out for the first time. Like you said, Daniel, you don't want a lot of back and forth like, what does ESG plan in place mean? Things like that.

DB: Yeah. But like, this ability to do this is really important because-- maybe you're about to cover this, but I'm just going to jump in here, because you want your repository, your vendor and contract record, to be as tidy as possible.

That's kind of how I put it. You want it to be neat. And if what you're really needing to ask is, like, a 10-word question and say got 50 to 100 custom data fields, I don't know. That's just an arbitrary number there.Your records are going to get really busy very quickly once you've expanded all of this. So you can have it effectively in shorthand as your own internal custom data, which everyone will understand. And then just, yeah, add some flavour to it here for the vendor.

JI: Exactly. Imagine running a report off for one of your exec committee, and it had this as a field name. You would much prefer a simpler version, because people internally will probably know what you're reporting on and what the data means.

But you want the workflow to have the long form version. So when you're in the form like this, you can simply edit the fields that we've pulled from our custom data model and just relabel them just like this and hit save.

DB: And this is-- and James is pretty worth calling out. And you have, but I just want to really narrow in on this that this is only changing it for this specific workflow.JI: Exactly. The data model stays as it was. Data model stays tidy, as you put it, yeah? But this workflow form is where we're making these amendments. So it's on the users that see it in this workflow that--DB: James. Along Just one other question that's come to mind. When you came into this area and you went on to the workflow and we were looking at all the different phases, you went straight in onto the first phase of the workflow to add this data. That's the best way to do it, right?JI: Yep. You can add sections when you're on other phases, but as a best practice, because of how workflow forms operate, because they are technically a form that exists on every phase but they have to originate somewhere, they have to have a base version, the base version is at the start.

So if you want to do more complex config, like we just relabelled some fields, or if you want to change descriptions and things like that, you should be generally doing it at the start.And then the specific editability and visibility settings, you should be doing it on the other phases, as on a phase-by-phase basis, which we'll do in a second, actually.

LC: Could we see what it looks like when a vendor is filling this out?JI: Yeah, of course. So one final bit, once you've added a form section, is setting who should be able to see it and interact with it. So by default, form sections will be read only everywhere, apart from the phase you add them, where they'll be editable.

So because this one is going to be empty at our start phase because it's going to be filled out later by a vendor, I'm going to set this one to hidden here. And I'm going to quickly navigate over to our vendor onboarding form phase where we want it to be filled out.So I'm going to edit this one and go to the same tab we were just on. But this is the form tab where we're editing it for this phase. And I'm going to find our section that we've added, and I'm going to make it editable.

And what I'm also going to do is make all these fields mandatory. So we want it to be the case that vendors have to fill these out in order to submit a valid onboarding form.

And just as a tidbit of people worried about this, that even though we're making these two fields mandatory, they'll only be mandatory if they're visible. So because they're obviously dependent on this yes/no, if the user selects no here, the form will still be valid if these ones aren't populated.
So you don't have to worry about whether or not these should be mandatory, because they're dependent on something else.

Yeah, we can log in as a vendor now and submit our form. So let me just change screens to a user in vendor portal who will be a vendor user for Atlassian, and we'll see the view they have. So I just want to give some context around vendor portal because I'm aware that--

DB: I'm just about to ask.JI: Sometimes I skip a few steps. But we're on vendor portal here. So this is basically a Gatekeeper module which allows people from outside your organisation to log in to a restricted view of Gatekeeper.

Obviously you can see in the sidebar menu, they don't get everything that regular internal people do. But the purpose of this and the key benefit is that it means that you get that extra dimension of collaborators for workflow processes and the key.The obvious example that we're using in this scenario is like, you're onboarding a vendor. A lot of the information around ESG compliance, SOC audits, their actual core values, like their registered address, should be coming from them.

And it's so easy to get them to add that data directly to your Gatekeeper environment if you have them in the vendor portal like this. So in this sense, you--

DB: Just quickly, just once more on this view, right, because something we spoke about in webinar one was events, which we renamed applications. And just below where you are on my open forums, you have my open applications.

And this is where the vendor would be able to see any obligations that you've set up in coordination with them, which could be, oh, we have quarterly business reviews with you, or maybe SLAs, KPIs.Any one of a number of different points here, which really means they have no excuse. So that's kind of how I think about it. Like if it's in a contract and we've spoken about it and it's in your vendor portal, which you can see all the time and we can run notifications through that to you, there's no excuse if we're missing news.

JI: Exactly. And when they log in to the vendor portal, this is their immediate dashboard. It's not like they'd be hard to spot, either.DB: It's staring at them.JI: The two first things they get are, do they have any workflows to do anything with? Do they have any open obligations? So yeah, you're right. There's no excuse of missing them if they're checking you up on this.

So like you said, they can't miss that they have a form to fill out. So at the top they have my open forms, and they have a vendor onboarding one here.So when this user, Cameron from Atlassian, logs in, he can update this form, and this will take him into our vendor onboarding form. So he's got a few sections to fill out. Some of them are just form data.

So just to call out the bits that you mentioned earlier, Daniel, this top section, we have is just form data. It's just, this will influence the process.

So for instance, influence the process and how we treat this vendor during our onboarding. Just to give some context, this one has a question around whether or not this vendor process is data. And if they answer yes to this, this will load up that GDPR InfoSec screening bit.

So we might have seen that in the custom data section earlier. So this is that distinction there, that these are useful bits to capture whilst you're going through a workflow process such as vendor onboarding.

But you might only want to report on the more important bits, like specific GDPR questions. This is just to decide what should happen on the workflow. But we're going to change some of those--

DB: Sorry. Just quickly, because the point you're incorporating just there, we'll show that in the workflow sessions because we are getting into conditional groups within workflow forms.

And I love it. It's really easy to do. It's really not that hard, but we will go into this way in more detail to show you how to set up these forms. But James, just quickly, people might be looking at this form and thinking it looks slightly different anyway.This is the newest layout, right? So it doesn't just share all the questions in one long list. It's segmented out by the groups within that workflow form.

JI: Yeah, definitely. So that's something that, it's not the default setting, but we recommend considering it, especially for those longer forms like vendor onboarding ones where if a vendor opened it up and it was like a wall of 100 questions, it might be a bit daunting, and it's one of those like you mentioned earlier-- it's tough to get them to adopt it.So it's definitely recommended. It makes it easier from an input perspective, and just from a digestion perspective, to see a few different chapters so they know how much they have to fill out, and it's all in bite-size sections. And they can jump around if they know who needs to fill out what section. It's a lot easier to do.

So yeah. So I'll skip those other sections, because yeah, we can come to those in more detail when we talk about workflows and form sections and so on. But I'll just fill out our ESG questionnaire so we've got this on the workflow. So you'll see, this is the relabeled field that I configured earlier.

It still has that example description. So that has pulled through, but I could have edited that if I wanted to. Same with the hover over text. So I can fill this out and say, yes, we do.

And I'll upload a file. Just a boilerplate form.

And I'll choose an expiration date of next year. And I'm drawing a blank on some of this text, as well, so I'm going to add some stuff in here. But I guess--

DB: Test always works.JI: Yeah, test always works. And one thing that is fairly useful in this, depending on how thorough you have of vendors, is that they can add a bit of formatting to these sections, depending on whether they have chapterisation of how they want to describe things, if they want to be quite thorough and neat with how they organise it.The free-form text fields with multi-line text are like the one that's up to 20,000 characters, allows them to do a lot of stuff here. They can hyperlink things. They can add header sections. They can add bold and italics, things like that.

So at this point, once the vendors filled out all of the forms-- I'm just going to fill out the ESG one on this workflow-- they can hit submit. And at that point, get people to say thank you.

But if I navigate back to my workflow board now, my regular one as an internal user, and just refresh the page, we'll see that Cameron submitting that has sent automatically transitioned the card onwards. And so users at this phase, if they're performing some onboarding reviews, like you've got your due diligence teams here, we'll be able to scroll down.

And this is that default view where everything's in one long ream of data. But they'll be able to see the information that's been provided as part of this ESG questionnaire. So we've got that. Yes, we do have one. Here's our ESG document with the expiry date. And here's the response on targets and objectives that Atlassian have in place.

And I just want to configure one final thing, because this workflow runs on auto actions. So I need to-- and I'm aware that we haven't covered what auto actions are, and we're going to get to them in the Take Control--

DB: At some point in the next--JI: Yeah, we'll just give you a sense of what's to come.DB: Two to six months.JI: Yeah.So I'm going to edit my final phase, because this is basically, the done phase of this workflow will commit all of the data that's been compiled by various users from the vendor record to the repository. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to configure this phase to say, now that we've added an extra section now, this ESG section,

I'm going to say, take everything that the users put in the form and push that back to the repository for us so we don't have to transcribe it. Sorry. Yeah.

DB: I was going to share something that's kind of embarrassing. But hey, that's why I'm here, to share these stories, in that I create a bunch of custom data when I was getting really excited to use Gatekeeper.And then I forgot to do this end bit. So what happens is you just have a contract record or a vendor record that has none of the data you've got in there. So I had to just push it all back through.

I just didn't realise, and I'm pretty certain had told me all of this, as well. I just got ahead of myself. So it does a really good-- yeah, this is a really key step in this process, is to do that. And you can almost just go in and not worry about anything else. Just make sure those tick boxes are checked against any custom data you've added.

JI: Exactly. And the benefits of this screen and the reason that we make it so that you have to choose what the value is going to be, either if it's going to be something in the form or something like a predefined option, is that you can have backup set.

So you might want to say that if the user doesn't put anything in there, like if Gatekeeper can't take the value from the form, choose no as the default because we're going to assume they've missed, they've skipped it, because they don't have a plan in place.And you can also use it-- we'll come to this in workflow weeks-- to set status flags automatically. So you can use this to link processes, to update audit trails automatically. So Gatekeeper's providing you a lot more information in the repository around what's going on process wise.

But yeah, I don't want to get too into that. But it is worth calling out, that yeah, if you add new sections to your data model in your workflow, you need to decide what your auto actions are going to do with them.

So I'm going to hit save here. And now that I've got that auto action configured, I can approve this form, which will push it onto that done phase. And we'll see the values that Cameron the vendor user provided will automatically be synced to our repository record. So if I hit approve, this will move through to our done phase.

And if I open up that vendor record, I'll have to expand my ESG data section. We'll see, there's that value. Cameron said yes. Here's his file. And here's what the text that he put in the ESG monitoring procedures there, automatically in our vendor record, and hopefully in our repository level, too. There it is in our save view that we created earlier.

DB: But just to call out, like I know we're kind of joking that there's no data in. But typically, that is typical of what happens when you're creating custom data. Perhaps your business wants to start tracking something new for the very first time. You've not tracked it before, so you can't do the bulk import, the upload.You don't have data on it. It does look like this. But as you push more and more of your vendors for you to workflows and collect that information, it doesn't take very long for this data to start coming in. So you can use it to-- use it for whatever it is you're using it for.

LC: Wonderful. Well, thanks, James. Thanks, Daniel.Everyone please continue to put in your questions. But before we jump into our question and answer session, I think we have a poll, Daniel, about workflows and what everybody will be interested in seeing for our control series.

DB: Yeah. So in terms of this, we're really keen to understand when we're building our workflow series what it is you want to hear from us and what you want us to effectively do, like, a live tutorial of, again, if it's tutorials, could be a really good way to help you learn.Also open to your feedback on that. Maybe I'll just set the scene for what we think we're going to be doing at the end of June, which is like a workflow 101 session.

So very similar to what we did in the very first visibility webinar, which is where we cover as much as we can about workflows, and pretty much the A to Z of workflows using the features that we have.

And then after that, we're going to just narrow in on some other areas that can really get the most out of workflows, enable you to do maybe some stuff that you're not aware of, and things that maybe require us a bit more time to show you how to set up, because the gist of it is you can get a workflow, especially with our best practice workflow, set up in minutes.

But there's so much under the hood, let's say, like in the engine there, that you can just play around with. James is a workflow nerd, I would say, around all of that, and he's going to be great to just run us through all of this.

JI: I take that as a compliment.

DB: It is. It's a compliment. Don't worry.It's great. We'll just leave this Q&A open just for a few more seconds, Connie, and you can close it. By the way, just for anyone listening, I'm referencing Connie. Connie is like the producer and the background that you can't see.

So this is actually four of us running this workflow in that sense, and a couple more people answering questions and doing that in the background. But Connie is the one putting the polls up right now and doing a few bits. So that's the reference there.

I'm just waiting for the results to come in. Great. So James, just for some context-- James, can you see this? Can you see the results?

JI: Yeah, I've got them up.

DB: Oh, you can. Great. Yeah. So the types of workflows and their use cases-- like walk through a workflow are very popular. So perhaps we can do a dedicated session to showing off different workflows, right from the best practice workflows. That might make sense to do for sure.JI: Yeah, for sure. For sure.DB: Which will help people there. And some people were looking at workflow configurations. So we've kind of shown you today some of the workflow configuration. We're only just scratching the surface.And we can definitely cover more of that. So that's great. Also, Lucy, over to you on the Q&A. I know we've got a few questions that have been asked already.LC: Yeah, we have a few questions that came in. So first one. Can I create custom data fields that are visible only to certain teams?

JI: This is a tough one to answer because when you create a custom data field, one thing we actually sort of skipped over when we were adding that ESG group is, get some decisions on where it appears. So let me go back to it. And let's pretend we did this back when we created our group.

By default, when you're adding a group to either a vendor or contract record data model, you can say, should it appear for every single record, for every single type, or specific types-- either contracts or vendors?So as an example, you might say you only want to capture ESG data against your critical vendors, because they're the only ones where it's relevant or that you have the bandwidth to actually assess that.

Or on the contract side, it's probably easier to explain it on the contract side because you might have NDAs you probably don't want a lot of extra fields in there, whereas you might have a lot more interesting clauses and terms and information you want to report on against your more complex contracts, like MSAs, and so on.

What you can do is, depending on who has access to which vendors, this is a way to tacitly think of restricting access to particular fields. However, if a user has access to a vendor record, or if they have access to a contract record in the repository, they can see everything that's in there.

They get access to it unless we're talking about vendor portal. So when I was logged in as Cameron before, for instance, Cameron will only see a very small subset of our data model. He won't see loads of specific bits that maybe you use to categorize his vendor, or rankings you have in your repository about him. He'll only see his vendor registered address and his core company number, stuff like that. So vendor portal uses, yes, but not internal.

DB: And just coming back to the idea of which team can see it, that kind of comes back to the user settings in the first place in that you can set it so people can only see the contracts and vendors that they own, and they will typically see everything in the record, though, that is associated with that vendor or that contract.JI: Yeah, exactly.

LC: My next one here-- can I create a custom data field to attach files?JI: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did that earlier. That was one of the examples we picked, was-- yeah, there's two types, as well.DB: Yeah.JI: You can use this one if you want to definitively capture an expiration date, which is not mandatory for the other type, where you can just create a field that just says, attach the file that's relevant to this particular purpose. So yeah, there's two ways you can do that, these two types.LC: Thanks, James. Next question here. How can I separate contract custom data from vendor custom data?

JI: I guess it's part of-- it's the native part of building out the data model like this. So if you're adding a group, that's one of the first decisions you have to make. After you name it you say, whereabouts in my repository do I want this data to appear? Is it on the contract side or the vendor side? And that's the initial decision you make. And once you create that group, from that point on, that's where the data appears.I guess one bit to add, though, is-- and this may be why the attendees asking that question is-- technically, vendor fields can be viewed in the contract repository. This is an enhancement we made to make reporting a lot easier. So you can see combinations of vendor key information whilst you're looking at the contractual side.

So I can go in here, in my system data, start pulling in vendor-related fields to this view. But yeah, the first thing that you have to do when you're configuring custom data is decide, is it a contract, a custom group, or a vendor custom group?

DB: Yeah. I was just looking at one of these questions here, Lucy, which is-- and maybe it's a good one to cover, because we've spoken about it in the last week or so, which is the way in which we build out these custom data fields. It doesn't let you necessarily mix it with a whole bunch of core data.But James, I was just going to ask if you could just go in on the view that you were just on, because there are predefined groups that we can add to, right, on custom data?

JI: Yeah, there are.

DB: And I'm very aware it's something that we haven't covered in this session, which might be useful here. So maybe could we just quickly show the contract custom data groups one, and maybe go on to whichever?JI: Yeah.Well, yeah. So there are two sections in each of these core objects of contract and vendor records that are there by default. And they're technically-- well, they're custom groups, but I'm saying that in quotes because to users, like your users browsing the system, any fields you add here will appear to be part of the core data model.

So for instance, I won't add a field because we've seen me do that, like, three or four times already. But in this contract data section, which came with the system, if you go to this area in your Gatekeeper screen, you'll see this contract data and contract dates, supply data and supply dates. You'll see I've added a field called jurisdiction.

If I go to my contracts and pick a contract for example, pick a contract example, we'll see in this core section of contract data where I've got entity, team, central, preexisting fields, jurisdiction appears there, too. So you can make it seem to your users like there are fields that you've added, but you'll make it seem like they're part of the core data set. So you don't always have to create a custom group.

DB: This one-- and correct me if I'm wrong here, which I know sometimes I have with this when I ask these questions. But this just, when you make these fields, it just adds it in the order that you've created it, right? So we can't move jurisdiction above entity or anything like that.JI: You can move-- I believe you can move them amongst each other. Like if you add--DB: Once you've built up more.

JI: Five fields in here, yeah, but you can't put them above the core ones. They appear there at the top because they're Gatekeepers.DB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great.Awesome. Is that all the questions, Lucy, I think we've got here?

LC: I think so. Yeah, I think those are all the questions that we've gotten for today.DB: That's great. Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure to run through this with everyone.Oh, wait. I think we may-- I'm just checking there. James, do you want to just have a look in the webinar chat? There might just be one question that we can answer, potentially. Can we hide core fields for the vendor and contract records, is the question that's come in.

The answer is no on the record, right? But we can hide them on the workflow form, which maybe is best to cover in the workflow sessions, because it will definitely come up when we're going through that.

JI: I was going to say, the session is going to be full of workflow tips when we're trying to round out, restore visibility for the pillar here. But yeah, when it comes to that-- you answered it perfectly. So when it comes to the record, the answer is no.

The core fields are there. When it comes to the more functional parts, like workflow forms, especially for those status fields which users probably shouldn't be setting anyway. A user shouldn't be able to request a contract and set it to be live and approved.You can hide those fields from your workflow forms. And even, like we saw, you can use auto actions to update the statuses or have other users populate them when it becomes relevant. So like you said, in the record, no, but in functional areas like workflows, and even save views, things like that, you can hide them.

DB: Yeah. I was just thinking back to one data point that I never used to often. Sometimes I would, but I think it's the-- I'm going to butcher it here from memory, which is, when the relationship started in the vendor record, it didn't necessarily track that because sometimes it's so hard to track, especially when it came into a business that had been operating for a couple of years and relationships have been around for a long time, right?I don't want to ask the vendors that, because I don't want them to answer it, because I wasn't going to do anything with that data point. So just hide it on the workflow field, and then filter it out on the vendor list view, which is where you make the saved views. So yeah, great. Awesome. I just I'm glad we could just catch that question.

I was just going to say, thanks, Lucy, thanks, James, for being on this. And to everyone else who joined, hopefully you got some value out of that. If there's anything that we didn't cover regarding custom data that you want us to cover, just send us an email.

It's not an issue.

Send an email to your customer success manager. Just drop us a line and we can get that sorted for you.

If you would like to find out more about Gatekeeper or arrange a personalised demonstration, please get in touch today.