A pretty common issue with purchasing and supply chain is trying to document tribal knowledge of which vendors to quote new parts from. With items that have been established, it is possible to assign them a preferred vendor. However, when a new part is in the discovery quoting process and is being considered by the purchasing team for multiple vendors, it often comes down to tribal knowledge of which vendor is best at what competency to determine who should even quote this new part. This can somewhat be captured with the comments feature on vendors currently, but is hard to make searchable and easy to navigate.

It would be really useful to have vendor categories much like how Items currently have an Item Category Code. The only difference in functionality would be to allow multiple selections such that a vendor could exist in multiple categories. This would allow the user to create multiple competencies as categories such as welding, laser cutting, waterjet cutting, injection molding, powder coating, etc. and apply as many or as few of them to the vendor as needed.

Once vendors had categories applied, users could either sort for the vendors they are looking for on the fly or build out views for specific filters that are called upon frequently.

Thanks for reviewing this idea!