I am trying to design a workflow for my charter business where I can send a quote request to multiple suppliers asking them to quote on a specific customer itinerary. The workflow would allow the Suppliers to respond and enter their quote.
Key features would include:
My customer’s details need to be hidden from the Suppliers
The suppliers’ individual responses need to be hidden from other suppliers
As a User, I would need to see a list of the Suppliers responses on the Customer’s Charter Request
A Customer may have multiple charter requests over time
A Supplier will have multiple quote submissions for any number of Customers over time.
One version for internal usage which shows all the fields in the sheet,
The other version for external usage (for Suppliers) in which specific fields (customer’s details) are hidden
You can configure proper access right to suppliers : set their access right to Survey User so that they can only create and edit their own entry and not be able to view other suppliers’ individual responses.
To separate the records “Customer’s Charter Request” and “Quote Request to Suppliers”, we suggest you to create another sheet for keeping “Customer’s Charter Request” data. To create “Quote Request to Suppliers” data to the sheets created from point 1, you can use convert records function. However, you will need to manually clone entries as many times as you need to send quotes to different suppliers.
Therefore, the workflow will be:
A customer sending charter requests to --> you --> convert records from charter request to quote request (for suppliers) --> manually clone entries according to the number of suppliers involved.
You can also assign entries of quote request to suppliers if they are added as your external users. With proper access right (Survey user), they would only be able to see and edit the entries assigned to them.
If you wish to see all suppliers responses to a customer’s charter request, you can use show references from existing sheets linking tool to insert a reference subtable on sheet “customer’s charter request”, which will automatically list out related suppliers’ responses.
Or, you can simply filter from the sheet Quote Request (Suppliers’ responses, internal usage version).
I have reviewed all the methods and can conceptualise how it may work.
Two further queries now arise and they relate to making forms available on the web.
Form 1 would be the initial customer request. Can I embed a Ragic form on my website and have the user submit their response?
** A particular requirement of this form is that the user can enter a departure and destination on the form and we use a mapping api such as google to resolve those locations. Further, we like to provide a route map to the user.
If Ragic can’t support the mapping api, can we take the form submission as an api feed into another app?
Form 2 would be the invitation to each supplier to quote on the charter. If we send the same link to any and all suppliers do they just see the generic info but their response is tagged with their user credentials? Does that make sense?
For form 1: to embed a Ragic form on your website, use the web embed function. Customers’ responses will be automatically recorded in your Ragic database.
Ragic’s address field is linked to Google maps. If you enter a valid address or coordinate, it will lead you to its position on Google maps when clicked. You can also pinpoint a target location on the map to generate an address value in the field.
For form 2: I’m not quite sure of what you meant by “their response is tagged with their user credentials”, could you elaborate more? What I can tell you now is that if you add suppliers as external users (with survey user access right) and you assign them to fill out entries from the link you provide, they can only view and edit entries of their own.