What is the Providers section on the 7bridges platform and what is it used for?
Overview
The Providers section of the 7bridges platform houses details of all your Logistics Service Provider (LSP) accounts. It provides a number of key benefits:
- As a database of information on all your accounts and associated information
- A way to view and manage LSP contracts and rate cards
- Configuring your provider accounts as essential building blocks in the 7bridges platform for optimisation and automation of your supply chain
Homepage
Each provider account can be seen in the table on the Providers section homepage
The Providers section homepage will show all provider accounts linked to you. The page is split into 2 halves:
Summary metrics
The quick snapshot at the top of the page shows:
- The total number of different LSPs and active accounts
- How many of these provider accounts have an active rate card in the platform
- How many active accounts are expiring soon and how many expired accounts are still tied to you
Using this information you can take quick action to make sure you have as complete a set of Provider information and documentation as possible.
Data views: configuration & activity view
In the bottom section of the page there is a table of all your provider accounts in 2 views:
- Configuration - showing how each account is configured in the platform
- Activity - showing recent activity of that account in the platform
You can switch between these views using the button bar on the right hand side
There are also comprehensive filters and a search box to help you narrow the providers accounts listed in the table. Click the 'Filters' button to open the filter drawer
Viewing an account detail
Clicking a provider account in the table will bring you to the account detail page:
This page has all the information for that provider account:
Account info
General details about this provider account including tags that can be used to group accounts together
Totals
You can add estimated annual totals for an account which will give a running measure on the data added to the platform. It also shows the last 8 weeks of invoices received and shipments tracked and booked.
Contract and rate cards
Here you can view all documents associated with the provider account. It makes it much easier for your team members to find contracts and rate cards in one central location.
Receiving connections for invoices etc.
This shows all the ways we receive data for this account. This is organised by the connection type and also contains the list of documents that can be obtained by that connection. Every account supports receiving data by email but you can also add the following:
- File transfer - pull (where the 7bridges platform will retrieve documents from an sFTP location)
- File transfer - push (where the 7bridges platform will provide an sFTP location for files to be pushed to)
- Ebilling (a providers ebilling portal)
Contacts
There are 4 different types of contacts for each account. Adding the contact information helps when troubleshooting an account or processing disputes. Again, having this information all stored in one place means all your team members can find the information they need for each provider account.
Shipments: Top 5
Here we display the top 5 shipments for this account based on cost, weight, emissions and delays. You can click through to a full report for each of these in the Network analysis section as well as clicking on each row to open that shipment in more detail. Please note that emissions are only available if you are subscribed to emissions data.