When you create a project, it is not always clear how much it will take to complete it, how many resources you need to assign vendors, etc. To facilitate with this task, TBM has a project planning tool, which can help to create assignments, assign vendors and compare margins in case of selecting different vendors. 

Before starting to use the tool, you have to create empty translation assignments and then tasks in created jobs. When this is done, click Plan assignments button on the toolbar. The following window will open:

Here, in the first column, you can find all project jobs, with language pairs and tasks included in each job. Each additional column in the right allows to select different vendor and estimate absolute and relative margins. For each job, you can select a planned vendor using a drop-down box (or by clicking search button top open vendor search window, where you have more parameters to pickup a right vendor). When you select a vendor, you will see estimated amount, calculated according to a vendor's default price list:

Additionally, if translation assignment has specified deadline, you will see average volume of an assignment, and estimated available volume of a selected vendor. This allows to find out if a vendor is capable to deliver this assignment, at least approximately, as additional not accounted factors may have effect on this.

At the bottom, when all vendors are selected for each job, you will find total amount and a margin. For each selected vendor, you can select an Action, depending on your knowledge about availability of a vendor. You can select Send job offer, Generate PO and immediately assign or Add candidate but don't send an offer.

When the first group of vendor is specified, you can click Add Group button in the right empty column. And new column of vendor swill be created, prefilled with vendors from a previous group. You can then make another selection of vendors and compare the results:

For example, you can select more expensive vendors, but consider to invite them to a project if margin allows to do that, provided that you know that more expensive vendor could provide better quality.

When all selections are made, you can click OK to start processing them. Application will create assignments, send job offers using default templates, generate POs as necessary and set assignment statuses accordingly. Then, you will get the results window:

According to notification settings, application will not only send email, but in-app notifications as well. After that, you can switch to the Assignments tab and check created assignments.