Introduction

What is a Vendor?

In SDL TMS, a Vendor is a localization service provider to an organization. In most cases, the vendor will be providing translation and/or linguistic review services to the organization. If the Vendor is not marked as private, they can also provide these services to child organizations. When creating a Vendor in SDL TMS, the following information is required:

• Basic information such as the name of the Vendor and the key contact
• The Users who will perform the work assigned to the Vendor
• One or more Cost Models which specify costs for Tasks undertaken by the Vendor
• The Language Pairs the Vendor can handle
• The default Users who will carry out various services such as:
  • Project Management
  • DTP
  • Engineering
  • Translation (per Language Pair)
  • Review (per Language Pair)

How to use Vendors

To use Vendors in an Organization, you must define a Workflow that has Vendor-enabled steps. Any Workflow Step that is not performed by the system can be Vendor-enabled, except for Authorization and Recovery. When authorizing a Job, the Project Manager can assign Tasks from the same Job to different Vendors. However, it is not possible to assign one Task to multiple Vendors.

More information

For more information on setting up Vendors and configuring Workflows, please refer to chapter 10 in the SDL TMS Administrator Guide which is available online by visiting https://docs.sdl.com/.

Changes to Vendor functionality in SDL TMS 12.4 and later

Permissions

With the release of SDL TMS 12.4, the functionality for Vendors has been revisited to provide a more flexible solution. In previous versions of SDL TMS, specific checks were made to restrict the information and functionality that a Vendor User could access. In SDL TMS 12.4, these specific checks have been replaced with permission checks so that Vendor Users can be granted permissions based on the Vendor Groups that they belong to.

Determining if a Vendor is assigned to a Task

A Vendor is assigned to a Task if one of the following conditions are met:

• The Task’s active Cost Model belongs to the Vendor and the Task is already authorized
• The Task is assigned to a User that belongs to the Vendor
• The Task is assigned to a Group where all members belong to the Vendor

Determining if a Vendor is assigned to a Job

A Vendor is assigned to a Job if there is at least one Task in the Job that is assigned to the Vendor.

Project visibility

A Vendor User can see a Project if:

• They have the relevant permissions
• The Project’s project manager User belongs to the Vendor
• The Project contains a Task that is assigned to the Vendor

Organization visibility

Vendors can see Organizations where they have (or have previous had) access to a non-archived Job. Vendors can also see Organizations that are between their parent Organization and any Organization with a relevant Job.

Creating Jobs

A Vendor User who has permission to create Jobs will:

• only see Configurations to which their Vendor is assigned
• only see Language Pairs that are supported by their Vendor
• not be able to see other Vendors in the Vendor tab

Visibility of Job-related information

When a Job is assigned only to a single Vendor, a Vendor User can see all the costs associated with the Job. In addition, when a Vendor User views the details of the Job, the word count pie chart will only show information relating to the relevant Tasks and Languages for that Vendor.

Capability to edit a Vendor

A Vendor with suitable permissions can edit their own Vendor and modify User/Group assignment and supported Language Pairs. Vendor Users will not be able to change the Users or Cost Models assigned to their Vendor. Vendor Users with enough permissions can create additional Users and these new Users will be automatically added to their Vendor.

Visibility of other Vendors

Regardless of the permissions granted to a Vendor user, they will never have visibility of other Vendors on the system.

Editing Configurations

Vendors can only see and edit Configurations where they are the only Vendor.

Reports

A Vendor User with permission to run standard SDL TMS reports will not see any information relating to other Vendors.

Objects in use

The logic that determines whether a Cost Models, Group, User, Language Pair or Language Group is in use now additionally considers whether the object is in use by a vendor.