What is it?
Across your organization, many departments will work together with external parties or are approached by different external partners, e.g., start-ups, universities, and even freelancers. To make transparent who was in contact with whom, to avoid double work, and foster synergies, you can outline your complete partner portfolio in ITONICS and manage it within your application.
Furthermore, you can also handle new partnership proposals and collaboratively evaluate the worth of adding new partners.
Learn more about
- creating a partner entity
- enabling a partner board or radar
- use the external gateway to allow for external submissions
What is it?
Creating a partner entity
To start with, you should get clarity on your partner process and what information you want to capture in your application. Do you also want to collect partner proposals? Or, are you (only) capturing the information on running partnerships? Getting clarity on the setup will help you to create the partner template that is just right for you.
You will need to start with defining your partner template. Therefore, navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration. Use the button to add a new entity. Provide the name and select the modules that you want to activate for this entity. Please note that modules need to be activated by your Customer Success Manager first.
If you also want to collect partnership proposals, you should check this section on using the external gateway to allow for external submissions.
Typical fields that should be included are:
- Title, Image, Abstract, Value Proposition, Tags
- Partnership Type (Dropdown with the following values: Supplier, Client, Reseller, Competitor, Network, Other)
- Organization Type (Dropdown with the following values: Start-Up, Incumbent, Scientific, Other)
- Activity Level (Pearl Chain with the following values: discarded, no activity, exploration, negotiation, partner)
- Industry (Dropdown with e.g., the following values: construction, consumer goods, defense & aerospace, electronics & materials, energy, finance & insurance, health care, information & communication, manufacturing, mobility, professional services, public, other)
- Contact information - group field incl.
- External contact/email address (single line input field with email validation)
- Internal contact (user search field)
- Website (single line input field with URL validation)
- Region (dropdown with e.g., the following values: East and South Asia, North America, Latin and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Australia and Oceania)
- NDA (radio button with 'yes' and 'no')
- Responsible business unit (dropdown field with your departmental structure)
- Financial data - group field incl. and put within a confidential tab
- Costs p.a. (single line input field with number validation)
- Collaboration Start Day (Date Picker Field)
- Contract End Day (Date Picker Field)
You can then also relate other entities, such as a project entity, in the relations tab or by using an element search field. Within an element search field, you can give further context to the linked element.
You can, of course, also add rating criteria for the assessment of a potential partner.
To make the intake of information easy, you can also check this article on using the ITONICS Crunchbase integration.
Enabling a partner board or radar
To visualize your entire partner portfolio, it is best to use either the Radar visualization or Board visualization. The radar makes sense if you have a rich partner landscape as it has enough space to oversee it. In this case, please note that you need to create segment fields as a specific requirement.
The board makes the most sense when you have a clear process that your partner process follows and/or if you want to aggregate financial data from the different partnerships in a general view.
In both cases, you will first need to activate the visualization on the first page of the entity configuration. Please note that the available modules depend on your license. After the activation, you will have the option to configure the default board and/or radar view.
For the board, you will be also able to indicate if you would like to use the KPI aggregation and which values should be shown as default in a board.
Use the external gateway to allow for external submissions
The External Gateway enables you to build a bridge between your application (where access is only given to authorized individuals) and a public community (individuals with no access to your system). Via this bridge, you allow such a public community to, for instance, submit an idea or feedback. They just need a URL to access the gateway - for instance, the gateway can be placed on a public website.
In fact, submissions via the external gateway will create a new content element in your system. You can then process this content element further within your application and along a specific workflow. This is highly relevant for allowing external partners (e.g., start-ups/universities/the crowd) to submit their proposals and ideas for collaboration.
For using the External Gateway, please navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration and open the entity, i.e., partner, for which you want to configure it by clicking the Edit (pen) icon.
Look for the External Gateway card (1) under the Modules/Features section and check the box on the left corner of the module card. When the checkbox is marked the card should change the layout color from light gray to the system color. Don't forget to press the Save button (2) at the bottom of the page.
After enabling the module you can configure it according to your preferences. Go again into the edit mode for the respective entity and find the Manage External Gateway menu.
If you cannot activate it, please talk to your Customer Innovation Success Manager.