Glossary.
The terms we use, defined once, in one place.
Our taxonomy.
- Onboarding Ready
- The floor, and the badge buyers filter on. Five elements: legal disputes, financial stress, sanctions and watch lists, business identity, and insurance.
- Capability badge
- What a supplier can actually do. 100s available. These are what score instantly when a buyer runs a prequalification search.
- Compliance and risk badge
- What a supplier adheres to, as distinct from what they can do. 67 available. Each is a separate signal and some are highly specialised.
- Active supplier
- A supplier you're using now, or have used in the past 18 months. Determines which pricing tier a buyer sits in. Dormant records don't count.
- Enhanced Digital Certification (EDC)
- Our optional certification. Validates a supplier's key credentials against outside sources so buyers don't repeat the work. $25 a year.
- Aria
- The buyer-side agent. Dedicated to one customer, trained on their data and nobody else's. Suppliers get their own agent, included in every plan.
- SRM console
- The free supplier-relationship view. Shows a buyer their whole supplier base and monitors the essentials at no cost.
- Time Machine
- Locks a reporting period. Q1 data stays Q1 data even when a certification changes afterwards.
- Onboarding readiness
- A supplier's ability to answer an onboarding request quickly and accurately, because the information is already current.
Industry terms.
- Tier-1 / Tier-2
- Tier-1 is your own direct supplier spend, independently verified. Tier-2 is spend your primes report to you on their own suppliers. Different standards, and reports should show which is which.
- Supplier Information Management (SIM)
- Enterprise software that centralises supplier records and governs how supplier data is collected, maintained and used across onboarding, compliance, risk and reporting. — What is SIM?
- System of record
- The authoritative source for a type of data. A SIM platform is the system of record for supplier information; an ERP is the system of record for transactions.
- Supplier onboarding
- Collecting, validating and approving supplier information so a supplier can be authorised to do business.
- Compliance management
- Defining supplier requirements, collecting and tracking documentation, watching expirations, and keeping records an auditor can follow.
- Credentialing
- Verifying specific supplier credentials or qualifications required before engagement. Common in healthcare, where it is usually called vendor credentialing.
- Supplier data enrichment
- Standardising, validating and classifying supplier records against outside sources, principally SAM. Includes business classification — small, minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned, LGBTQ-owned. — Data enrichment
- Risk monitoring
- Ongoing review of supplier risk signals — financial, legal, regulatory, operational — attached to the supplier's record.
- Procure-to-pay (P2P)
- The transactional side: requisitions, purchase orders, invoices, payments. Depends on accurate supplier data; doesn't govern it.
- Supplier lifecycle
- Onboarding, compliance, active engagement, ongoing oversight, offboarding.