Could the E-Sourcing / CLM Workbench be more useful? I have thought about this question a bunch of times, particularly when I login to use an E-Sourcing system and I ignore everything on the workbench page and immediately navigate to the area of interest.

With this in mind, I thought about what some of the key things I would like to see on the workbench page that would ease my use of the system and provide real value to me. Some goals that I established for my workbench page were:

1. The workbench page should load fast. I don’t want it to take long to load, particularly when I login to the system. Usually when I am logging in, I have a specific task in mind and waiting for the workbench is not valuable use of my time.

2. The workbench page should be free of clutter. I don’t want things on the page that are not useful and that I won’t use.

3. The workbench page should simplify my use of the system…show me what I am working on and provide quick navigation to the areas of the system I use the most.

With these goals in mind, I set about creating a workbench page…here is what I came up with:

The workbench page I created consists of five desktop channels:

1. My Quick Links: this channel provides one click navigation to the major module areas (Projects, RFx, Auctions, and CLM). This saves me from having to click on the top navigation bar and select the module access point. I can view documents in the module area or create new ones.

2. My Recent Edits: This channel is setup to show the recent business documents that I edited, with one-click access to those documents. In my experience, sourcing professionals are working with a small set of documents in the system, so this simple one-click access to the document can really speed up navigation of the system.

3. My Bookmarks: One of the features that I really like in E-Sourcing / CLM is the ability to bookmark reports. Unfortunately, I don’t think it gets used enough. Bookmarking reports allows the user to “save” the filter parameters they use with the report and run it with those filters without having to re-enter them every time they run the report. This capability can be pretty useful if you have a report that filters by, say, organizational unit and users typically are only interested in a particular organizational unit. Anyway, after bookmarking reports, they are available on the Analysis (report page). I created a new workbench channel that puts them on the workbench page.

My workbench page also includes two of the standard channels that come with E-Sourcing / CLM:

1. Links: If you have configured web hyperlinks on the Company object, keeping the links channel that is provided with the system is a good idea.

2. Technical Support: This channel is very useful so that users know what to do in case of questions and issues.

What do you think? Would such a workbench page work for you? What else would you like to see on the page? Another idea I had was to create a “favorites” area that would allow me to identify certain business documents (Projects, RFxs, Contracts, etc) as a “favorite” and those favorites would be listed on the workbench page…I like this idea, but have not prototyped it yet. Would this be helpful?

For those that are intested in knowing a little more about how I actually, configured this workbench page, read on…for those that are not, thanks for stopping by.

Each of the three “My…” desktop channels was implemented using the E-Sourcing /CLM query definition tool. The My Quick Links channel is a single column query that uses the URL/Internal Page capability of the query tool. It also used images to create the actual links - this enabled me to create the indented effect and include the icon with the link.

The My Recent Edits channel is a query that looks at the MODIFIED BY field on the business documents and selects only the most recently edited documents.

The My Bookmarks channel queries the bookmarks table to generate the URL to the bookmarked report.

Thanks again for stopping by…I hope you enjoyed this post and see how you can use the E-Sourcing / CLM query tool to create some interesting desktop channels.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.