Attachment 9) FedMall Quick Start Guide_Supplier Portal.pdf

FedMall.mil

QUICK START GUIDE: SUPPLIER PORTAL

FedMall is a U.S. Government System provided by the Defense Logistics Agency Copyright 2018

What is FedMall? What’s the Supplier Portal?

FedMall is an e-commerce ordering system for Department of Defense (DoD), Federal, State, and authorized local Agencies to search for and acquire products from government reserves and commercial sources. Buyers will have access to tens of millions of individual items of supply, from centrally managed DoD and General Service Administration (GSA) assets to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

As a supplier, you will access FedMall primarily via the Supplier Portal—a dedicated website where you will register, manage your catalog items, and view purchase orders. The Supplier Portal is available at https://www.suppliers.fedmall.mil.

Logging on as a FedMall Supplier

Before you begin

This guide assumes that you have already completed registration in the FedMall Supplier Portal. If you have not already completed those steps, please review the Supplier Registration Quick Start Guide.

Steps to log on

Visit the Supplier Portal at https://www.suppliers.fedmall.mil.

Click the “Enter Supplier Portal” button.

Read and accept the standard notice and consent.

Select your certificate and enter your pin, if prompted. (Information about certificates is in the Supplier Registration Quick Start Guide.)

As a registered user, you will be automatically directed to the Supplier Portal home page.

The home page contains a link to the bulk upload template (see below), as well as links to the two primary capabilities of the Portal:

Product Information Management, where suppliers add, edit, and remove catalog items and associated images;

Purchase Orders, where suppliers may view, acknowledge, reject, and document shipping information for orders received through FedMall.

Product Information Management

You may have multiple catalogs in FedMall. In general, for a given supplier (i.e. CAGE code), you may have:

One catalog for each Long Term Agreement (LTA) or Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) added to FedMall;

One catalog for all MarketPlace items.

Note that not all items are available for sale via the MarketPlace. At present, the MarketPlace is available to those suppliers offering office supplies under NAICS code 453210. More items categories are anticipated to be made available within the MarketPlace in the future.

For each catalog, you may upload the items (or item changes) in bulk using a specialized plain text (comma separated values, .csv) file and a zipped archive (.zip) of images, or you may directly add and edit items within the Supplier Portal.

FedMall is a U.S. Government System provided by the Defense Logistics Agency Copyright 2018

Uploading a catalog

Before uploading your catalog, you must ensure that you are using the correct, current format. A specialized quick start guide (in both PDF and Microsoft Excel formats) is available to provide field-by-field guidance on how to construct a well-formed bulk upload file, and how to name and organize the images associated with those items.

This file may be downloaded from the Supplier Portal home page, immediately after logging in.

To upload catalog items, start at the “Upload Catalog File” tab. Browse for the .csv or Excel (.xls or .xlsx) file on your local computer and click the “Upload” button. You will see the upload tracked as a transaction under Activity Status.

Uploading images is performed the same way, but from the “Upload Image Archive File” tab. See the separate quick start guide for how to construct the image archive (.zip) file and associated Images.csv file.

Manage catalog items from the Portal

SEARCHING FOR ITEMS

All viewing and editing of catalog items begins with Search. From the “Search” tab, select the appropriate catalog/contract (if you are managing more than one), and then specify one or more other search criteria.

Items matching your search results will appear on the “Results” tab. View (and edit) individual items by clicking on the applicable Item ID.

Clicking a particular item automatically switches you to the Manage Item tab, where you can view item details and edit them as applicable.

Your last five searches are also available from the “History” tab, where you can rerun searches by clicking on the number to the left of each search

CALLING UP A SPECIFIC ITEM

Alternatively, if you know the exact Part Number, you can update the item directly through the Manage Item function – without searching for the item beforehand.

Click on Manage Item, select the Contract Number from the drop-down menu, and enter the complete Part Number.

After clicking “OK”, the interface will return details of the item. You can then view or update the item as described below.

FedMall is a U.S. Government System provided by the Defense Logistics Agency Copyright 2018

VIEWING, EDITING, CLONING, AND DELETING ITEMS

The Manage Item page will show the details of a particular item. Other options on this page include:

Adding additional attributes (MRC codes) to make your items easier to search for in FedMall;

Indicating special properties, including whether the item is environmentally preferred, Energy Star certified, and/or made in the USA;

Adding full images and/or thumbnails, which dramatically improve the accessibility of your items to customers.

Once you are done making changes, click the “Update Item” button to submit your changes. You may also:

Clone an item, which creates a new item based on the current one. This feature keeps the majority of the attributes but lets you specify a new Part Number and make any other changes necessary;

this is helpful when you have several similar products to add to your catalog.

Delete an item, which permanently removes it from FedMall.

ADDING ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTES (MRC CODES)

Although all catalog items in FedMall share certain basic attributes, such as Original Equipment Manufacturer Name and the Unit of Issue, items are different, and the attributes that describe those items are necessarily different as well. To account for this, FedMall uses an extensive, standard set of product attributes described by MRC codes. As customers search for items, they will have the ability to specify this level of detail in their filtering of search results; consequently, it behooves suppliers to provide this attribute data in order to ensure their products are displayed prominently.

To add these additional attributes, click the “Add Attributes” button on the Manage Item screen, and then search for the attribute by MRC code (e.g. “AAAB”) or the attribute description (e.g. “color”). Once you’ve added the attribute, you can specify the attribute value (e.g. “red”).

ADDING CATALOG ITEMS

To create a new item in the Supplier Portal, use the “Create Item” tab in the navigation bar. Note that the Part Number must be unique within a catalog, and that once the Part Number is set, it cannot be changed. All other features of the Create Item screen match the functionality of the Edit Item screen.

MASS EDITING ITEMS WITHIN THE PORTAL

In addition to individual edits, you may make bulk changes to items displayed in search results from within the Supplier Portal. From the search results screen, select the check box next to the items you wish to edit, then click “Edit Item/s” at the bottom of the screen.

Those items are made available for bulk editing, and will be displayed in a tabular format (like an online spreadsheet) where you can edit their attributes all at once. To edit one attribute of all the listed items at once, FedMall is a U.S. Government System provided by the Defense Logistics Agency Copyright 2018 click the column header. When you are done, click Save to commit the changes.

How soon will I see my changes?

For items in both traditional contract-based catalogs and Marketplace catalogs, the changes will be automatically approved and submitted for inclusion in the next replication of the FedMall catalogs.

After confirmation of successful validation and upload of your catalog for new items (or changes), please allow several business days to pass before changes are made available to shoppers. During busy periods, it make take approximately one week to see changes.

Purchase Orders

The Purchase Orders capability within the Supplier Portal is not intended to replace how you already receive your purchase orders (via EDI, cXML, and/or secure email).

Rather, it provides you with a convenient dashboard to quickly find, view, and manage those FedMall orders that result in the generation of a purchase order. Think of this as the online version of form DD1155.

Searching for orders

Click “Purchase Orders” from the navigation bar to open the primary purchase orders screen, which lets you search for orders by order status, date, purchase order number, customer number (typically a DODAAC), and/or customer email address. The default search criteria is for all open orders from the previous 7 days. You may change the search criteria and click "Find Purchase Orders" to see other orders. All search criteria will match on either full or partial search terms, and are not case sensitive. Thus, a search on “123” will match “123”, “AB123” and “X1234”.

Order status

Purchase orders are categorized as follows:

Open purchase orders o Unreviewed: this is the initial state;

o Acknowledged: the supplier has reviewed this order and intends to fulfill it.

Closed purchase orders o Shipped: the order has been fulfilled, and tracking information has been provided;

o Rejected: the order will not be fulfilled, for a reason specified by the supplier;

o Canceled: the order will not be fulfilled, because the supplier received a request for cancelation from the customer.

Once an order has moved to one of the three closed statuses, its status can no longer change (hence closed).

Managing the results list

As you review the list of search results:

Click on any column header to sort the list by that column.

Click on any Purchase Order Number to view more details.

Acknowledge multiple orders at once by checking the box(es) next to any unreviewed purchase order(s) and clicking the “Acknowledge Purchase Orders” button.

Export all of the search results to a plain text (comma separated values, .csv) file, where the columns exported match what appears on screen.

FedMall is a U.S. Government System provided by the Defense Logistics Agency Copyright 2018

Purchase order details

From the details page, you can:

Acknowledge an unreviewed purchase order (and optionally specify an estimated ship date);

Reject/cancel an open purchase order (once a reason is specified);

Save shipment tracking information for an open order (shipment carrier, tracking number, and shipment date are all required, but may be updated later if needed without changing the Shipped status).