Suppliers
Suppliers is where you manage every company you buy from: the ones that run on Equipme, and the ones that don't.
That second group matters more than it sounds. Most of what your company buys doesn't come from a supplier with a platform account. It comes from an online shop, an electronics retailer, the furniture store that fitted out your last office. None of them will register on Equipme just because you order from them. They don't have to. You add them yourself, and your internal process still runs through Equipme.
You find Suppliers under Offer management → Suppliers.
Two ways to work with a supplier
Every supplier has an order type. It decides who maintains the offers and how an order reaches the supplier.
Platform. The supplier runs on Equipme. They maintain their own offers, and you decide which of them appear in your marketplace. When an employee orders, the order goes straight to the supplier through the platform. They process it there, and you follow the progress.
Manual. A supplier you created yourself. You maintain the offers, because the supplier isn't on the platform to do it. When an employee orders, we record the order, and you place it with the supplier the usual way: by email, in their web shop or at the counter.
Your employees never see this distinction. They browse one marketplace and go through the same approvals. The difference only shows after the order is placed.
Why the list only shows your suppliers
The list contains the companies you actually work with. If you haven't connected with a supplier or created one yet, it's empty. That's deliberate: the list is your supply chain, not a directory. Suppliers available on the platform are one step away under Add supplier.
The three figures above the list (total orders, open order items, total offers) cover all your suppliers together.
Connecting with a supplier on Equipme
Open Add supplier and search by name, description or website. The dialog only shows suppliers you aren't connected with yet. Open a supplier's page and select Request partnership. The connection is active straight away, and the supplier is notified.
From then on, their offers are available to you. You decide whether to list them one by one or make all of them available automatically. Listing selectively keeps your marketplace focused. Automatic listing means new offers appear without you doing anything, which suits suppliers whose range you trust.
Creating a supplier yourself
In the same dialog, select Add a supplier yourself.
Only the name is required. You can create a supplier the moment you need one and complete the rest later.
Start with the domain. Enter the supplier's domain and select Find supplier. We fill in the name, website and logo. The logo matters more than it seems: your suppliers get their own row in the marketplace, and employees recognise a logo faster than a name.
Add your customer number. Most suppliers know you by a customer number. Store it here, and everyone in your team who orders from this supplier has it at hand, instead of searching old emails for it.
The address is optional. Many suppliers you only know as a website. If you add one, postal code and city become required so the address stays usable.
Contacts are optional, but worth it. Contact details for suppliers usually live in one person's inbox. When that person is away or leaves, the knowledge goes with them. Stored here, your whole team finds the right person.
Order recipients. Contacts marked as order recipients will receive your orders automatically once automatic order emails are available. Setting them now saves a round trip later.
Inviting a supplier to Equipme
Once you've added a contact, you can switch on Send invitation. We send that contact an invitation to join Equipme.
What isn't obvious: accepting the invitation doesn't turn your entry into a platform supplier. The supplier joins Equipme as their own company. Your entry stays as it is, with order type Manual, and keeps all its offers and orders. That's why your entry is created whether or not the supplier ever responds.
If your company is managed by a provider
Some things work differently when a provider manages your company:
Add supplier takes you straight to the form for creating a supplier yourself. Your connection to suppliers on the platform runs through your provider, so the directory isn't part of your view.
Send invitation isn't available.
Offers for your own suppliers are created from the supplier itself, not through a field in the service portfolio.
Offers from your own suppliers
A manual supplier becomes useful once it has offers. There are two ways to create them:
From the supplier. Open the supplier, go to Offers and add them there.
From the service portfolio. When you create a service or add an offer, the Supplier field in the pricing step links the offer to one of your own suppliers. That's how one product gets several sources: the same monitor from two retailers, each with its own price.
The Supplier field only lists suppliers you created yourself. Platform suppliers maintain their own offers, so there's nothing to link.
Visibility, customer-specific availability and approvals work exactly as for any other offer.
How orders to your own suppliers work
When an employee orders from several suppliers in one go, we split the order into one order per supplier. Each supplier only receives what concerns them, and you follow each order on its own.
Orders to manual suppliers land in Order processing. The supplier has no access to Equipme, so you move the order forward yourself: Ordered (confirmed), In progress, Ready for delivery, Completed. Keeping the status current is what makes the order history and the open items reliable for everyone else.
The supplier view
Open a supplier to see everything that belongs to it, in three tabs:
Overview: key figures, contacts, order recipients and the supplier's details, all editable here.
Offers: every offer from this supplier. Add new ones directly.
Open order items: what's still on its way, plus the full order history. You can update the status here too.
Orders and open items are the same entries you find in Order processing, filtered to this supplier. Nothing is managed twice.
Coming next: automatic order emails
Right now, you place orders with manual suppliers yourself. Soon, every order will go out automatically to the supplier's order recipients, with a summary of what was ordered. Your process stays digital, and the supplier keeps receiving orders the way they're used to: by email.