Webinar recap: Product Showcase February 2025

On 11 February we hosted our latest instalment of Evolving Felix - a Product Showcase. 

Our product showcase webinars are a great opportunity for our users to meet the team behind Felix, hear about what’s new alongside in-platform demonstrations and get an insight into what the team is focusing on next.   

You can watch the full webinar here or take a look at what was showcased in the recap below. 

Release snapshot: What’s new in Felix 

Mariia Starikova, Head of Product, provided a summary of new functionality that we’ve delivered since our last webinar. 

First up, Mariia refers to our Public Roadmap (available within Felix) to talk through what the team is working on to continually evolve Felix. 

Mariia explains that our recently released product enhancements have focus around three key themes, and include:  

Organisations invite vendors to Felix, which means the Felix vendor portal is an extension of the experience of working with your organisation. We’re continuously investing in the vendor experience and are currently talking to vendors and conducting surveys to help understand what really matters. 

Some impactful updates in this space include: 

• Interactive guides: To assist vendors with critical workflows in Felix (such as inviting team members, onboarding and responding to an RFQ).  

• AI assistant: That’s trained on the Felix knowledgebase and Help Centre, so that vendors can easily search for help while in the platform. 

• Pricing Schedule import: Allowing vendors to import CSV or excel files into RFQs to make responding easier and more efficient. 

• Vendor invitation email update: Featuring more clear and concise information to get started, and contact details so they know who to reach out to with any questions.
  

The next theme is having one place for vendor insights and sourcing data. Two key initiatives in this area include Internally Managed Profiles and Post Tender Requests which will be looked at more closely later in the webinar.  

Sometimes it’s the smallest features that make the biggest impact to teams on the ground, and quality of life improvements help users get things done faster and easier, while being more enjoyable. A lot of the time these include smaller UX improvements that don’t always get published on the portal. However, one larger initiative released recently is the ability to move declined vendors back to pending approval – as sometimes mistakes happen and you may decline a vendor and have no ability to recover without contacting the vendor.  

A reminder that we also keep our Release Notes page up to date so you can see what we’re delivering to market on an ongoing basis. 

If you’re wanting to hear the above in more detail, tune into Mariia’s segment of the webinar at the 4-minute mark. 

Feature spotlight: Internally Managed Profiles (Vendor Management module) 

Lachan Magee, Product Manager for our Vendor Relationship Management stream, showcases how you can capture vendors in Felix without onboarding by using Internally Managed Profiles 

Lachlan explains that there are a few ways you can already capture vendors in Felix – you can invite them by email, you can find them in our marketplace and you can set up a public registration form for them to submit an EOI. What these have in common is that the vendor takes initiative to complete the onboarding before you start engaging with them. 

We know that some vendors aren’t required to follow the onboarding process but still need to tracked in Felix for a various reasons.  

Examples include: 

• A vendor that requires payment and falls outside of the traditional Felix vendor category. (For example, one-off payments or paying rates to councils).   

• Historical vendors that you no longer have active engagement with but are required to be in your Vendor List to improve internal visibility for better outcomes. (For example, blacklisted vendors or contracts of previous suppliers).   

• Vendors that are too large or too small to onboard.   

• Vendors who aren’t responsive or won’t complete onboarding. 

Internally Managed Profiles allow you to capture these types of vendors in Felix and fully centralise your vendor base. By creating an Internally Managed Profile you can capture key vendor information, payment details, services, contracts and documents. 

See more about Internally Managed Profiles. Tune into Lachlan’s segment at the 14-minute mark and watch the demonstration. 

Feature spotlight: Post Tender Requests (Sourcing module) 

Harrison Milne, Product Designer, walks through the discovery of customer pain points that lead to the development of a feature for Post Tender Requests. 

Harrison prefaces his segment with the value proposition for the RFQ feature in Felix: RFQs in Felix are streamlined, centralised and automatically traceable. To deliver this, Felix offers a range of features and functionality that are key to procurement (seen in the slide below).  

However, as RFQs become more competitive and complex, the team started to notice an issue arise in one area of the RFQ/Sourcing ecosystem and after speaking to users, learnt that requesting, receiving and tracking quote updates with vendors was becoming difficult. It was learnt that users were opening up RFQs after the close period which was then leading to every vendor having to change their quote, impacting quote history. And some users were taking negotiations out of Felix, impacting the integrity of the data. 

This meant the value proposition was not being met and that’s why Post Tender Requests was released. This feature allows users to not just compare responses in Felix but also negotiate with vendors directly in the platform without any additional effort in maintaining those documents. 

Learn how Post Tender Requests work in Harrison’s segment of the webinar at the 26-minute mark. For his demonstration, he prepares a Post Tender Request on a closed RFQ where he invites two vendors to a ‘best and final offer’ round.   

Cybersecurity deep dive: Investing in safe and secure platform 

Tony Chan, Chief Information Officer, talks through what we’ve been doing in the background to enhance our platform security, giving you peace of mind when using Felix. 

Did you know that the Australian Cyber Security Centre receives a report of a scam every six minutes? 

Tony shares some insights from the ASD Cyber Security Threat Report (2022-2023) that speaks to the increasing trend of cybercriminal activity, as these criminals adopt tactics to extract maximum payments. 

What this means for Felix users is that cybercriminals are targeting subcontractors and suppliers with weaker cybersecurity measures to gain access to larger enterprise organisations. 

On top of being IS27001, SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant, and implementing various automation technologies in our cybersecurity programs to maintain security, Felix is further investing in being a responsible corporate citizen. 

Our efforts include: 

• Implementing an education campaign for vendors on good cybersecurity practices 

• Mandating Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to all vendor users  

• More notifications to enterprise users – especially around payment detail changes 

• Integrating with Eftsure to validate vendor payment details 

Tony shares a use case on how our investment is cybersecurity averted a fraud attempt late last year when a malicious actor impersonated a subcontractor, with an agenda to update payment details to their criminal account. Watch Tony’s segment at the 42-minute mark in the Product Showcase webinar. 

Sneak peek: Coming soon to Felix 

In the last part of the Product Showcase, we go back to Mariia who shares some insights into what the Product Team is focusing on next for Felix. 

A question that the product team gets asked every single day is ‘What’s next for Felix?’ and this is followed up by ‘What’s the ETA?’. 

To help answer these questions, Mariia shares a short-term outlook of features that the team are working on imminently and will be released in the coming months. 

These include: 

• New endpoints: API endpoints for our Contract module will soon be released, which builds on the already available collection of API endpoints for Vendor Management and Sourcing modules, and for User information. Combining them all will create a more comprehensive picture of your organisation’s data.   

• Reaching the right person and the right business: To help find the right contact for onboarding or for RFQ submissions, a new feature for vendors will allow them to direct all invitations to a key account. We’re also introducing more information in the marketplace search to help connect users to the right vendor. 

Mariia explains these upcoming enhancements in more detail in the webinar, so check out her segment at the 51-minute mark to get a comprehensive overview of what’s next for Felix. 

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A big thank you to our presenters who made this Product Showcase possible. 

You can watch the full webinar here.