Onboarding Your Vendors

Third-Party Onboarding Forms

Onboarding Forms is an automated, easy-to-use, and quick way to onboard a new vendor on your 6clicks account. The forms can be shared with your organization and clients to introduce one or more vendors to your 6clicks platform. 

Forms will also automatically define the pre-qualification or initial assessment, allowing you and your organization to better manage and control the vendor's risk and compliance lifecycle. This is achievable by setting up the form in a way that is not only creating a vendor in 6clicks when submitted, but also generates and sends a question-based assessment to the respondents, either within your organization or the vendor itself. This allows you to make sure all the vendors are going through the qualification phase automatically with no manual intervention required. 
 
The onboarding form is also used to shape the onboarded vendor in a way that suits your organization's needs. By setting up default field settings and values, all onboarded vendors can have the important fields and data right from the beginning. 

 

Form capabilities at a high level:

1. Allows you to create an onboarding form to be shared with whoever has the responsibility to introduce or add vendors to your 6clicks ecosystem.
2. Allowing you to set default values and data for all the vendors onboarded via the form you are creating. This includes all your custom data fields and standard vendor fields.  
3. Allowing you to automatically create and publish a pre-qualification Audits and Assessment (Question-Based Assessment) to be sent to the vendor or assessor when the vendors are onboarded using the form. 
4. Allowing you to notify your team members and users on every vendor that is onboarded as well as when they complete the pre-qualification assessment.

 

How to create an onboarding form

Creating the form: Creating an onboarding form is done in your client/team account by clicking on the Third-Parties menu on the left.  Note: This functionality requires permission. Your system administrator can add this to your permissions in the settings section. 

 

The onboarding forms page is then accessible by clicking on the "Forms" sub-menu below: 

This page displays all the existing forms created under your team/accounts. 
You may filter the forms by Status and Owner as well as the forms can be archived and restored which we will explain in more detail in the next sections. 
 
 
There is a button on the top-right of this page called "Create onboarding form" which opens a form creation modal when clicked. 

 

Adding Form fields:

This is the main Onboarding Form setting step that allows you to define the below.  
Here you can add/remove all the available fields to be displayed on the form when it is published. Fields can also have a mandatory checkbox where the user must answer as well as the fields that are defined by you during the process. 
 

1. The field(s) you want the form user to answer. 
2. The field(s) you want to make mandatory for the form user. 
3. The field(s) you want to fill automatically when the form is submitted. 
   

Defining mandatory fields

Added fields can be marked as mandatory by clicking on the checkbox when the field setting accordion is open.  

Marking a field as mandatory means the form user will have to provide the value, otherwise, you cannot submit the form.

Using provided value (Default value for the field): 
 
This functionality allows the form builder to specify a value at the time of creating the form. If there is a default value for the field, the user of the form will not see the field on the form, but the value will get saved against the field when the form is submitted. 
 
An example is a form that is created with the Critically set to "High" as a default value. All the Third Parties created from the form will have their Criticality set to "High" by default. 

• Important Note: The following two fields are mandatory on all onboarding forms and cannot be removed from the forms. 
• Name: The form user must provide a name for the vendor being onboarded. This name is the name that will be used to store and create the vendor in 6Clicks. 
• Third-Party Contact email: This is an email address of a person responsible for communications with your vendor. Although this can be an internal person from your organization, we encourage this to be used as a place to store the actual vendor's contact person details. This field can later be used when the automated pre-qualification assessment is set up. 

 

Saving the form and going to the next step: 
 
Once all the required, default, and optional fields are defined for the final form, you can proceed to the next step to define the pre-qualification assessment automation for the form.  
 
"Save & Close" allows you to stop at this step and come back later to complete the form setup. 
 
Once clicked on the "Assessments" button, the form will get saved and is ready to take vendors on board. 
 
Important Note: The Form Details step is the only mandatory step during the form creation process. The form can be used when this step is complete, and you can directly go to the last step bypassing all the other steps and making the form live. We will cover this in the next sections. 
 

Assessment automation settings: 
 
Once the form was submitted by the user, the automatically created Third-Party will have the opportunity to immediately undergo a pre-qualification/initial assessment. 
 
This allows the form builder and your organization to automate the onboarding process and make sure no vendor is added to your 6Clicks ecosystem without doing your required compliance check and initial control. 
 
Pre-requisites: As the form, you are creating can be used to onboard multiple Third-Parties, this is required you to create your pre-qualification/initial assessment template before creating a Third-Party onboarding form. The template is a Question-Based Assessment, published and ready to be used. 
 
Once step one is complete, the Assessments tab is accessible by clicking on the "Assessments" button: 

Here you see an explainer of what this step is about and how you can use it by selecting one of the available, published Question-Based Assessment templates in your account. If you have not yet created the template, you can click on "Save & Close" to save the form as is and come back later to complete the steps. 
 
Providing a template means each vendor who is introduced/onboarded using this form will receive a published assessment, created from using this template. 
 
Once the template is selected, you will see the below settings. We will go through each of the setting options below.

Assessment Respondent 
 
This section allows you to define who should perform and complete the assessment for the vendor. The options are as below: 

Allocate assessment respondent now: This option means you (the form builder) know who should be performing the assessment and who will receive the initial assessment to complete. Selecting this option means you must provide the details on the number (2) by introducing respondents manually. There can be more than one respondent to add and as you see below, each respondent added can be allowed to submit the assessment as completed.  

Respondent(s) to be provided by the user at submission: 
Choosing this option means there will be a field in the final form that the form user needs to use to allocate/nominate the respondent for the assessment. Once this option is selected, the number (2) section on the above will not be required, hence not displayed. 
 
The form user will have a field below on the final form to complete:

Form user to perform the assessment: 
Choosing this option will ask for the form used to provide your email address. Once the form is submitted, you will be the one who receives the assessment and is added to the automated assessment as a respondent. 
 
Below is the message the form user will see when completing the form:

• Third-Party contact to complete the assessment: Choosing this option means the vendor's contact email that was initially provided on the form will be the respondent to complete the assessment. To remember, there is a mandatory field on all the onboarding forms as "Third-Party contact email" which will then be used as the assessment's respondent. 
• Assessment due date (days after submission): This field is the number (3) in the above image. The number of days added here as a numeric value will be used to calculate the actual assessment due date. As the date that the form was submitted is not known at this stage, the numbers provided here will be added to the submission date to calculate the due date. 
• Assessment Owner(s): The automatically created assessment needs to have at least one owner. The owner is the person who will be notified at every stage of the assessment. The owner in this field can be either an individual or a group in the 6clicks account. 
• "Save & Close" moving to step 3 (Configurations): Once all the fields are properly filled and the assessment setting is complete, you can move ahead by clicking on the "Save & Close" button to save all the changes you have made or click on the "Configurations" button that saves the changes and moves to the next step. 

 

Step 3: Configurations 
This step is used to set the notifications and other configurations that need to be added to the onboarding form and the automation caused by it. 

• Notify user(s) on form submission: This field allows you to add one or more users to get notified once the form is submitted and the vendor was created in the system. The notification will be in the form of an email and is sent once the form was successfully submitted. 
• Notify user(s) on assessment completion: This field allows you to add one or more users who will get notified once the third-party respondent(s) has/have successfully submitted the automated assessment generated after the form is submitted. The notification is in a form of an email and will be sent once 6clicks application receives the assessment result and the status of the assessment is set to complete. 
• Important Note: This field (marked with a red border) is only available if there is an assessment template selected in the previous step. If no assessment is required for the vendors, then this field will be hidden. 
• Third-Party Owner(s): This field allows you to associate an existing 6Clicks user to the vendors created by this form as the owner. The owner will be the go-to person in your organization who manages the vendors. 
• "Save & Close", moving to step 4 (Review + Publish): Once all the fields are properly filled, you can move ahead by clicking on the "Save & Close" button to save all the changes you have made or click on the "Review + Publish" button that saves the changes and moves to the next step. 

 

Step 4: Review + Publish 
 This is the last step in creating the form and you can either check the form by copying the provided public URL or toggle the "Make submission form live".

Important Note: The form is a public form and can be accessed by anyone who has the URL. This is the organization's responsibility to make sure the form does not get compromised/shared outside the organization. 
 

Onboarding Forms list page

Once you click on the "Forms" menu under the "Third Parties" menu item on the left, the list of all existing forms will be displayed:

Here you can see and access the public URLs as well as change the status of the forms by clicking on the status. The second column is from the right. 
 
 Statuses and how they work: There are four (4) statuses available for a form explained below: 

• Draft: This is when the form is just created and has never been set to Live. Once the status is changed to anything other than Draft, it cannot be set back to Draft. Forms in Draft status are not accessible by the users and if the user visits the URL, there will be an error message. 
• Live: This status shows the form is live and is accepting submissions. 
• Inactive: The form can be set to inactive by editing the form and toggling the live checkbox to inactive at step 4 (Review + Publish). This makes the form temporarily inactive, and the user will see an unavailable message when landing on the form's URL. 
•  Archived: A form can be archived. Achieved forms will not accept any submission and the user will see an unavailable form message. 

 

Automations and how they work 
Once the form is live and accepting submissions, the users can submit the form as many times as needed. This will trigger the following automations immediately:

• Vendor creation: With every submission, there will be a new vendor/Third-Party created in your account. This will respect the default fields you have set up on the form. For example, if the form has a default of "High" for Risk Rating, all the vendors created using the form will have the Risk Rating set to "High" by default.  
• Assessment Automation: With every submission and if the form has automation set up for assessments (Step 2), the 6clicks automation engine will generate a Question-Based assessment from the template specified and will assign it to the respondents provided at the time of form creation. The details such as the due date and owners will also be set automatically for the assessment, based on the form settings.
• Notifications: The system will send notifications for every form submission if it was set at the form creation time, as well as notifications to the users specified for when the assessment is submitted and completed. 
  
  

Last Updated April 19, 2023