What's new
UI enhancements and design updates in the Award menu, larger uploads and downloads for surrogate bidding and bidder configuration files, and improvements for bidder invite statuses.
As part of an ongoing redesign of the Award step in Sourcing Optimizer, we have made small but effective improvements to the user flow, the user interface, and in-app content to enhance the overall user experience in this key area of the application.
To accommodate larger events, file sizes for downloading and uploading surrogate bids and bidder configuration information can now exceed Excel limitations using a CSV format.
For improved clarity around bidder communication, invite emails sent to bidders that have bounced will now show as having failed on the Invitations tab in the Invite menu.
In addition, we have fixed a number of minor bugs and issues. The bugs and the version number they were fixed in are listed at the bottom of the page.
Features and updates
A simplified process for round progression during the Award step
We have redesigned and streamlined the user flow for progressing to another round during the Award step. Previously, when creating a new round at the Award step, the user navigated to different areas of the application to add a new round before returning to the Award menu. It is now a much more simplified and straightforward process to create a new round or advance to scheduled rounds within the Award menu.
Minor UI changes improve clarity when closing an event
After an event is finished and you have conducted your analysis and made your award decision, it is useful to close your event. Closing the event updates the event state in the system. Event team members and users from your organization can then see that the event has been closed on the Events page.
To improve the user experience when closing an event, we have made two minor but important alterations to the user interface. Before you close your event, the chosen winning scenario for the current round is now displayed. In addition, we have clarified the supporting text to better communicate that even if a user closes an event, they can reopen it in the future if required.
Upload and download larger surrogate bid data and bidder configuration files
To cater for larger events with higher numbers of bidders and lots, you can now upload and download files that exceed Excel limitations when placing surrogate bids, configuring incumbency, setting lot visibility, and configuring lot bonuses and maluses.
Previously, some users running very large events encountered issues downloading these types of files if the number of rows generated surpassed Excel limits. Sourcing Optimizer now automatically converts files that exceed Excel limitations — approximately 1,000,000 rows — to a comma-separated values (CSV) file when downloading surrogate bid and bidder configuration data. We have also extended the upload functionality to support CSV files in addition to Excel files.
Bounced emails now display as having failed in the Invite menu
To improve bidder communication and better enable purchaser users to take action when there is an issue with undelivered invites, bidder invite emails that bounce will now be labelled as FAILED in the Status column on the Invitations tab of the Invite > Bidders menu.
For example, in Figure 5 the email bounced when trying to deliver to the recipient. The status of the invite is now listed as FAILED to reflect this issue.
Bug fixes
| Version | Description |
| 22.05 | If a bidder user was creating a bundle on the Capacity Limits tab, clicking Select all in the Select lots to be included dropdown did not select all lots in the list. This has been fixed. |
| 22.10 | For a brief period, users could not select more than a single column in the Group lots by field on the Reports page. Users can now select multiple columns again. |
| 22.10 | Organization Owner users could not update the organization details in the Your Organization area on the Account settings page. A small bug was preventing saving the new details and this has been fixed. |
| 22.10 | After selecting and saving the decimal precision settings when adding or editing a global bid input, the settings were updated but the Round values dropdown list did not display the selected decimal places. This has been fixed and the selected decimal places are now displayed. |
| 22.10 | An internal hyperlink from the Split Configuration page to the Event Settings page wasn't working correctly. The hyperlink is now functional again. |
| 22.10 | When bid coverage was less than 100%, unawarded volume was not being displayed in the Unawarded lots section on the Results page. This has been fixed. |