We are happy to announce that we have just released a feature often requested by our sellers: the new supplier dashboard.
The dashboard makes your performance on 100% CheMondis transparent and is thus a great example of how digitalization and data availability can help to grow your business further.
The dashboard is divided into three different areas:
Traffic Analysis
Turnover
Transaction Overview
Let’s have a closer look…
Traffic Analysis
Number of Active Products
This is the number of uploaded and active Products from your company. Only active products are visible to potential buyers and thus available for requests.
Number of Page Views
This shows your top 5 products by page views within the last 30 days, as well as the number of page views of all products within the last 7 days.
Please note that this number might actually be even higher than displayed. This is for 2 reasons:
1)Technically, only page views of visitors that accepted the CheMondis cookies can be counted;
2) Views of your products on the search results page are not included.
Turnover overview
Total Turnover
This part shows the all-time total turnover of all transactions you have completed on CheMondis and a chart related to your transactions in the last 6 months.
Turnover by Product
This shows the turnover generated via CheMondis for your top 5 products on CheMondis (all-time).
Transaction overview
Open Requests
The numbers of open requests grouped by status. This can help you to know how many buyers are still waiting for a quote or an offer, but also when a request is declined and closed.
Request History
The request history provides an overview of all requests received on CheMondis by type of request: sample, quote or agreement.
How Does It Help you Doing Business on CheMondis?
The number of page views is very important for every supplier as it gives an indication of how interested buyers are in reviewing and requesting a certain product.
If the number of views is high or rising over time, this is good news. It indicates that the product is properly described and that there is high online demand for this product.
If the number of views is low or decreasing, it signals that the product might be ranking too low. There are two main reasons for this: 1) the product details and the product descriptions are not detailed enough; 2) your answer time to incoming quotes should be improved. Our algorithm sorts results by relevance for buyers. A high level of detail and a fast answering time are both indicators of relevance for a buyer. For registered suppliers, we do provide some tips on how to increase page views on our help center.
Stay Tuned for More.
What you can see now, is just the first version. We will continuously improve and extend the functionalities of the dashboard. Stay tuned.
Now It Is Up to you.
Did you already check your dashboard? How to do like our new feature? Do you have any feedback regarding the dashboard or any other feature? Leave us a comment below and let us know.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis blog.
You can use CheMondis for various steps in your buying process.
Early in the process, you may want to request a Sample to determine whether a product is a fit to your requirements.
Next, you can use best our quote request function for a one-time purchase of a specific product at a negotiable volume and price.
For building long-term relationships, you can use our Agreement feature, which allows you to negotiate long-term contracts for a negotiable period and price and then call-off according to your needs.
Any of the three types of requests can be either sent individually or for multiple products at once.
For Buyers: Let’s Take a Deep Dive into the Sample Request Process.
If you are interested in a sample of a specific product before ordering a large quantity, it takes you only four steps:
Use the search function and find the product details page of your desired product.
Click on “Sample” to request a sample from the supplier.
Define a shipping address as the only mandatory information to make sure that your shipment reaches you. If you want to speed up the process, you can also enter the quantity you need and what you are willing to pay for this sample.
By clicking on “Send Request” the supplier will directly receive your request and will be notified via email.
Of course, for the supplier, the review of your request will be easier the more information you share. Therefore, you can optionally add the following information to your sample requests such as expected annual demand, desired sample size, desired delivery date, or planned usage of the product.
To find the details of any sample request, to communicate with the supplier, and to update any requirement please open the request details via your Requests Overview. Here, you can also filter by samples.
For Suppliers: How to Respond to a Sample Request as a Supplier?
You will receive an email as soon as a potential buyer sends you a sample request. You can open the request directly from the email or you can find any sample request within “Requests”. Here you have the option to filter by Samples. Make sure you click “Search” after selecting the requests you want to filter.
If you want to accept the sample request, the only thing you need to do is to indicate your price. You can either enter the price for a specific quantity or select that the sample is for free. You are then ready to send your final offer to the buyer, who can decide to either accept or decline.
Of course, in case of questions, you can use the chat functionality in the same way like you are used to from our regular quote request function.
Now It Is Up to you.
Did you already send a sample request or received one? How to do like our new feature? Leave us a comment below and let us know.
If you are already a CheMondis user please find our CheMondis help center for additional information.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis blog.
We know that you as a supplier will only be happy with your quote requests if they really match your business and your delivery conditions. To show you immediately the matching quality of your quote requests, we have introduced the Match Score Rate on our marketplace. This way we will assist you to identify the most relevant quote requests you receive from buyers.
Where to Find the Match Score Rate?
You can find the Match Score Rate within the menu “Requests” on CheMondis. To get an idea how it looks, please have a look at the following graphic. The Match Score Rate is highlighted within the red box.
How Is the Score Calculated?
The score is calculated by four different measurements. This does not just help you to set up the match score rate but also helps buyers to find your products as this data is required for the CheMondis search filters. Let’s take a look on the four factors…
Quantity
You can define a range of quantity (in kilograms) you want to serve for all products in general or modified for each product in the product details.
The score increases if the desired quantity of the buyer is matching this range.
Shipping Countries
You can select in which countries you want to ship to, either for all products in general or modified for each product.
The score increases if the requested ship-to location matches your served countries.
Incoterm
You can select the Incoterms you can serve as a delivery option either for all products in general or modified for each product.
The score increases if the requested Incoterm matches your settings.
Packaging
You can select the fitting package types for all products in general or modified for each product.
The score increases if the requested packaging of the buyer matches your settings.
The score is calculated by a combination of those four factors. A higher score means that the quote request matches your requirements more than a weak score.
How you Can Benefit from the Match Score Rate.
To be able to benefit from this feature please set up your desired terms regarding the quantity, incoterms, package types, and shipping to countries. This can easily be done in your company settings for all your products at once. Later you can still change the terms for each product individually. Please note that the rate will only help you identifying the quality of your requests if the required information is available.
Now It Is up to you.
Find your company settings to set up the information for all products at once. Click on your company name and then scroll down to Packaging, Incoterms, and Quantities. Find the following button to set up the information for each product individually.
For us at CheMondis – as a software development company – data security and the security of our marketplace are essential. Therefore, it is self-explanatory for us to ensure that we fulfill our safety standards anytime. To do so, team engineering is from now on performing so called “fire-drills”.
What Is Behind a “Fire Drill”?
The literal meaning of a fire drill is an exercise to prepare for a fire or other emergencies in a building. People prepare by doing whatever they would in a situation of fire – evacuating a building, grabbing a fire extinguisher, etc. as if an emergency had occurred.
Within the context of software development, a fire drill has the goal to prepare for emergency situations like hardware fails, major bugs, hacker attacks etc. – basically for the case we face problems within our code, the heart of the marketplace, without knowing the reason.
*Fingers crossed* that such a “fire” will never occur.
The Scenario.
On the day of the fire drill our engineering team had a meeting in the morning and our Head of Engineering Max Kugland (the initiator of the fire drill) explained the exercises for the rest of the day.
To make sure we do not create any real problems during this exercise and our marketplace survives the fire drill safely, we created a separate completely isolated environment. In this environment they could let the chaos monkey loose.
Max and a taskforce designed a couple of scenarios in which the marketplace service gets severely disrupted.
networking problems in the cluster (slow network, dropped packages, domain name system resolution failure)
sub-system outage (failure of a sub-system, system shuts down, can’t be restarted, disk full…)
partial data loss (deleted database tables, database goes down, automatic failover)
We Follow the DevOps Approach.
That means we do not have a dedicated operations team. DevOps is just a set of practices which a team follows to not only produce and test code but also build, package and release the code and operate the underlying infrastructure. Basically, the whole cycle. This means every (backend) developer does not only write code, but also possesses in-depth knowledge about the infrastructure the code runs on and the interactions of the various systems involved.
Why Did We Focus on Infrastructure?
Parts of the exercise were to…
figure out if something is wrong
to pinpoint and analyze what is wrong and which systems are affected
to contain the failure and protect other systems
to develop and deploy countermeasures
to learn from the failure, increase system resiliency and fault tolerance
The Engineering Team Was on Fire.
The team successfully spent the day on solving these issues.
Based on the learnings of the fire drill, we improved and extended our system runbooks, so we not only practiced for the emergency, but also have an easy to follow step-by-step guide what to do in case something blows up.
Prevention Is Better Than Cure.
We extend the catalogue of failure on a regular basis and intend to perform a fire drill quarterly, so we are prepared when lightning strikes.
So, there are many more fire drills to come…
Interested in Becoming Part of the Engineering Team?
Apply now via the following button to become part of #teamchemondis.
When we set the theme for this blog, it was clear that there is one person in our company who is an expert in this field. Our Office & Community Manager Alina. Within this article, she will give you more insights into how we developed our start-up culture, what challenges we faced over the past 2 years, and what makes our culture unique.
Thank you, Alina, and enjoy reading, everyone!
What is Behind a “Start-up Culture” in General?
“Start-up culture” is a relatively new type of work culture that aims to break down the barriers of growth that more established companies might have. It is known for and aims at giving space to be creative, agile, and passion-driven.
Back in 2018, we started our journey with five employees and a rough idea on how we want to shape our company culture in the future. The good thing was that we had it in our own hands.
We were equipped with a modern office in the heart of Cologne and a constantly growing international team consisting of the best people from the tech, commercial & chemical industry.
Work Environment is Not Synonymous with Company Culture.
CheMondis is a young and dynamic start-up. Founded in 2018, we are working on our mission to create the global professional network for the chemical industry and while growing an international team.
We have a lot of features which make working at CheMondis very pleasant. However, providing free snacks, the most modern equipment, and an office dog is not sufficient to create a great company culture. Of course, it was defining our work environment, though, which is a strong contributor, yet not synonymous with a company’s culture.
What we needed was to align on shared values – values that appeal to each and everybody in the company and that build the pillars to our company culture and our future growth.
So, in January 2019 we started our first values workshops. We used the “9-Levels analysis”- tool to make our team’s value system visible and thereby useable. Often it was eye-opening for every individual to learn about their personal values and drivers. During a two-day offsite workshop at the beautiful Marienburg in Monheim, we evaluated our personal 9-levels surveys and brought them together to a team level. A lot of discussions, active listening to each other and intensive group work resulted in the definition of five company values. (Click here for more information)
– Responsibility – Personal Development – Multi-perspectivity – Collaboration – Vision-driven orientation
With a constantly growing team, our culture develops permanently. Every new joiner shapes our company. That is why we held a second 9-levels workshop a few months later to ensure that everybody aligns on our values and has the same understanding of what’s behind them. Doing so, we realized that something was missing. We had been looking at ourselves and our way of collaborating, but we had not given one particular person an explicit seat at the table yet. Our customer. We, therefore, implemented a sixth value: customer-centricity. This progress clearly shows that our company culture is developing in the way our team develops.
Taking Time for Each Other Means Caring for Each Other – Personally and Professionally.
In my position as a community manager, I am ensuring that we are living our start-up culture on a daily basis. I organize and host interesting meet-ups in our office to engage with the local tech and start-up community. Also, organizing team offsites and regular stand-ups to push the collaboration between our teams and to give room to strengthen our team spirit is part of my job.
Besides that, the so-called “Donut-Bot” within our communication tool Slack supports us to boost collaboration across all teams. Every second Monday our employees get paired up with each other to go on a “Donut-Date”. A Donut Date usually leads to sharing great food, great conversations, and learning about each others’ jobs.
What Makes us Realize That our Company Culture Makes us Successful?
Our team spirit and the vibe in the office make us come to the office every day with a bright smile. We give each other a hand whenever it’s needed and live an open and direct feedback culture. This way we ensure that we learn quickly from each other and get better and better every day. For our customer, and for each other.
Our Plan for The Future?
We will keep on working on our values and our company culture. It is what makes us unique and it is also what will lead to building a successful company and product for our customers. We have split the team into six working groups, one per value. Each of the teams constantly comes up with ideas and measures to make sure the values are embedded in our core DNA and are brought to life in our daily behavior. We have launched learning lunches, movie nights, chemical workshops, and much more.
Furthermore, we just launched a competency model that is based on our six values – it aims at the personal and professional development of every employee.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
