Case study · Enterprise SaaS · Supplier management
Admins build supplier questionnaires with visible logic and inline validation, then send them to many suppliers without duplicates.
Client branding is removed from all screens. Form names and people shown are demo data.
Supplier Forms Builder lets Workbench admins build questionnaires, onboarding, compliance and risk assessments. Send Forms delivers them to many suppliers at once.
Admins change forms without engineering help. Conditional logic hides irrelevant questions, inline validation catches errors early, and the send flow prevents duplicate or wrong sends.
Building a supplier form was slow and depended on specialists. Logic was hard to see and easy to break. Sending forms to many suppliers risked duplicates and confusion.
Procurement admins need to build, check and send supplier forms on their own, because today every change and every bulk send carries a risk of hidden logic errors and duplicate requests.
Let admins build and change forms without engineering help?
Make conditional logic visible, so it's hard to break?
Send many forms to many suppliers with no duplicates or surprises?
The plan covered both halves of the job: building a form and getting it to the right suppliers.
| Method | Who | What we wanted to learn |
|---|---|---|
| Stakeholder interviews | PM, product and engineering leads | Goals, constraints, technical limits of the form engine |
| User interviews | Procurement admins, supplier-management leads | How forms are built, changed and sent today |
| Compliance interviews | Compliance managers | What evidence is required and how errors are caught |
| Competitive analysis | Five form tools | Layout, logic, validation and distribution patterns |
| Send-flow audit | Existing Send Forms screen | Where duplicates and wrong sends happen |
We synthesized interviews with procurement admins, supplier-management leads, compliance managers and engineers into five themes.
"Changing one question shouldn't need a release."
Procurement admin · Illustrative"I only find out a branch is broken when a supplier calls."
Supplier-management lead · Illustrative"We sent the same assessment twice and looked careless."
Compliance manager · IllustrativeI reviewed Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Typeform, SurveyMonkey and JotForm across layout, logic visibility, validation and distribution.
| Layout | Logic visibility | Validation | Send / distribution | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Forms | Single column | Set per question; no overview of branches | Required fields and response rules | Link, email, embed |
| Microsoft Forms | Single column | Branching set per question | Required fields, basic restrictions | Link, email, QR code, embed |
| Typeform | One question at a time | Visual logic map: the benchmark | Per field type | Link, embed |
| SurveyMonkey | Single column, paged | Skip logic per question or page | Answer validation options | Collectors that track recipients |
| JotForm | Single column or cards | Conditions listed in settings | Field validation types | Link, email, assigned forms |
Sending is a mode of the admin's job, not a separate person, so one persona covers both building and sending.
Planning and building felt manageable. Adding logic and sending at scale were where admins lost confidence.
Each insight became a requirement. With the PM and engineering we plotted them by impact and effort to sequence the work.
Validation and preview sit before sending, so nothing broken reaches a supplier. Duplicates are resolved inside the send step, not after it.
Putting full rule editors inside the canvas made long forms unreadable. A dedicated panel keeps the canvas single-column. The right panel defaults to Structure and switches to Conditional Rules only when a question's Conditional switch is turned on.
Questions stack in one column. Answer options use ghost-text placeholders, so adding one is just typing. Object Name is a dynamic launch parameter, so the same form works on any platform object.
Browse the forms library, open a form in the builder, and switch between layout and preview.
Password protected. Email me at ramprasadp1304@gmail.com for access. Best on a laptop or desktop screen.
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12Branches render under the answer that triggers them and mirror in the Structure panel. Inline validation appears on the field itself, using the exact messages supplied by the PM.
12Before, admins picked recipients, then forms, then scrolled to a separate Duplicates list. After, every recipient-form pair is one row, conflicts show inline, and new rows collapse so attention goes to the exceptions.
Six participants completed three tasks: build a form with logic, fix validation errors, and send forms to 20 suppliers.
| Finding | Severity | Change made |
|---|---|---|
| Conditional switched on with no rule hid the question in preview | High | Keep it visible and warn until a rule exists |
| Duplicates were missed in a separate list | High | Inline warnings in the unified table |
| Errors only appeared after saving | Medium | Inline validation on blur |
| Adding options felt slow | Medium | Ghost-text placeholder for the next option |
| Skipped rows reset after changing filters | Low | Skip state persists |
Everything followed PDS: sentence case buttons, Title Case labels, "New" over "Add" or "Create", and brand blue #0170ef. Edge cases and states were documented with the screens.
These are targets, not measured results. They'll be replaced with live data as usage grows.
Faster form build time
Duplicate sends
Fewer send errors
Fewer support requests