Is there a way to follow supplier SLA's with Jira (SM)

[Heidi Lehessalo]

Our team needs to follow several suppliers and how they meet SLA's. I'm hoping to do that within Jira so I could see all performances at a glance. Our agents would have to update the info manually from different reports but I would like to see them together in a view or a report? 

Supplier name/Application name          Successful/not succesful        %  or something like that. 

[Phill Fox · Accepted solution]

Hi @Heidi Lehessalo 

Welcome to the Atlassian community. 

It is certainly possible to do some level of tracking of supplier SLAs. However the challenges are in the detail of how those SLAs are defined. 

At the top-level you can build different SLA metrics to suit different suppliers and either track against a collection of suppliers or an individual supplier by defining the JQL for the metric. 
It may even be that you would want a "all suppliers metric" and a series of individual supplier metrics to be able to effectively track your pain points. 
I would start with a custom field that has to be populated when an issue in Jira is assigned to a supplier to work with.  You can then use that custom field to choose the appropriate metric in which to record the SLA. 

So a workflow that has a status of "With Supplier" and a transition page that enforces the capture of the supplier will allow you to build a metric for the SLA. 

Now lets talk about the mechanics of how you might set this up. 

Firstly you need to think about the SLA conditions

When does the SLA start (on transition to "With Supplier")
Does it pause at all? 
When does it stop? (on transition from "With Supplier")

(Be careful on the setting up of this and think carefully about single and multi-cycle SLAs)

Now you can work on the goals. 

In this section you choose the calendar (different suppliers may offer different working hours so think carefully about these)
Then you add a time goal for the supplier eg 24hrs
Now add the issues to have this goal applied in this example you will be using the custom field for the supplier to select the right issues. 

 Once this is working you will then be able to pull reports on your supplier performance easily. 

Check out more details at https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/create-service-level-agreements-slas/

Hope this helps

Phill

[Heidi Lehessalo]

Hi @Phill Fox  and thank you for your response. I noticed that my question left out a significant part. Our suppliers don't use Jira at all. So we get all the information from them in a separate report and I would only like my agents to fill our the details once every month and create a report out of those

[Phill Fox]

@Heidi Lehessalo 

Thanks for that significant additional piece of information. This puts a very different slant on the scenario. 

Jira is designed to track real-time activity and report on it. Making changes once a month is not ideal but not impossible. 

The trick to making changes once a month is to actually pretend these are the activities are backdated correctly. 

One of the easier ways to do this is to import information using a CSV. So in a very simple example. You would
1. import a CSV that would create tickets for all requests made to a supplier in a month. 

2. import a CSV with details of when any requests were sent to the supplier. (Note this is any requests not just the ones created that month)

3. import a CSV with details of when any requests were returned from the supplier. (Note this is any requests not just the ones created that month)

4. Reindex the project after all CSVs loaded to ensure SLAs are fully recalculated (May not always be essential)

5. Pause to allow reindex and SLA recalculation to complete

6. Pull reports on SLAs based on previous explanation.

Not pretty but addresses your once a month update approach.

Phill

[Heidi Lehessalo]

Hi @Phill Fox

Thank you for taking your time to think through this. I think it is easier to continue with a simple Excel sheet in this case.