Awarded vendors

Awarded vendors reads the same NUPCO award history as Price History, from the other end. Where Price History lists awards one row at a time, this page gathers them around what connects them: the vendor that won, the manufacturer whose product it won with, the product that was awarded, and the tender it was awarded in. It is reached from Awarded vendors under the Tenders section of the navigation bar, right beside Price History. Everything you point at: the filters, the item in the middle, the path you took to it, what surrounds it, the scale of the circles. Is carried in the page address, so any view can be shared as a link and the browser's back button retraces your steps.

What the page shows

Every number on the page is computed from the award rows described in What the record holds: one row is one material code awarded to one vendor in one tender. Four rules decide who is who. The note under the page title summarizes them:

• A vendor is its NUPCO supplier number. Rows carrying the same number are one vendor however the name is spelled. Acme Medical Supplies, ACME MEDICAL SUPPLIES -Orig- and Acme Med. Supplies Co. are one vendor if all three sit under number 400214. The name shown is the most frequent spelling in the whole record without an Orig/Alt marker; the other spellings are listed after Also filed as in the vendor's header.
• A row with no number is attached to the number when its name is known. NUPCO's public announcements usually publish the winner's name without its number; when that same name (after folding letter case, punctuation and spacing and dropping the sheet markers) was filed under exactly one supplier number anywhere in the record, its awards count toward that vendor. A name filed under two different numbers stays a separate, number-less vendor, because attributing its awards to either would be a guess, and no win is attributed to a company that did not win it.
• A manufacturer is its name. Spellings that differ only in letter case, punctuation, spacing or an Orig/Alt marker are one manufacturer, and so are spellings the platform has grouped as one company: Stryker, Stryker Medical and Stryker Corp, say, with the other spellings listed after Also filed as in its header; a genuinely different spelling is a different manufacturer. A product is its NUPCO code. Shown by its most frequent description with the code beside it: and a tender is its number as NUPCO published it, so its different spellings (NPT0064/25 in an announcement, NPT0064-25 on a sheet) are one tender shown under its most frequent spelling.
• Manufacturer not stated. An award that names no manufacturer still counts toward its vendor and appears in a manufacturers table as a row labelled Manufacturer not stated, but it is never drawn as a circle and cannot be put in the middle. "not stated" is not a manufacturer, and a circle gathering the unnamed would say nothing about who supplies whom.
• A price never published is a dash. NUPCO's public announcements name the winner but publish no price, so wherever a price is shown (Latest price, Price range) a dash means none was published, never zero and never a free award. The Priced column beside Awards counts how many awards do carry a price.

Filtering the record

The card at the top holds three filters. Fill them in and press Apply (or Enter); Clear empties all three. Both keep your place on the map. A filter narrows everything below it at once (the totals, the drawing and the tables) and travels with the link if you share the page:

• Search: a word or phrase matched as it is, one contiguous string, inside the vendor name, the manufacturer, the product description or the NUPCO code. Unlike the box on Price History, this one takes no structured syntax, and the hint under it says so outright. So vendor:acme is looked for exactly as typed, and a comma or a + is searched literally.
• Price: All awards, Priced only or Unpriced only. The default is All awards, the opposite of Price History's: the public announcements publish no price, so a priced-only default would hide most of the record. Choose Priced only when you want the network of awards that carry a unit price, and the Latest price and Price range columns filled.
• Manufacturer country: a searchable country picker; type part of a country's name and pick it. Only awards whose manufacturer is from that country stay in.

On the overview, four tiles under the filters: Vendors, Manufacturers, Products, Awards. Count the whole filtered record and are never truncated. In the focus view, the header of the item in the middle keeps its all-time numbers whatever the filters say (a filter does not change who it is) and a line under it, Under the current filters:, says how many of its awards, products and tenders remain within them; its neighbours and their table honour the filters. When nothing matches at all, the card says No awards match these filters. or Nothing here under these filters.

Reading the graph

The page opens on the Vendor ↔ manufacturer network card: vendors are teal circles and manufacturers orange ones. The legend above the canvas repeats the two colours, and later adds navy for products and grey for tenders, with a line between a vendor and every manufacturer it was awarded with. Size and width both carry meaning:

• Circle size is whatever the Circle size box in the card's corner selects: Awards. The number of line items awarded to the vendor or manufacturer, the default, or the Tenders it took an award in, or the distinct Products (NUPCO codes) it has awards for. Circles grow by area relative to the largest of their kind in the picture: the biggest vendor drawn is always the biggest teal circle, and the rest read against it. The choice travels with the link.
• Line width is the number of products awarded through that vendor–manufacturer pair: the thicker the line, the broader the relationship.
• Labels are printed under the larger circles and under the circle you hover or park the keyboard cursor on.

The drawing is a deliberately trimmed picture, not the whole directory: it keeps the strongest vendors, each of those vendors' strongest links, and only the manufacturers those links reach. Drawing every link between the top vendors and the manufacturers they share is a tangle nobody can read. The caption above the canvas says exactly what was drawn. Drawing X of N vendors and Y of M manufacturers (each vendor's strongest links); a circle's size is its Awards. Where N and M are the tiles' totals. What is not drawn here is in the tables below, and nearer than you think: click any circle and everything connected to it is drawn for you.

Move around as the hint above the canvas says: drag to pan, scroll to zoom about the pointer, and use the +, − and Fit buttons in the corner (Fit returns to the framing the view opened with). Resting the pointer on a circle prints, in the line under the canvas, its kind, its name and its numbers. From the keyboard, the whole canvas is a single Tab stop; once it has focus, the arrow keys move a dashed cursor ring from circle to circle, largest first (Home/End jump to the first and last), Enter opens the circle under the cursor, and Escape clears the cursor.

Focusing an item

Click a circle, or a name or row in any table, and it moves to the middle. Everything else disappears and its neighbours of one kind are drawn around it: a vendor opens on its manufacturers; a manufacturer, a product or a tender opens on its vendors. The Show buttons above the canvas switch what surrounds it to any other kind: for a vendor Manufacturers, Products or Tenders; for a product Vendors, Manufacturers or Tenders; and so on, each button carrying the count it would show under the current filters. Then click any neighbour to make it the middle: vendor → product → tender → another vendor, as far as you like.

• The circle in the middle is the focused item, ringed; its header above the canvas names it: with a Supplier no., country, or NUPCO code, UoM and Catalog no. badge as its kind allows. Lists its other spellings after Also filed as and its numbers (all time), and for a product its Latest price and Price range.
• A neighbour's circle size is its overall size under the current filters by the metric chosen in Circle size. A huge manufacturer is a big circle even if only a little of its output passed through this vendor. The line between it and the middle is the awards the two share: the thicker, the broader the relationship. The strongest links sit closest to the middle (the order starts at the top of the ring and runs clockwise) and when neighbours are many a second and third ring are drawn, with names printed on the outer ring and on whichever circle you hover. The caption says what was drawn: Drawing X of N manufacturers; past a hundred and fifty neighbours the strongest hundred and fifty are drawn and every one stays in the table.
• The breadcrumb above the card reads All vendors › vendor › product › tender with a dot coloured by each step's kind: the step you are on is in bold, and clicking an earlier step returns you to it and drops what came after, so does the browser's back button, since each step is its own address. A shared link whose item no longer matches anything answers Nothing matches this link. with a button back to All vendors.

The tables

Under the drawing on the overview is a directory with two tabs, Vendors (captioned N of M vendors, with the columns Vendor, Supplier no., Manufacturers, Products, Awards, Priced, Tenders and Latest tender) and Manufacturers (N of M manufacturers, with Manufacturer, Country, Vendors, Products, Awards and Tenders). Each tab starts with a part of the directory, and while what is shown is fewer than the total a Show more button under the table widens the request in two steps: from 40 to 120 and then 500 vendors, from 150 to 300 and then 1,000 manufacturers. While the drawing keeps its trimmed picture however wide the directory grows. In the focus view the table lists the middle's neighbours of the kind chosen under Show. The same rows drawn as circles, plus the undrawn Manufacturer not stated row. In every table:

• The "Filter this list…" box above the table narrows it as you type to the rows containing every word you typed: in the name, number, code, country or tender number, in any letter case and with Arabic-Indic or Western digits, and says N of M rows how many remain. It filters the displayed list only and changes no number; the filters in the top card are what change the numbers.
• Column headers sort. Click a header to sort by it (descending first for counts, ascending for names) and click again to reverse; the arrow beside the header says the current sort. Dashes (a price never published) sort last in both directions, so nothing without a price ever leads a "cheapest first" list.
• The neighbours table carries two groups of columns. After the identity columns (the name and Supplier no., or Country, or NUPCO code, Description and UoM, or Tender, Tender name and Period) comes the With {name} group. What passed between the middle and this neighbour under the filters: Awards, Priced, Products, Tenders, Latest tender, plus Latest price and Price range where a price means something (product or tender neighbours, or a product in the middle). Then the Overall group: the neighbour's own size under the filters, which is what its circle measures. The name is a real link (open it in a new tab if you like) and the whole row is clickable.

Where to go from here

The Open in Price History link in every focused item's header opens its rows one by one on Price History with the price filter set to All: for a product NUPCO code is filled in, for a vendor the Vendor field, for a manufacturer the search box, for a tender the tender filter. The place to sort the rows by price or write a structured search around them, and where the Us chip marks what was awarded to your organization.