QMS includes a feature set to streamline temporary, short-term access to your Vault for suppliers, partners, contractors, or other external parties to respond to your organization’s audit findings on behalf of their company. You can give your organization’s auditor users the ability to request responses from recognized external contacts, collaborate with those individuals in Vault, and close out findings with minimal or no need to manage user account provisioning for those external parties.
When authorized internal Vault users request collaboration from external contacts, Vault automates the provisioning of External User accounts for those contacts and invites them to collaborate with specialized email messages. Vault can also close out their user accounts when the collaboration is complete.
Note: This feature set is not intended to replace long-term or regular day-to-day interaction with external parties within your Vault. To understand whether your use case is best served with External Collaboration or External Users, discuss with your Veeva team. External Response Collaboration must be configured by an Admin before use.
Defining External Collaborators
On applicable records, you can identify an assignee/collaborator from an external organization by selecting their Person record or creating a new Person record from the External Collaborator field. This field may be constrained to only Persons within the Organization involved in the process. For example, following the Audit Finding response process flow, the organization in the Supplier field on the External Finding (Quality Event) record.
Contact Lists
If configured by an Admin, you can define Persons related to an Organization record, creating a contact list for external audit responders. This is defined by populating the Organization field present on Person records in your Vault.
Automating User Account Provisioning
When your organization identifies Persons to assign external findings or requests to, Vault can invite or uninvite these persons from your Vault automatically at specific lifecycle states within the applicable lifecycle. Upon beginning collaboration, Vault can automatically detect if the Person identified in the External Collaborator field has a user account in your Vault.
If Vault detects that the Person does not have a user account, the system creates an External User licensed user. If Vault detects that the Person already has a user account, it activates their existing user regardless of security or licensing, and grants access for their user account to the assigned finding or record by adding membership to the External Collaborators application role, as needed.
When the third-party contact has finished collaboration in your Vault, Vault can automatically deactivate that user account, limiting the total count of active External User licenses at any given time. Vault will leave a collaborating external user active until all work requested of them across all processes with external collaboration configured is completed.
User accounts provisioned by Vault’s QMS user automation have the Managed By QMS Automation field on their User record set to True. If this field is set to False, a user will never be activated or deactivated by QMS automation.
Replacing External Collaborators
If an external collaborator needs to be replaced with a different external collaborator, the Reassign External Collaborator user action must be utilized on the appropriate lifecycle state where the external collaborator has a collaboration task. In the event that you must replace an external collaborator, Vault handles the reassignment in the following ways:
- The prior external collaborator is replaced with the new external collaborator in the External Collaborator field on the record.
- If the prior external collaborator still has an active user account and open workflow tasks on other processes, Vault removes them from the workflow tasks associated with the reassigned record only and keeps their user account active. If, after the cancellation of their current task, the prior external collaborator has an active user account and no active workflow tasks remaining in Vault, Vault inactivates their account and sends them a Goodbye Collaborator email.
- If a new collaborator is specified and the new external collaborator has an active user account, Vault assigns them a workflow task and notifies them via email. If their user account is inactive, Vault activates it, sends them a Welcome Collaborator or Welcome Back Collaborator email, assigns them a workflow task, and notifies them via email. The user who performed the reassignment receives a notification when Vault has successfully completed the reassignment.
- If a new collaborator is specified and the new external collaborator does not have an active user account, Vault creates and activates a new user, sends them a Welcome Collaborator email, assigns them a workflow task, and notifies them via email.
Note: We strongly recommend not modifying the External Collaborator field directly once a workflow that activates and issues a task to an external collaborator has been initiated. We also strongly recommend adding a page layout rule to make the External Collaborator field read-only after the initial external collaboration assignment is made or when the task has been issued.
If configured by an Admin, running the Reassign External Collaborator user action on a record also reassigns the external collaborator on any associated open checklists. Completed checklists cannot be reassigned. For additional considerations, see Working with External Collaboration Checklists.