Every action on MBN is attributable to a specific role on a specific organization. This lesson walks the roles a service-provider organization assigns at registration: what each one is responsible for, what each one does today on the live platform, and what each one gains as MBN's remaining milestones arrive. Which roles you assign depends on your declared capability: Contractor, Vendor, or both.
Service providers have historically operated under informal authority. "Sales said the price was firm." "The shop foreman agreed to the timeline." When the contract finishes, or worse, when it doesn't, there's no record of who committed to what, under what authority, at what point. MBN replaces that pattern with attributable authority: every action, submitting a bid, accepting an award, participating in a clarification, declaring delivery, is tied to a specific role on a specific organization, with a timestamp and an audit trail.
That structure is what makes the record defensible when it matters. When you submit a bid, the platform records exactly which role on your organization committed to that scope and price. When a dispute opens, the platform names who acted and under what authority. That isn't bureaucracy, it's what turns "we thought we agreed" into "Commercial Manager X submitted this bid on date Y under explicit org capability."
A service-provider organization assigns these roles during registration. Admin is required (exactly one: the owner's role). Commercial Manager is required if you declared Contractor; Sales if you declared Vendor; both if you do both. Project Manager, Finance, Field Technician, and the Co-Admin layer are all optional. One thing to know up front: submitting a quote isn't locked to a role: any team member can bid. But acknowledging or signing an awarded contract is reserved for Admin or Commercial Manager, and issuing your own sub-contract tenders is Admin, Commercial Manager, or Project Manager.
Exactly one Admin per service-provider organization, regardless of declared capability. Holds the legal representation responsibility and manages the organization's settings, declared capabilities, engineering category enablement, and role assignments on MBN.
Completes the organization's profile, declares capability (Contractor, Vendor, or both), enables relevant engineering categories, assigns the rest of the team, and submits the organization for MBN officer review.
Required if your org declared Contractor capability (selling labor, services, or technical work). One or more per organization. Holds binding-bid authority for labor scopes: the role that commits the company to a price, a timeline, and a technical approach.
Registered in role if Contractor was declared. Receives organization notifications. Confirms commercial readiness once the org is approved and steps into the live dashboard.
Required if your org declared Vendor capability (selling parts, equipment, or supplied goods). One or more per organization. Holds binding-quote authority for parts and equipment scopes: the role that commits the company to a price, a delivery window, and a parts specification.
Registered in role if Vendor was declared. Receives organization notifications. Confirms vendor readiness once the org is approved and steps into the live dashboard.
Optional. Leads delivery on awarded contractor work. Holds authority to issue sub-contract tenders, sub-contracting part of a job to other providers, and to manage project files, but not to acknowledge or sign the final contract (that stays with Admin and Commercial Manager).
Registered in role if assigned. Receives organization notifications.
Optional. A finance and commercial-visibility seat: sees the org's quotes, awards, and billing picture. In v1 it carries no special mutation authority beyond what any team member has.
Registered in role if assigned. Receives organization notifications.
Optional. The hands-on delivery seat: the person who does or supervises the work on site. A participant role with no tender-creation or contract authority in v1.
Registered in role if assigned. Receives organization notifications.
An organization-management layer granted on top of a functional role: say, a Commercial Manager who also runs the org's admin. Not a job of its own; it adds admin power to whoever holds it. Optional, and you can have more than one.
Registered in role if assigned. Manages the organization alongside the Admin.
Three rules govern how authority works inside every MBN organization, service-provider organizations included. First: no shared credentials. Each role is held by a named person, not "the office" or "the shop." Second: no implied permissions. A role does what it's explicitly authorized to do, nothing inherited, nothing assumed. Third: no overrides without record. If an action gets escalated past its normal authority, the escalation itself is logged with who, when, and why.
The result is an organization where the audit trail isn't a separate compliance artifact, it is the operational record. When a vessel organization traces an award back to the role that committed to it, they're not reading reconstructed history. They're reading what actually happened, in the order it happened, under the authority it happened.
Next, learn how to find tenders and submit a proposal. Request free access, declare your capabilities, enable your engineering categories, assign the roles you just read about, get approved by an MBN officer, and the dashboard is live for you immediately.