In today’s world of e-procurement, many of us and businesses don’t realize how easy our lives could be when making a simple (but very important) decision.
Understanding how a supplier portal integrated with ERP can make your company’s procurement process much more streamlined, more automated, and more efficient is the first step in understanding why such a decision should be made at the earliest. We discuss what the supplier portal is and what advantages it has.
What is a Vendor Portal Software?
Vendor Portal is an online e-procurement solution that enables companies to manage and connect with third-party suppliers of products and/or services.
In other words, a supplier portal can be a secure management system that helps companies connecting with many suppliers to significantly streamline their online procurement process and communicate with their suppliers in a safe, secure, and highly efficient online environment.
Typically, a vendor portal can be a software-service (SaaS) solution hosted and maintained, by an e-commerce solution provider. As a vendor, you shouldn’t need any additional hardware and you don’t need any infrastructure to operate such a system. Now let’s take a look at what a supplier portal actually does.
What are the advantages of a Supplier Portal system?
First of all, it should be noted that a supplier portal offers many advantages. However, this may depend more or less on the functionality of each portal.
For this reason, we are going to list some of the most important advantages that the minimum requirement of a portal should be.
1. Real-time ERP Data Integration
Portals must offer both suppliers and merchants a common insight into knowledge that is directly integrated into the ERP. Before the advent of vendor portals, the customer, and thus the vendor, had to browse data in their own line of business applications, which in most cases was not synchronized.
As already mentioned, real-time integration with the ERP system can be key to precision, speed, and therefore the elimination of errors so that you can manage your data in a single system, your ERP.
All changes made by you or the supplier should be automatically transferred to the other system. This protects them both from the unnecessary constant updating of 2 systems, giving the method more clarity and transparency.
2. Reduce Manual Admin Tasks
The main goal of a portal is not only to reduce time-consuming manual activities but also to provide copies of documents, invoices, bank statements, reminders, data updates, etc.
With the usage of the portal, the burden on the administrative team is drastically reduced, this time and energy can be invested in maintaining and improving the supplier relations.
3. Supplier Account Management
A portal allows vendors to register for their own account online and make inquiries, which are usually made by phone or email.
For example, vendors should be able to log in and view company account information, a history of open and closed quotes, orders, invoices, delivery dates, and self-service information.
You have an access point within the vendor portal to update your account information, and at the other end, the distributor must be ready to view these updates directly in the ERP.
4. Automated Notifications & Reminders
Notifications and reminders should be sent to suppliers at different stages of the process. They are usually sent by e-mail to inform/remind suppliers of the steps to be taken in the ordering process.
This way, you or your providers do not have to notify each other and remind each other to take the next action if there is a delay. The portal should do this automatically so that both parties don’t have to worry about following up until the process is complete.
5. Action Log
For traceability purposes, a supplier portal should allow you to track events on orders taken, which adds an additional level of tracking to view suppliers’ progress in fulfilling the order. A manager must be willing to select from an inventory of orders and consider audit events for a particular order over time.
Each event must track the action is taken, the time, and therefore the IP address of the user who completed the event.
In this way, you can see at each step of the procurement process who and what actions have been taken. So in the event of a misunderstanding or mistake, you’re ready to review the auditor’s change history if necessary and correct it before it escalates.
Automate your process and ease your supply chain management with the vendor portal from Sciqus.