The quality of our relationships with our suppliers can determine or destroy the success of our supply chain. This fact will become even more apparent in coming years. How quickly can you incorporate new products and providers in the face of confusion? Can you trust the accuracy of your data while overcoming market changes? If not, is it time to consider the vendor portal as an answer to all questions?
The Vendor Portal is a module that connects to the Product Information Management (PIM) platform. The portal allows companies and suppliers to work together through a shared view of product and supplier data.
Role-based access simplifies the enterprise data collection process by allowing suppliers to enter product information such as SKUs, materials, and prices using the portal. You can also upload and share a wide range of content such as videos and images.
The portal also helps companies track supplier contacts, locations, certifications, and more. With this data, companies can easily communicate with suppliers, group organizations into hierarchies, and understand the effects of negotiations and contracts.
What are the benefits of the supplier portal? At the base level, the supplier portal addresses many of the pressing challenges associated with manually error-prone data entry. However, with a good implementation plan, vendor portals can bring lasting benefits to your business, including:
- Fast Vendor Onboarding: Companies are constantly adding and removing vendors. This process reviews suppliers by collecting and validating a variety of information. The vendor portal greatly streamlines this process by allowing suppliers to enter information according to predefined parameters. With automatic submissions and dealer notifications, the workflow engine guides the enterprise through all steps of the approval process, saving time and resources.
- Reducing time to market: As the life cycle of products shortens, reducing time to market is important to stay one step ahead of the competition. If product information is inaccurate, inconsistent, or incomplete, you can lose valuable revenue. With the Vendor Portal, suppliers play an active role in product onboarding by directly providing detailed and comprehensive product information. This allows companies to quickly expand their product lineup and bring new products to market easily.
- Meet Redundancy Requirements : If a supply chain gets disturbed goes down, backups (also known as redundancy) are needed to get the right products in the right place and at the right time. Having a repository of information about other potential approved suppliers makes customization easier. In addition, the Supplier Portal helps companies reduce costs by assessing cost-effective procurement options, improving negotiations, and optimizing shipping from warehouse locations.
- Data Standardization: In today’s trading environment, data must meet a variety of standards for external channels and partners, regulatory agencies, and internal requirements. Supplier is supported by the vendor portal and plays an important role in this process.
Organizations can apply data standards to their suppliers and create onboarding workflows that notify internal teams of new product lists, missing data, and other triggers that require 0attention. These data quality and governance safeguards support a single view of accurate, complete and accessible data that can be assembled in less time compared to manual processes.
Companies are beginning to look at suppliers from a new perspective that refocuses on the relationship between suppliers and businesses. The provider portal provides innovative tools to facilitate collaboration. But technology is not the only answer. In fact, adoption of the portal is a major obstacle to the success of the program.
The launch of the Supplier Portal is not a one-time event. Change management should be the backbone of your implementation. This includes up-front and ongoing training with internal and supplier to address expectations, processes, barriers, key figures, and more.
For more information on how Sciqus can help businesses maximize the value of their vendor portals, see Vendor Portal Solutions Overview.