Single Location For Everything
Portals have become abundant in our lives. We access search engines, shop online, and use any number of government websites and other portals in our personal and professional lives on a daily basis.
One of the biggest challenges for manufacturing and distribution suppliers is an efficient collaboration with suppliers. A delay, an error, poor quality materials, or a miscommunication with a supplier can have detrimental implications with ripple effects that impact the end customer.
The Supplier’s Portal
From a procurement perspective, the idea of a ‘supplier portal’ has become increasingly popular in recent years. The supplier portal is the consolidation of all of an organization’s procurement information into one area.
The focus in the past has been on the functionality of tools in procurement such as e-requisition, e-auctions, e-RFx, and e-catalogs. While these are valuable tools, they cannot provide any meaningful benefit if the internal customer of procurement does not engage with the system. We see three key benefits in an intuitive, easy-to-use supplier portal.
Integration
By bringing all the different buying channels together into one place and providing seamless links to all, the user is more easily drawn into using the portal and into following the established procurement processes and policies. The supplier portal becomes a one-stop procurement shop for the user. A fully integrated solution between your supplier network and ERP can completely automate the end-to-end business processes for procure-to-pay or order-to-cash.
Integration extends your ERP purchasing capabilities to your suppliers. It enables suppliers to automate their procure-to-pay processes and can automatically:
• Send purchase orders from ERP and receive order confirmations in ERP
• Receive ship notices from suppliers in ERP as soon as they are received in the supplier network
• Send notification to suppliers that items have been partially or fully received
• Receive invoices in ERP as soon as they are created in the supplier network
• Send payment notifications from ERP so the supplier knows payment was issued
Visibility | Everything can be monitored from a suppliers’ portal dashboard – from requisitions to procurement, shipment statuses to invoices, and automatic updates improve material planning so suppliers can deliver products and services to their own customers in a timely manner, bypassing stock outs.
Building a Relationship / Supplier Collaboration
A key desired outcome from a supplier portal is increased user satisfaction and greater engagement between suppliers and suppliers. An effective and well-designed Supplier Portal can provide the basis for ongoing dialogue between procurement and its vendors.
Automate supplier and supplier collaboration throughout the entire procurement lifecycle, from the first inquiry to the final payment. Access to every RFQ, every purchase requisition, purchase order, and every communication thread for complete visibility into your customer’s data—and you see it all in real-time displayed in an easy-to-use dashboard.
Track and Improve Supplier Performance
Supplier relationships should be partnerships. All too often, miscommunications about PO changes lead to finger-pointing. With a Suppliers Portal, supplier scorecards are available to both parties and are updated 24/7. We keep track of the direct communication between suppliers and suppliers to make sure that the data presents the full picture.
Better yet, in a Suppliers Portal, you can easily review Supplier Performance Metrics and Key Purchasing Metrics at a glance.
Monitoring supplier performance metrics grants both parties insight into the operations of the supply chain. By recording data through standardized metrics, captured on a supplier scorecard, procurement teams can determine if suppliers are performing their roles as expected and which suppliers a supplier can lean on.
Procurement leaders are constantly looking for ways to improve their procurement process and make it more sustainable. However, they don’t want to make any decisions without the right data. And so, they track an array of Purchasing Metrics as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’S). Procurement KPIs are a type of performance measurement tool that is used to evaluate and monitor the efficiency of an organization’s procurement management. These KPIs help an organization optimize and regulate spending, quality, time, and cost.
In Summary
Our Suppliers Portal will provide:
- Streamlining the purchasing process
- Remove communication barriers and facilitate accurate communications
- Log supplier communications, such as requests & responses
- Ability for the supplier to view a purchase order and confirm shipping
- Supplier documents Library
- Increasing efficiency by eliminating random email threads
- Maintaining supplier contact lists
- Sending RFQ’s and converting to PO’s for the chosen supplier
- RFQ’s for non-QAD items and sales support
- Sending surveys and analyzing the results
- Monitoring supplier performance via supplier scorecards
- Tracking Key Purchasing Metrics
- Seamless integration with QAD ERP
- Can be adjusted to any creative way for your organization’s use.
