Five Steps To Make Your Supplier Relationship Management Strategy Digital

Your supplier relationship management strategy, and your supplier on-boarding process to gain compliant credential renewals are a strict necessity towards demonstrating your compliance standards and your due diligence.

Your time is the most valuable asset you have and your role is to manage a compliant Supply Chain who will be able to continue the supply of their goods and services to your organisation during changing times.

When your organisation is a busy environment with many distractions that pull on your time for your attention. What can you do and need to do to make your working hours that bit easier?

Well, firstly, stop doing all the work manually in spreadsheets and automate your supplier relationship management strategy with digital!

Making your supplier relationship management strategy and how you collect and manage credentials renewals digitally will save you time, and deliver a current, and consistently updated approved supplier database to mitigate any supply chain risks and protect your organisational reputation.

Here’s five reasons why you should seriously consider automating your supplier management strategy.

1. Identify

Your compliance regime for your estate is going to vary subtly from everyone else’s so it’s critical that you identify ALL the compliance credentials you require from your Suppliers and, where their contractors are coming onto your site to deliver works. This allows you to identify how you can demonstrate your due diligence to adhere to your compliance standards.

2. Question

You’ll need to have a supplier questionnaire or compliance process that solicits credentials from Suppliers. Make sure that it has sufficient scope from what you’ve identified to meet your compliance needs

3. Digitise

Create a digital version of the questionnaire with the ability for the supplier to take their journey through your compliance process. By digitising this part of you supplier relationship management strategy you can create a database of all suppliers and enable the questionnaire to be sent via email so that suppliers can commence their relationship with you.

4. Validate & Iterate

By digitising the questionnaire, sharing over the Internet, validating each question, referring to colleagues for clarity on information you’re not 100% certain of, accepting and rejecting each stage and sending back for clarity; you can significantly reduce the time it takes towards gaining a fully compliant Supplier Chain database.

5. Renew

Once you’ve approved your Suppliers what’s the first thing that happens? Right! One of their provided credentials with an expiry date, you guessed, expires!
Through automating the renewals process you can see at a glance who isn’t managing their document set until the worse thing happens; digital enables you to be have a reactive requirement for a breakdown and your policies and procedures mean that very valuable supplier cannot continue to deliver services until restoration of their compliance documents!

Conclusion

You and your colleagues are responsible for ensuring that your supply chain are:
• Compliant
• Resilient
• Performing

We’ve seen some amazing results from our Accord Systems. Accord Contracts Management Systems is a leading system that delivers stress free contracts management, to manage all of your Suppliers, Contracts and Spend Data. Our recent exciting survey results help testify with one client even going so far as to say: “Accord has revolutionised the way we undertake supplier and contract management”.

Take the pressure off you and the team. Digitise and automate your supplier relationship management strategy.