The Benefits of a Supplier Portal

Supplier Portal, Supplier Log In, Supplier On-Boarding Process… its functionality and benefits take many names and forms. Many people do not realise just how an integrated and configurable supplier portal can bring a team together to start to collect requirements from their supply chain.

A Supplier Portal, is a web-based and innovative supplier management solution that provide multiple benefits with an excellent opportunity to work and communicate with your supply chain in a safe, secure, and an efficient online environment. As such, supplier portal benefits can provide you with numerous possibilities for improving your business. Here are some of the most important supplier portal benefits:

• Automates Your Supplier On-boarding

A supplier portals can do a great job at automating your supplier on-boarding processes. In most businesses the supplier on-boarding process is manual and takes up to a week to complete so with the ability to automate this, you can save you and your procurement team a lot of time paper chasing. An unknown benefit is that a supplier can be granted self-service capabilities, such as a log in or notification links that can facilitate continual data submission and validation.

• Centralises Supply Chain Communications

With a supplier portal you are able to centralise your supply chain communication strategies across all of your multiple departments and office locations. The functionality in a supplier is very intuitive and extremely helpful business tool that ensures the adequate flexibility and efficiency required for you and your team to update data and communicate in real time across the international business environments, where you have may have to deal with multiple languages, regions, or organisational departments.

• Supplier Information Management

You have to collect information, such as financial and risk profiles, core supplier attributes, various NDAs, supply chain contracts, compliance surveys, and any other requirements that are withing your procurement standards. All of this data can be securely communicated, submitted and tracked to ensured that it does not expire out of compliance. Also, a not so well known Supplier Portal benefit is that with innovative development the system can track given data elements for expiry and review to then alert you via digital dashboard and your supplier via email through integrated automated request processes.

• Data Sharing and Audit Capability

Perhaps the most important aspect of a Supplier Portal is the ability to syndicate data across your organisation. Most companies have multiple locations, divisions and business tools, a Supplier Portal can distribute supplier data to all of these departments to maximize supply chain efficiency and data integrity. Supplier Portals offer audit capability over all of the controls. You can improve controls over and an adaptability to keep up with the dynamic supplier changes, such as bank account info tracking, Tax/VAT, reviews, automatic notifications trigger, and similar.

• Workflow Integration and Automation

Supplier Portals can be used to manage and contact all targeted suppliers individually. With a configurable and adaptable system you can apply the your procurement and supply chain workflows so you can automate your manual workload. Or, with an automated digital dashboard you can see where to focus on urgent and emerging issues with your suppliers, that you need to handle as soon as possible. A Supplier Portal can filter your supply base for virtually any criterion and then deploy a communication or workflow campaign/process.

How Can Accord’s Supplier Portal help?

At a time when many teams are struggling with managing their supply chain, it is important to consider smart strategies and solutions and look towards the offering of digital supplier onboarding systems, so you and your team can continue to work collaboratively with your supply chain.

Accord’s Supplier Portal is reducing the time required to process information and manage suppliers; a paper-less process helping save your team time to free up resources to focus on improving service quality.

The Supplier Portal is taking supplier relationship management further and driving supply chain performance by helping your business with the supplier onboarding process; recording and managing contracts and supplier information, audit results, performance ratings, NCR’s, CAR’s, certifications, documents and more.

You can ensure suppliers maintain their compliance by providing them with secure access to your Accord contract management system so they can…

• See all the contracts they have in place with you.
• Manage their own insurance and compliance.
• Be easily notified of non-conformances.
• Address any non-conformances to improve KPI’s.
• Complete online questionnaires.
• Work more closely with procurement and purchasing departments.

Enabling suppliers their own login to the system helps reduce the time required to process information and manage suppliers; saving valuable man hours to put more focus on generating quality services and enhancing efficiency across the supply chain.

How do you currently manage your supply chain? Do you have an efficient and effective supplier relationship management system?

Talk to us, or arrange a free, informal, no-obligation tour of Accord over a webinar to see more about our Supplier Portal.