An important part of smooth operating supply chains is onboarding and managing the vendors that are key to your organization’s success. Once onboarded, all key stakeholders from procurement (purchasing), finance (accounts payable), and the vendor must communicate, collaborate, and transact effectively to ensure frictionless transactions flow through the supply chain. Let’s address the three elements referenced above:
Communication
While communication may seem like an absurdly obvious concept, in practice it is often one of the most inefficient pieces of the process. Open lines of communication between all stakeholders can alleviate, or at least mitigate, issues that result in delayed orders and shipments, late payments, incorrect payments, and inaccurate vendor score-carding. Technologies and solutions allow for real-time communications amongst all internal and external stakeholders without going through “middlemen” such as vendor service centers or help desks. Integrating real-time messaging capabilities into your vendor portal applications such as vendor onboarding, invoice submission, payment inquiry, payment dispute, etc. allows you to communicate instantly and effectively to address issues and opportunities as they arise.
Collaboration
A critical piece of smooth running supply chains and successful vendor management programs is collaboration both internally (AP, procurement, legal, supply chain operations, etc.) and with your vendors. Unilateral decisions and actions by why one side of the equation (buyer/seller) without the collaboration of others on the other side (seller/buyer) can often result in delays, disagreements, and poor relationships with vendors who are key to keeping your supply chains operating smoothly. Using the communication tools discussed above, collaboration with all the parties involved is an easy and effective strategy to ensure healthy vendors, smooth running supply chain operations, and a value-added vendor management program.
Transaction
Now comes the most important component in the process: transactions between the buying and selling organization. Through diligent onboarding of key vendors to communicating and collaborating with your suppliers and vendors, the transaction part should be frictionless and timely. Any issues that may arise in the transaction processes can be quickly dealt with and resolved by all parties. Implementing additional cloud-hosted technologies can also help to make the transaction processing activities far more automated. Complementary solutions such as AP automation, workflow management, and data capture & document assembly can be useful tools for reducing costs and speeding up back-office supply chain processes. These back-office solutions can all be implemented in an on-premise, remote, or hybrid workforce configuration.
Get in touch with ICG to learn more about how we can help you communicate, collaborate, and transact with your vendors. Or, request a demo of any of our vendor management solutions. You can also watch a short video on all of ICG’s back-office solutions.