As the economy starts to reopen and business is starting to boom, labor is still hard to find despite high percentages of unemployment. This trend favors companies that value efficiency and are willing to invest in back-office applications that promote high levels of vendor self-service. Using cloud-hosted tools like vendor portals, AP automation, PO dispatch & update, dynamic discounting, workflows, and advanced data capture, companies can expand their top and bottom lines without significantly expanding resources to support back-office functions. In this blog post, we will focus specifically on why you should invest in efficiency with vendor portals.
Cloud-Hosted Vendor Portals
The vendor portal has been a long-standing tool, but until recently, its adoption has been relatively low, found mainly in specific industries and larger companies. From procurement to accounts payable, a cloud-hosted vendor portal provides an important platform for parties to communicate, collaborate, and transact 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Vendor portals can also provide a business-critical platform to support a remote workforce both internally and externally. A vendor portal can be adapted to many more processes than most people realize. When used, a vendor portal can become a hub for all things surrounding vendors, making it an invaluable tool in many different ways.
Vendor Portal Benefits
- Increased Communication: Be proactive in communicating with your current and potential vendors from onboarding to maintenance to offboarding.
- Messaging: Powerful messaging capabilities allow your team to communicate in real time with your vendors.
- Better Service for Vendors: Answer vendor inquiries immediately and provide valuable information at the click of a mouse. Your vendors also become more efficient, stable, and responsive.
- Return on Investment: The biggest benefit of a vendor management portal is the ROI. The return usually begins immediately as labor-intensive tasks are transferred from in-house to the vendor.
- Dynamic Discounting: For Vendor/Supplier/Payment portals, Dynamic Discounting can be a substantial profit and/or cash-flow center.
ICG Vendor Portal Features
- Scalability: An ICG vendor management solution can scale from small to large in terms of functionality as well as transactional activity.
- Adaptability: Your vendor portal can adapt to both business growth and technological advances.
- Cloud-hosted: ICG’s vendor portals are cloud-hosted, single-tenant solutions. This means that your portal will look and act the same as if it were on your servers. No data or application sharing with other companies.
- Technology Independent: We work with your existing ERP and back office applications, no matter what the technology or platform.
- Complete Administration Control and Security: ICG’s vendor portals include robust, bulletproof security. You control who gets in and how much privilege they have, right down to the individual user level.
- Added Functionality Made Affordable: ICG’s vendor portals allow you to take advantage of and pay for only the functionality you need. If future business conditions warrant, you can add different pieces of functionality to your portal. Additionally, customize your vendor portal as you see fit. We are able to add or subtract functionality based on your existing processes and needs.
Get Started
There is no better time to look at a vendor portal for your organization or add more functionality to your existing portal platform. Are you ready to take a fresh look at your back office and learn how to invest in efficiency with vendor portals? If so, click for more information or schedule a demo with ICG for your team.