From Chaos to Control: Mastering Vendor Onboarding

Vendors are vital to a company’s success; they bring new capabilities and resources that help a business grow and prosper. The effective management of existing and potential vendors can help managers find the ideal business partners who can help them solve business problems swiftly. This can help them launch new products and services, cut costs, create new revenue streams, or better manage their risks.

However, it can all become very chaotic if managers can’t find the right suppliers or spend time engaging with unsuitable vendors. Equally, if managers start engaging suppliers who do not meet a business’s vendor management policy or create compliance issues, the business can suffer significant legal, operational, and reputational harm very quickly.

The challenge, especially for growing businesses or large companies with worldwide operations, is ensuring they have suitable suppliers at the right time.

Vendor onboarding programmes and systems allow managers across the business to identify the right suppliers for their project shortlist, ensure they meet corporate standards, and ensure they are engaged and paid swiftly and efficiently.

Let’s look at how automated vendor onboarding helps companies meet their objectives.

Four Ways Vendor Onboarding Helps Your Company

1. Reduce the Management Overhead of Managing Your Supply Chain

In a dynamic economy, your vendor landscape is changing constantly. New companies with new products and services continually enter the market, providing new capabilities. Your existing suppliers will also introduce new offerings and change their pricing and their terms & conditions.

Finding a way to avoid chaos in this situation is almost impossible, even for companies with which managers already have relationships. If you add potential new suppliers to this equation, too, it quickly becomes apparent that only an automated platform can provide the vendor onboarding support needed so managers can review candidates for potential projects while continuing to do their day job.

2. Manage Your Growth Effectively

Growing a business organically or through acquisition means constantly re-balancing your supply chain and searching for the right mix of scale and cost-effectiveness.

This process may involve identifying and engaging new suppliers with additional capacity or streamlining them by giving larger orders to fewer suppliers to secure better unit costs and more value.

Achieving this in an orderly fashion means having accurate data from your suppliers – current and potential – that has been validated so that you can make sensible like-for-like comparisons, to draw up your project vendor shortlist.

3. Maintaining your Compliance

In highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals, aviation, and financial services, supply chain risk management is a critical part of the business’s compliance regime.

From a vendor management perspective, this means ensuring that vendors and potential vendors have the proper certifications in place to provide their services compliantly, whether a specific regulation focuses on quality control, product traceability, bribery prevention, modern slavery, ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC), or anti-money laundering, for example.

A vendor onboarding platform can be the ideal way of systematically identifying which suppliers and would-be suppliers have the proper credentials to help ensure your business processes and offerings remain fully compliant.

4. Deepening Your Vendor Relationships

From time to time, it is necessary to identify vendors and potential vendors with the specialist skills, expertise, or resources you need to take your company to the next level. Identifying the right ones in a complex vendor landscape is time-consuming at best but likely impossible unless you have the correct vendor information and the right search tools that reflect your business’s unique requirements.

Implementing Best Practice Vendor Onboarding

A vendor onboarding programme will provide the proper framework to help you match the right vendors to the right initiatives in your company.

An effective programme should also provide a framework for managing and reviewing a supplier’s service throughout the contract lifecycle.

Let’s explore the steps to implement the right programme for your business.

1. Supplier Engagement & Registration

Companies source their suppliers in numerous ways, including leveraging personal relationships, engaging with existing suppliers, meeting potential suppliers at events, and conducting online searches.

Potential vendors also spend considerable time and effort engaging with potential customers themselves through their sales and marketing activity.

The smart move for any company looking to screen vendors is to provide a straightforward way of allowing companies to register their interests as potential suppliers.

A vendor onboarding programme can provide a portal-based engagement model that can be tailored to the specific needs of a business, based on its industry, size, geographical spread, and the expectations it has of prospective suppliers in terms of expertise, size, qualifications, certifications, experience, turnover and so on.

This portal can serve as a catalogue of services that a company’s employees can review, to see which suppliers might fit the bill for their project.

2. Data Verification

This vendor-led data input model ensures their information is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant. It also allows the data they provide to be verified should a supplier be identified as a candidate.

Ideally, this process can benefit from extensive automation so that issues around the identity and location of the company, its financial records, and other essential information can be confirmed quickly and easily.

You can integrate your onboarding platform with external data sources and create workflow automation processes to review and approve vendors and highlight issues that may need more research, clarification, or a response from the prospective supplier.

You can also adapt the model to capture how different jurisdictions provide this type of information to make it easy to engage with overseas suppliers who may help you grow your revenues in new geographies.

3. Supplier Record

With this process complete, the vendor can be considered ’onboarded’ so that they are ready to work with you in an organised way, according to the agreed contract, and also paid, using all the information provided during the onboarding process.

How Can Telic Digital Help You?

Telic Digital has extensive experience helping companies automate and streamline critical business processes. We help companies develop and implement vendor onboarding systems and processes that capture the specific requirements of a business, and develop a catalogue of vendors that can help them build their business. We deliver proven capabilities that deliver a vendor database, workflow automation, management reporting, searching, systems integration, and data verification that ensure a company has the vendors it needs.