Vendors and suppliers are critical to ensuring good product and service procurement for your company. Vendor management best practices help you maintain long-term relationships with your suppliers. Working in tandem with vendors allows you to meet your objectives and achieve success more quickly. Effective vendor management, in theory, should result in a win-win situation for both you and your vendors.
Previously, vendor management relied heavily on manual onboarding and information management. To manage vendor-related operations, the top organizations could rely on phone conversations and emails.
Then came the B2B vendor portal, a game-changing technology that made vendor administration easier and automated it. To manage vendors and supply chains, almost every company uses a B2B vendor management platform.
In this article by Hanna Shnaider, you’ll learn to improve your template for vendor risk assessment, explain what vendor management is, why it’s essential, and how it works. You’ll also learn about the features your B2B vendor site must have.
Features of a B2B Vendor Portal
When going for a suitable B2B vendor portal, be sure to look out for the following:
- Online registrations: Your vendor portal should make it simple to register international vendors and suppliers and add them to your network. People tend to lose hope when registration processes seem challenging to move from.
- Automated filtering of vendors: Manually filtering vendors by any criteria you choose is a daunting process. By providing auto-filter capability and increasing transparency in the process, your portal should assist you in eliminating this.
- Control of quotes and proposals: Your platform should eliminate the necessity for manual quotation and proposal requests. Instead, it should allow multiple vendors to share estimates and offers directly through a secure login while maintaining confidentiality.
- Easy distinction: There should be an easy way to evaluate offers within your site based on their previous records. The site should save you time by eliminating the need to compare and evaluate bids manually each time.
- Automated grading: Your portal should also allow you to rate your merchants using a comparison index that you establish. You can rate your vendors based on things like their history, compliance scores, delivery time, available inventory, and so on.
- Invoice and payments: Purchase Orders and Invoices should be generated immediately from your vendor portal in the company. It should eliminate the burden of creating separate purchase orders and invoices and sharing them by email, fax, or postal mail.
- Obtain CRM access: Your vendors should be able to access their relevant data fields in the CRM securely. Your gateway should grant role-based CRM access to your vendors and suppliers.
Improved supply chain visibility
A B2B portal streamlines and organizes the whole supply chain. It enables continuous tracking of relevant order status and access to up-to-date shipment information, allowing the buyer to better plan his working process. Because the order status is continuously updated, it is always evident why it isn’t arriving, when it will arrive, and at what point it has become stuck, reducing vendor-related risks, allowing more deliberate judgments, and preventing both parties from making follow-up and clarifying calls.
Working in an open environment
Supplier involvement in the R&D process is facilitated by the instant flow of information, increased openness, and close cooperation that a well-designed B2B portal provides. And, if the buyer’s side has the right organizational culture in place to implement such collaboration, they can benefit from the new level of engagement. Suppliers’ invaluable experience might help buyers accelerate their R&D efforts. For example, Fuji-Xerox recently reduced its time to build a new model from 38 to 29 months. The secret was that they gathered all members of the multifunctional team in one room, listened to what their suppliers had to say, and acted quickly.
Issues faced with portal implementation
The portal implementation is not as easy as some people might make it sound; some issues are present at some points. Here are the most common issues faced:
1. Inconvenience
The intricacy of different alternative scenarios, sophisticated pricing algorithms, recurrent orders, and elaborate delivery schedules are not easy to disguise. However, the inconvenience would return us to the fundamental issues that a portal is designed to address. The user does not have rapid, direct, and intuitive access to what he needs, resulting in numerous clarification calls/emails and document errors. As a result, both the vendor and buyer’s managers deal with wasted time, increased delays, and decreased efficiency. The only choice is never to neglect the time-consuming process of developing a clear and straightforward user interface and ensuring ongoing end-user input in a custom software agency.
2. Tight protocols for new vendors
New suppliers may offer benefits that none of the old merchants do. A continual stream of new potential suppliers helps sustain healthy competition at the site, giving those who provide higher-quality products a real chance to win. And any marketplace, even those that operate online, is driven by competition.
Entry-level costs and integration efforts in B2B portals can deter small and midsize development companies from cooperating. As a result, it may be good to consider launching a limited-featured free trial edition to make it easier for new suppliers to enter the market and demonstrate their products.
Furthermore, a well-designed registration process can turn the portal into a valuable instrument for automatic prequalification and subsequent prioritization, which considerably contributes to the e-profitability marketplace by attracting potential partners suitable for beneficial collaboration in software development companies.
Conclusion
Going digital and implementing a B2B Vendor portal will undoubtedly transform the company. But whether the adjustments will be for the better or the worse remains to be seen. A genuinely successful and profitable B2B solution appears straightforward only to its customers, but it is always the result of a long and challenging planning and development process.
Fortyseven software professionals recognize the importance of a B2B vendor portal in custom software development companies. So, we have made it easier for you to understand the problematic planning process as you get started with your B2B portal.