You’ve completed your tender and selected your perfect supplier. Now it’s time for the supplier to be onboarded, meaning all the required information needs to be collected and checked.
By having effective processes in-place for supplier information management, you can mitigate supplier risk.
What is Supplier Information Management?
Supplier information management, or vendor information management starts with the process of onboarding suppliers, collecting the required documentation.
From there, the information must be kept accurate, and up-to-date, and audit-ready.
Supplier information that is collected could include anything from specific policies to health and safety information regarding manufacturing sites.
Having supplier information on-hand is also important for managing global supply chains, particularly now organisations are growing more concerned with environmental, social and governance.
Why is it Important?
Brand Reputation:
There’s a growing onus on the organisation to ensure they are working with suppliers who are also compliant with legislation. This means investigating their higher-tier suppliers to ensure there is no modern slavery in the supply chain. Non-compliance in the supply chain can result in significant damage to brand reputation if the organisation hasn’t done their due diligence.
Supply Chain Disruption:
By cultivating better transparency with your suppliers, you can minimise the risk of disruption by having a strong understanding of your suppliers in terms of performance, location and manufacturing site details.
To discover more about supply chain collaboration, see our document here.
Reduce Supplier Risk:
By keeping your supplier information up to date, including the updating of documentation upon it’s expiry, you reduce the risk of suppliers becoming non-compliant with important legislation.
To discover how our software helps compliance teams, visit the webpage here.
Sustainability:
The climate crisis is still a big problem, and larger organisations will need to build greener supply chains moving forward. This means businesses need to know about the sustainability activities of their supply base.
To discover how our software can help you assess supplier environmental, social and governance compliant, visit the webpage here.
Pain Points of Supplier Information Management
The reality is that supplier information management isn’t easy when many organisations manage supply bases that consist of hundreds of suppliers.
When using cumbersome systems, such as spreadsheets, it’s too easy for the supplier data integrity to erode. This can be due to rekeying errors, missed data changes, or no real supplier oversight.
To discover more about how supplier information management can be streamlined, see our article on supplier onboarding here.
Supplier Information Management Best Practices
Automated Alerts
By having automated reminders to prompt suppliers to update their information, it’s much easier to track non-compliance.
AI Verification
By using Artificial Intelligence to verify supplier documentation, this tedious and repetitive task is effectively eliminated. This saves time and ensures that supplier documentation is in-date.
Data Visualisation
Using dashboards, it’s possible to gain more value from your supplier data, by delving deeper into the supplier insights that they offer.
To discover more about data visualisation, see our webpage for ARCUS® Analytics.
Centralisation
By keeping all data in one searchable location, you can easily find the information that you need.
Cloud-based working
Cloud-based working facilitates collaboration across teams involved in supplier information management.
All stakeholders can access the information from the same place, ensuring there aren’t multiple edited versions of the same document, which causes confusion.
Benefits of Supplier Management Software
At Trade Interchange, we provide ARCUS® Supplier Management Software, with modules dedicated to streamlining and digitally transforming the supplier management processes, including supplier information management.
To discover more benefits of software for supplier management, see our article here.
If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of ARCUS® SIM, book a consultation here.