Your vendors and suppliers are crucial to ensure the proper procurement of products and services for your business. Proper vendor management practices contribute to long-lasting relationships with your vendors. Working in sync with vendors helps you fulfill your goals and achieve success faster. Ideally, effective vendor management aims for a win-win situation for both you and your vendors.

Earlier, vendor management would mostly depend on manual onboarding, and management of vendors’ information. The best companies could do was use phone calls and emails to manage vendor-related operations.

Then came the B2B vendor portal, a pioneering technology that not only simplified but also automated the vendor management process. Almost all the companies today are switching to a B2B vendor management tool to manage vendors and supply chains.

If you too are looking to enhance your vendor management, here’s your post. This post will walk you through the meaning of vendor management, its importance, and its stages. You’ll also learn about the features you must have in your B2B vendor portal.

So, here you go.

Overview of Vendor Management

Vendor Management is a collective term to describe all the processes an organization uses to manage its vendors (or suppliers). It encompasses choosing vendors, negotiating and controlling contract prices, mitigating vendor-related issues and risks, and several other tasks. There can be one or more vendors that can vary according to the nature of your organization. Vendors can also vary in size from sole traders to large organizations.

Importance of Vendor Management

Vendor management holds great importance for your organization. And a B2B vendor portal can help make vendor management more efficient.

Below are the benefits of effective vendor management for your organization:

1. Right Vendor Selection

Implementing suitable vendor management can help you select the right vendors. You can get automated bidding between vendors to get the best vendors at the best prices.

2. Enhanced Contract Management

If you have more than one vendor, the vendor management system helps reduce the issues in contract management, documentation, and other essential information.

Proper vendor management practices can help you manage contracts better. By tracking the current status of all contracts and other useful info with a centralized view, you can accelerate the decision-making process. It saves your time and adds more efficiency to your vendor management.

3. Better Performance Management and Visibility

Implementing a vendor management system like a B2B vendor portal provides a central view of all your vendors’ performance. This integrated view helps you get visibility and understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Accordingly, you can take action to eliminate roadblocks in supply chain management. This helps boost the overall efficiency of your organization.

4. Improved Vendor Relations

Multi-vendor management can be tedious and challenging. To make the most of vendors and meet your business goals, robust vendor management is indispensable.

Easy access to all the vendor-related info in a single location via a B2B vendor portal can simplify your decision-making process. You can also communicate with them easily, which helps develop stronger bonding with your vendors over time.

5. Better Value for Your Buck

The end goal of vendor management is to achieve value for your investment. So, integrating a B2B vendor portal to manage vendors helps you save money and achieve long-term profitability over time.

If you are looking to manage your vendors seamlessly and enhance efficiency at every stage, our B2B vendor portal can help you out. It is a scalable and ready-to-integrate portal that you can customize to cater to your specific needs.

If you need help customizing it, we are there for you. You can even build a portal from scratch with our development team’s assistance if your specifications are very different.

Let’s make you the best portal for your business.

Stages of Vendor Management System

There are various stages that constitute the vendor management system, as below:

1. Vendor Selection - This is the first step in vendor management and includes picking the right vendors for your organization. For that, you need to research vendors, gather quotes via requests for quotation (RFQs) and requests for proposal (RFPs).

Once you have all the info and quotes, the next step is shortlisting and finalizing vendors. Though pricing will be a valuable factor, there are several other factors you should consider to select the vendors. These factors may be the vendor’s reputation, track record, capacity, communication ability, and more.

2. Negotiate the Contract - Getting the contract right is a must. Ensure that both you and your vendor agree to the terms that are mutually beneficial for both parties. Negotiating a contract may be time-consuming at times but it’s worth it.

This is because contract negotiation consists of defining goods and services to include, start date and end date of arrangements, and confidentiality and non-compete terms and clauses.

3. Vendor Onboarding - Vendor onboarding involves gathering the information and documentation relevant to on-boarding and approving a new vendor to your organization. You may also need to make sure that you collect all the vital contact and payment information. This information can include relevant licenses the vendor has, tax forms, insurance details, etc.

4. Tracking Vendor Performance - Once you on-board vendors, you need to continuously track and evaluate their performance. It includes evaluating their performance in terms of various key performance indicators like quality, volume, or delivery dates of goods.

5. Risk Monitoring and Management - There is a need to monitor vendors for any risks that can affect your organization. Some possible risks can be compliance breaches, data security issues, intellectual property loss or stealth, lawsuits, etc.

You should also identify if there is any bottleneck in the supply chain on the vendors’ side and how it can impact your organization’s operations.

6. Payment Management - Last but not least, on-time payment is also a step you can’t afford to avoid. Make sure you are paying your vendors in line with the agreed payment terms to maintain good terms.

B2B Vendor Portal - Your Key to Enhanced Visibility and Efficiency in Supply Chain

A B2B vendor portal enables you to track and view your vendors centrally all in one place. You can view different customized reports that your vendors upload for better insights into individual vendors’ performance.

Central management of all the vendors’ info, sales figures, and more helps you stay on track with respect to supplies and deficits. You can also spot overreliance on a single vendor, non-compliance of terms by a vendor, or other risk factors with everything in your B2B vendor portal.

Besides, automation of several business aspects like vendor onboarding, exchange of notifications like certification expirations, insurance certificates, affidavits, etc. helps expedite processes. They reduce the workload on the admin staff and increase the efficiency of the supply chain processes.

All in all, a B2B vendor portal helps you drive more efficiency and visibility in your vendor management operations.

Features You Must Look Out for In a B2B Vendor Portal

While picking a vendor portal, see to it that the portal has got the following features.

1. Online Registrations

Your vendor portal should allow you to register global vendors and suppliers and make them a part of your network without hassle.

2. Automated Filtering of Vendors

Manual filtering of vendors by certain criteria you decide is a herculean task indeed. Your portal should help you get rid of this by providing auto-filter functionality and enhance transparency in the process.

3. Management of Quotes and Proposals

Your portal should eliminate the need to send manual requests for quotes and proposals. Rather, it should let different vendors share their quotes and proposals directly via a secure login and stay assured of confidentiality.

4. Easy Comparison

There should be a means to evaluate the proposals based on their previous records easily within your portal. The portal should save your time by getting rid of the need for manual comparison and evaluation of proposals every time.

5. Automated Ranking

Your portal should also let you rate your vendors based on your defined comparison index. There can be factors like the history, compliance scores, delivery time, available inventory, etc. that you can rate your vendors on.

6. Invoicing & Payments

There should be the freedom to generate Purchase Orders and Invoices directly from within your vendor portal. It should take away the hassle of generating purchase orders and invoices separately and sharing them via email, fax, or post.

7. Secure CRM Access

Your vendors should be able to view their relevant data fields in the CRM in a secure way. Your portal should provide your vendors and suppliers with role-based access to CRM.

Hire Us - Your A-Team to Amplify Your Vendor Management

Now that you know how important vendor portal management is for your organization, it is time you got it right. If you need help, we’ve got you covered.

Our B2B vendor portal solution can be your ideal match. It features secure CRM access, proposal filter, automated proposal ranking, and more that you seek in an ideal B2B vendor portal. We can discuss your requirements and customize the portal to make it a perfect fit for you. If you want, our development team can take it one step ahead and build a portal from the ground up!

So, let’s connect and build the best vendor portal together!

• Better Selection:

• Contract Management:

• Better Performance Management: 

• Improved Vendor Relationships: 

• Provide Better Value:

• Compliance Risk:

• Background Check:

• Lack of Visibility:

• Vendor Data Storage:

• Payment Risks: 

Boeing has been in the news for a few very wrong reasons lately. And by lately, I mean for the better part of the last decade. 

The problems that their 787 and 737 Max faced were technological. But when you dig deeper, you can see that it is one thing to blame the technological failures but a whole another one to highlight the human and managerial errors that brought it down.

The issues began with cost cutting. Boeing outsourced 70% of 787 manufacturing with a tiered outsourcing structure. With this outsourcing, the issues created were manufacturing delays due to miscommunication and sometimes lack of communication all together. 

During the manufacturing of the 787, the bottom most tier did not communicate the issues they were facing to the company that was assembling the plane. This caused delays in the production cycle so much that the first planes came out 3 years later than promised.  

The management failed to communicate how to go about the innovations when they did not provide an on field expert to the companies that were making the parts of the plane.  

Next issue was the 737 Max. There is also a very sad case of cost cutting. Boeing had to keep everything the same about it as the previous versions of 737, while also innovating for fuel efficiency and to keep up with the competing new entry from Airbus. The management decided to install software in the plane that they did not tell the pilots about. This, essentially, a lack of communication brought about the two fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 Max. 

In both cases, Boeing looked at its competitor’s success story, and only focused on the sales they made. They ignored their supply chain, and they ignored the people who are actually going to be operationally interacting with their products.

Businesses that are B2B and even those who are both, B2B and B2C, like Boeing, need to streamline their focus on catering to more than just their absolute end user and looking at their sales performance.

It should begin at the supplier level. The end user is important, yes. But the people who make and distribute your products are more important on a prerequisite level. There are plenty of products that have parts being manufactured by smaller companies and they then come on the assembly line to a different company. This means that the communication between these two companies and you needs to be transparent. 

It boils down to paying attention to and maintaining your supply chain. How do you go about this?  

No cost cutting: 

The only way to do this is not to stop outsourcing, but to outsource responsibly. Pick the right vendors and manufacturers. Outsource to a place that has the same work ethic as your company or country, and ideally one where you speak the same language. Don’t focus on innovating for the sake of cost cutting. This makes it easier to compromise on quality.  

Put effort towards your supply chain:

If you are the designer and engineer of your product, you need to place a trainer or supervisor with the manufacturing units. This way, problems can be solved in run time without delays and more importantly, mistakes.  

Vendor management portal:

Use a vendor management portal to choose your manufacturers. You can have modules in the portals for quotes, timelines, quality rating etc. This portal should be used by the manufacturers as well as by the people who are assembling your product. From on boarding, quality check, contract management to constant communication, the vendor management portal can handle it all.  

With the effective use of this portal, every stakeholder can get run time updates during the process. This can help avoid costly delays and manufacturing defects. No decision will have to be backtracked because of miscommunication. Additionally, if you need to change the specific also, you can do so directly from the portal. The manufactures have a place to register issues they are facing or if they need to revise the contract details etc.  

A good supplier management portal can solve anything from the smallest to the extremely important issues. However, your relationship with your suppliers cannot fully depend on the portal. The portal is an aid to human interaction, to reduce redundancy and miscommunication. 

The idea is always to build a sustainable business. Not just a profitable one. And once your business is big, do not go down the Boeing road. Don’t look at just the fact the competition is getting better, but examine how they are doing it. Innovation should not come at the hand of corruption.  

About CRMJetty…

We are a portal solution company, and we partner with businesses to make portals for their vendors and suppliers. Our supplier management portal has all the features you’d need and it can aid you in your relationship management.

To know more about us and supplier management portal, feel free to drop us a line at sales@crmjetty.com.