Every company that sells products on the market will have advanced procurement functions. This procurement process orchestrates the supply of raw materials if manufacturing, or ready-made products when selling business to business (B2B) or direct to consumer (D2C).
A critical area of focus during procurement is identifying suitable products or materials, at a competitive price, and ensuring that suppliers meet obligations as part of the sales contract.
Let us explore how a vendor collaboration portal can streamline procurement using Pulse.
Build a Mutually Beneficial Vendor Collaboration Platform in Pulse
A vendor collaboration portal helps buyers and sellers to form a mutually beneficial consensus on finance, pricing, supply quantities, delivery deadlines, payment methods, and more.
For example, a supermarket collaborates with numerous vendors to build its own product portfolio. It must orchestrate purchases, deliveries, reconciliation for expired goods, and constantly re-negotiate prices to optimize this direct procurement process. Without this work, other competitors will out-negotiate and procure better vendor sources, putting the focus business at risk.
Uplift Procurement Efficiency to Improve Profitability
Sellers have requirements for buyers, and buyers have requirements for sellers. When these requirements are misaligned, it creates delays in the procurement process resulting in a lack of stock for the buyer, and interrupted cashflow for the seller. A common vendor collaboration interface can assist with supply chain management.
A vendor collaboration portal allows buyers and sellers to establish common frameworks around inventory stock levels, sales forecasts, purchase orders, and available capacity. A vendor has overstock available, and the buyer has a mishap resulting in stock loss. Supplier collaboration between sellers and buyers could work together to opportunistically acquire stock, in return for a cheaper overstock price, fulfilling both party requirements. A vendor collaboration portal in Pulse enables a collaborative approach in precisely this manner.
Purchase Order Tracking for Vendor Collaboration Management
As buyers submit purchase order requests, sellers are on the clock—racing to meet objectives. Buyers regularly experience delays with purchase order requests, leading to time wasted chasing absent stock. Rather than manually chasing it, a vendor collaboration portal can enable purchase order tracking to streamline the vendor relationship.
Automated reminders help sellers to maintain adherence with purchase order obligations, and the buyer’s procurement team can reduce its workloads. Timely deliveries are essential, especially in the food industry, making this an important consideration.
Automated reminders also improve adherence to Just-In-Time (JIT), helping vendors and buyers focus their productivity and operate efficiently under time constraints.
Vendor Performance Monitoring Over Time
New vendors ride on their reputation and sales pitch, but as time passes the only metric that truly matters is performance. Buyers can create a vendor collaboration portal with service level agreement (SLA) performance monitoring for delivery timescales, product quality, quantity ordered versus delivered, and more, to see whether vendors are meeting expectations.
Similarly, vendors experience uncertainty and risk when working with new buyers. Buyer expectations may exceed capacity and, if within the scope of work, the vendor must navigate this problem to find a mutually beneficial outcome. This helps both sides to establish a common performance threshold and stay above it, avoiding cashflow and stock-related issues.
Over time, each party can determine the success of the relationship and shop elsewhere if the service is not on point.
Vendor Collaboration Portal IT Security and Governance
As part of a vendor collaboration portal, buyers and sellers can establish common IT policies and governance rules to protect their own data while gaining compliant access to the partner’s data. This can be used to improve transparency between both parties with delivery timescales, driver availability, stock level thresholds, and financial operations insight.
Policies can be governed using role-based access controls and two-factor authentication methods, thus preventing unauthorized data access and reducing risk of vendor user account breaches. This also controls who can input data and where, and who can extract data from the collective system to protect both parties in alignment with data protection and data governance laws.
Knowledge Management Between Vendors and Purchasers
A purchasing company may enlist a vendor but be completely unaware of its product portfolio or other aspects of the external vendor’s business. This can make vendor relationships difficult as staff submit purchase orders, get in touch with points of contact, and visit vendor sites.
A vendor would appreciate a map showing the delivery point for drivers, a telephone number for the receiving employee on the day, and guidance on workflows to mark the delivery as complete. Similarly, a purchaser would appreciate the delivery driver’s contact details, warehouse locations for in-person quality assurance checks, and details on the origins of the product or raw materials.
A dedicated knowledge base for vendors and buyers makes this information readily available in real time, streamlining operations and reducing excessive time spent researching information.
