Top 10 Benefits to a Vendor Portal
Vendor Portal Benefits take many forms. Many people do not realize just how integrated a configurable a vendor portal will end up until they bring their team together and start to collect requirements. Also known as a Supplier Portal, they are web-based and genuine vendor management solutions that provide multiple benefits with an excellent opportunity to work and communicate with your vendors in a safe, secure, and an efficient online environment. As such, vendor portal benefits can provide you with numerous possibilities for improving your business. Here are some of the most important vendor portal benefits:
1 Automated Supplier Onboarding
Vendor portals can automate the supplier onboarding processes. For most companies, the supplier onboarding process is manual and takes up to a week to complete. Also, a not so well known Vendor Portal benefit is that a supplier can be granted self-service capabilities that can facilitate continual data submission and validation.
2 Segregation of Duties
It is also possible to establish a Segregation of Duties with the help of a configurable vendor portal. Access to the system can be rolls based and filled with access controls. The Vendor Portal should be integrated into your Active Directory offering two separate layers of security checks.
3 Vendor Portal Localized Communications
A Vendor Portal should enable Localized Communication strategies across all of your locations. These extremely helpful business tools can also allow you to ensure the adequate flexibility and efficiency required for the international business environments, where you have to deal with multiple languages, regions, or organizational unties.
4 Supplier Information Management
You may need to collect information, such as financial and risk profiles, core supplier attributes, various NDAs, vendor contracts, compliance surveys, and similar. All of this data can be securely communicated, submitted and tracked to ensured that it does not age out of compliance. Also, a not so well known Vendor Portal benefit is that an Enterprise can track given data elements for age and when it gets too old an automated request can be sent out.
5 Audit Capability
Vendor Portals offer audit capability over all of the controls. Improve controls over and adaptability to keep up with the dynamic supplier changes, such as bank account info tracking, Tax/VAT, reviews, automatic notifications trigger, and similar.
6 Third Party Data Integration
Once you collect data from suppliers, you will want to reach out to different 3rd parties to validate the submissions. These validations may be government validations like IRS TIN validation or private data validation like D&B or Experian. Additionally, there can be other validations to check the credentials of the suppliers like with the Office of the Inspector General or the Office of Foreign Assets and Controls
7 Parametric Workflow Campaign Integration
You can also use your vendor portal to manage and contact all targeted suppliers individually. Or, you can focus on urgent and emerging issues with your suppliers, you need to handle as soon as possible. A Vendor Portal can filter your supply base for virtually any criterion and then deploy a communication or workflow campaign.
8 Process Automation
Vendor portals allow you to apply the AR/AP “straight through processing” as frequent as possible and required to address any potential supplier management issues.
9 Data Syndication
Perhaps the most important aspect of a Vendor Portal is the ability to Syndicate data across your enterprise. Most companies have multiple locations, divisions and business tools. A vendor Portal can distribute supplier data to all of these systems to maximize their efficiency.
10 Facilitate Invoicing, Procurement and other core functionality.
Vendor portals allow you to track, capture, and identify all potential and additional payment-related credits, rebates, discounts, etc. Also, a not so well known Vendor Portal benefit is that all of these functional processes will increase in effectiveness as you integrate the workflow and communication tools.
