Unlock The Full Potential Of Source-To-Pay Solutions
SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
The advent of technology has eliminated many tedious manual processes around sourcing, financial operations and administration, allowing buyers to manage their entire vendor or supplier workflow with Source-to-Pay (S2P) solutions. This type of procurement automation software streamlines how buyers select and manage their suppliers, and simplifies their daily operations. For C-Suite executives in the finance department, incorporating S2P solution into their operational strategy can provide comprehensive tool, delivering significant savings and operational efficiency.
Supplier management, part of S2P solution, is an all-in-one system for onboarding, evaluating and managing suppliers and suppliers? performance, including existing supplier data and the auto-population of purchase-related information. This comprehensive and secure system allows executives to take control over their supplier portfolio and increase performance in the following ways.
Step 1: Setting Up Company Buyer Profiles
When beginning with S2P solution, it is imperative to set up detailed buyer profile. This profile should include the company name, address, locations, photo, and description of the company. By having these standard descriptions for buyers that can be reused for all supplier contracting, S2P system can help streamline the onboarding process for new suppliers.
Step 2: Evaluating Supplier Qualifications
The second step of implementing S2P solution is evaluating supplier qualifications. This includes background check, financial analysis, risk assessment, company profile check (including related companies, principal affiliations, etc.), and annual financial and compliance reviews. Using these evaluations, buyer can assess any supplier for internal corporate policy compliance and external public regulations. S2P solution can automate this supplier evaluation process with pre-built surveys and questionnaires to collect supplier data.
Step 3: Comparing Bid Processes
Developing an efficient, repeatable and defensible bid process is key part of S2P solutions, as it allows buyers to effectively compare suppliers. Using S2P solution, buyers can easily request and track bids and invoices, receive responses, and negotiate the best terms. Furthermore, with the supplier data collected and stored in the companies S2P database, buyers can organize bids, compare suppliers and make selections with few clicks.
Step 4: Online Catalog Management
Another major advantage of S2P solution is automation through online catalogs, which allow buyers to control catalogs of approved products, pricing, and PO-processing with pre-negotiated deals for different supplier selections. The entire catalog is searchable and updated in real-time, which enhances the value of the S2P system for both buyers and suppliers.
Step 5: Monitoring Supplier Performance
Finally, another key feature of S2P solution is supplier performance monitoring. This includes tracking the performance of all their suppliers across various metrics such as product quality, delivery speed, and customer service. Again, this process can easily be automated via S2P solution, as all purchase-related information is stored in one secure system that buyers can access and analyze.
Conclusion
By taking advantage of S2P solutions that automate complex supplier management tasks, C-suite executives can better manage the supplier selection, evaluation, onboarding, and performance processes. With comprehensive supplier management system, executives can gain visibility into their entire portfolio; they can make better decisions based on the data they collect, compare bids and make quicker selections, and further streamline their daily operations. Ultimately, this can lead to significant cost savings, increased efficiency and better supplier performance.
