Previously, procurement was only about goods and services. However, now it’s considered as the essential part of overall business strategy. And vendors are crucial for the proper procurement of products and services in the business. They increase the efficiency of selling processes, saves time and efforts of both parties, and helps demonstrate the suppliers’ care, thus earning loyalty and trust.
To get the most out of it, you should have a strategic approach to manage your suppliers efficiently. Undergoing vendor portal development can help. Proper vendor management contributes to long-lasting relationships. It streamlines every process that requires two-way communication, instant purchase, productivity, and proper management.
However, the role of vendor management is now more than manual onboarding and information management. Digital assistance like the B2B vendor portal has changed the game. It not only simplifies the process of selection, negotiation, and risk mitigation but also automates it all. Instead of contacting the businesses, vendors can manage it on their own.
Whether it’s a small business or a large one, portals have become a norm. If you’re looking for reasons to choose a B2B vendor portal, read this article.
Diverse Knowledge
A B2B vendor portal becomes a single point of solution to hold all the information, including suppliers’ and buyers’ phone calls, emails, and questions. It provides vendors with recent information. Vendors can learn about cooperation terms and conditions, and procedures. They can even view and download the documentation, templates to change the layouts, and company news to engage more with the business.
With a knowledge base, they can get every information at their fingertips without having to ask the business or support team. Your team can be free of all those endless calls and queries that your vendors and suppliers have.
Advice: Ensure that data is well-structured and vendors don’t have to scroll through a lot to get the relevant information.
Optimized Performance
Once you have an active vendor/supplier, a vendor portal can help track and measure their performance to ensure that they comply with your company’s requirements. This will help you optimize performance. If you have multiple vendors, it will help you reduce the contract management and documentation issues, if any.
With a contract management feature, you can handle contracts and even track their live status. If there’s an issue, the tracking performance will signal the problem so that you can tackle it on time. The live status and issue update accelerate your decision-making process, save time, effort, and make vendor management efficient.
Enhanced Visibility
Without automation, visibility in the business process is challenging. Unless you receive an invoice, open it, and manually add it to the system, no one has a clear idea.
A B2B vendor portal arranges and automates the entire supplier process. It allows tracking the order status and access to shipment information, thereby helping buyers plan their working process properly. Vendor management provides a central view of the vendor performance right from invoice submission to status and payment.
For instance, if the order status is upgraded timely, the buyer would know where the shipment has reached, when it will be delivered, or where it’s stuck. This reduces the miscommunication in both parties, along with the follow-up calls. You can even take action to eliminate the roadblocks. If a shipment is stuck, you can contact the delivery person and ask about the reason and try to resolve it.
Improved Vendor Relations
The golden business rule is to increase sales. Vendors, too, are looking for ways to maximize the cash flow. However, they have to call you to confirm the order and payment, which is frustrating. But, if you provide a B2B vendor portal, they can quickly get answers to their questions. Neither do you have to go through those emails and revert back, nor do they have to flood your emails and contacts in the first place.
They can access the portal 24/7 and submit, track, and update the information from anywhere – tablet, mobile phone, or desktop. The same rule applies to you. You can easily access all the vendor information in one place and even communicate with them.
Open Work Environment
Multiple proposals, the instant flow of information, and openness fosters suppliers to be a part of the business’ R&D process. Instead of requesting proposals manually, you can invite the vendors to propose through their respective login areas. This process can boost your R&D process. You can evaluate the proposals and even rank the vendors based on their history, compliance scores, inventory, delivery time, etc.
This way of collaboration, where you get all the data in hand, will help you get a broader picture and even speed up the development process.
Improved Security
No matter what business you have, security is of utmost importance. It’s essential to secure the customer and the entire data. When you have multiple vendors, it can get tricky if you manage the data manually, like in an Excel sheet. If you don’t want a vendor to edit a column, you can restrict it, but it’s again challenging. You can keep adding filters for every one manually.
Hence, you should opt for vendor portal development.
Vendor management, just like CRM, will provide limited access to the users based on their assigned roles. It means that you can manage who can access the documents and who can’t. Like the proposals you receive from vendors can be kept confidential and safe by providing access to only a selected bunch.
Reduced Costs
The end goal of vendor management is to maximize profit. By integrating the B2B vendor portal, you can save money and achieve long-term profitability. For instance, increased visibility can help see invisible costs, strong relations with suppliers can help negotiate better rates, and automation can increase productivity, which in turn, increases the profit margin.
Afterword
Going digital with vendor portal development will indeed transform your business. It will help you drive efficiency and visibility. However, the question is – how to get the most out of the vendor portal? For that, you must include all the advanced features such as online registration, automatic filtering, invoicing and payments, CRM access, etc.