Vendor Management covers many different areas of how companies identify, onboard, and transact with vendors and suppliers who supply goods and services to their organization in exchange for payment. The processes involved in managing these vendor centric activities can vary greatly by industry, company, and even departments within a company.
These types of activities in managing prospective, as well as active, vendors are very cumbersome and often manual. As a result critical details and activities can slip through the cracks. Consider the case of a regional retail store chain who was manually managing the insurance coverage and expirations of their vendors. A vendor who had dome business with the organization for years by removing snow from their locations during the winter months had let their insurance coverage expire. The company was not aware of this expiration and unfortunately, tragedy struck when the snow plow fatally struck a customer. Because the plow driver was a small business with few assets and expired insurance, the retail company was liable for significant damages. It all could have been easily avoided if the company had the right vendor management systems and processes in place.
So what are some of the vendor management solutions ICG Consulting offers to companies looking to advance their vendor management capabilities while at the same time streamlining their procure-to-pay processes?
- Vendor Onboarding / Supplier Onboarding
- collect company information
- contacts
- remit to addresses
- products and services
- financial information
- references
- licenses, permits, etc. (track expirations)
- sustainability program info.
- tax documents and TIN validations
- insurance COI’s
- track expirations and proactively notify buyer and vendor
- diversity tracking and validations
- expiration tracking
- reporting data
- collect company information
- PO Dispatch & Update
- automatically dispatch purchase orders and any subsequent revisions
- track responses, or if no response, notify buyer
- proactively reach out to suppliers to request status updates of critical orders
- automatically dispatch purchase orders and any subsequent revisions
- Vendor Portals / Supplier Portals
- submit invoices/payment requests through the portal
- web forms
- PO flip
- upload billing file
- online payment inquiries
- payment dispute submission & tracking
- dynamic discounting & supply chain finance
- real-time vendor collaboration
- 24 x 7 access from anywhere on any device
- submit invoices/payment requests through the portal
- AP Automation
- remote approval and exception processing workflows
- data and document capture
- PO matching
- online forms/payment requests
- general ledger cost distribution
- accounts payable interfaces to your ERP
- Data Capture & Document Assembly
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted data capture from documents and images
- Document assembly and aggregation
- Integration with ERP and AP systems
Vendor management portals are ideal for providing better service, more efficiency, risk mitigation and for less operating expenditures. At ICG Consulting, we make sure your vendor portal or supplier portal is designed to meet your business process needs. Any kind of information can be included your vendor management portal. And all of of ICG’s Vendor portal solutions are highly secure thanks to the help of our partners at AWS and Sysdig. ICG offers a variety vendor management solutions to fit your unique needs. Contact ICG today for more information or request a demo of our vendor management solutions. You can also watch a short Solutions Video of ICG’s business process solutions.