Reduce costs and risk while improving vendor relations
Vendor onboarding portals, also know as supplier portals, are an essential tool for businesses that want to streamline their procurement processes. These portals can automate many of the tasks associated with vendor onboarding, such as collecting and verifying supplier information, ensuring compliance, managing contracts, and processing payments. Vendor portal onboarding functionality also provides a platform to keep your existing vendors data current and accurate, as well as also ensuring compliance, e.g., insurance, license and certification expirations.
While the benefits of using a vendor onboarding portal are clear, many businesses overlook the cost savings opportunities that these portals can provide. Here are some ways that your business can save money by using a vendor onboarding portal:
- Reduced administrative costs: With a vendor onboarding portal, you can automate many of the manual and resource consuming tasks associated with managing supplier information. This means that you’ll spend less time on non-value add administrative tasks, freeing up resources for other business needs .
- Improved efficiency: By automating vendor onboarding processes, you can significantly reduce the time it takes to onboard new suppliers as well as manage the ever changing supplier data for existing vendors. This means that you can start working with new suppliers faster and reduce costs associated with managing supplier data, which can lead to improved business outcomes.
- Better vendor management: With a vendor onboarding portal, you can collect and manage supplier information in a centralized location. This will help you to control rouge spend and makes it easier to monitor supplier performance and identify opportunities for cost savings.
- Reduced risk of errors: By automating the vendor onboarding process, you can reduce the risk of errors and mistakes on the part of your vendors (bad data in) and your team. This can help you avoid costly outcomes, such as paying incorrect invoices or working with non-compliant suppliers.
- Improved negotiation power: By having a centralized location for supplier information, you can negotiate better terms with your suppliers. This can lead to significant cost savings over time.
- Ensure compliance: Automating the onboarding and management of your vendors allows you to enforce strict compliance without the chance of human error. Allow the portal solution to track expirations, notify internal and vendor resources of upcoming expirations, and even blocking further activity with that vendor until they get back into compliance. The cost avoidance from liability from non-compliant vendors activities can be significant.
- Improve payment processing: Using an onboarding portal to collect all the relevant information needed for an efficient payment process will eliminate bottlenecks once transactions commence. Additionally, saving will come from eliminating manual processes by the accounts payable and finance team in setting up new vendors to receive payments.
In summary, a vendor onboarding or supplier onboarding portal can provide your business with a range of cost savings and risk avoidance opportunities. By automating the vendor onboarding processes, you can reduce administrative costs, improve efficiency, better manage vendors, reduce the occurrence of errors, eliminate the risk of “out-of-compliance” vendors, and improve your negotiating power. A vendor onboarding portal can also be an extension of a traditional vendor portal so no need to add more technology. And at ICG, security is paramount for any of our portal or hosted solutions. ICG Consulting partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Sysdig to provide our clients with the highest levels of monitoring and security. If you haven’t already implemented a vendor onboarding portal, now is the time to consider doing so.
Contact ICG Consulting to start a discussion on how your organization can implement a vendor/supplier onboarding portal for your organization, or to schedule a demo of one of ICG’s comprehensive vendor portal or vendor onboarding solutions. You can also Watch a short video on ICG’s back-office solutions.