The quality of your supplier/vendor relationships determines the success of your supply chain. Especially, in this time of disruption & transformation, optimizing your supplier relationships is crucial for an agile supply chain and a resilient enterprise.

However, most enterprises have multiple systems for managing different aspects of their supply chain. These disparate systems create data silos that make it difficult to create a consistent & collaborative experience for internal & supplier stakeholders.

A Supplier Portal is a key technology platform designed to address these challenges and create a system designed around supplier relationships & collaboration.

Optimizing Supplier Relationships with a Supplier Portal

A Supplier Portal is a single system of truth that enables enterprises to bridge data silos by consolidating all internal & external third-party supplier data to improve communication & collaboration, gain a comprehensive view of third parties and manage supplier performance, contracts, spend, compliance, risks, measures & KPIs in a single, easily accessible portal. A robust Supplier Portal helps to optimize relationships with suppliers by enabling enterprises to:

Create an Inclusive Supplier Self-Service Experience

Self-service is one of the core functionality of a Supplier Portal. The goal of the self-service capabilities is to reduce the user adoption friction & costs and improve the experience for supplier stakeholders. 

A robust Supplier Portal enables enterprises to simplify the supplier registration process and help the suppliers easily update & manage crucial information, including contacts, documents, assessments, performance, exemptions, waivers, etc.

For internal stakeholders, the approval process is streamlined & automated. Reminder notification for approval is automatically routed to the respective stakeholder & if needed, they can request additional information, resubmission of documents, clarification on exemptions, and more.

Augment Communication & Collaboration with Suppliers

Communication & collaboration with suppliers is another core functionality of a robust Supplier Portal. It enables enterprises with customizable communication templates to send alerts & notices and collect information & documents from suppliers with an auditable trail. Enterprises can engage with selected suppliers in a select region or with all suppliers across multiple geographies.

Enterprises can leverage automated workflows with configurable steps & alerts/reminders (on steps or time-outs) to be sent via email or within the application for automated engagement with suppliers for SLA breaches, expiry, renewals & other crucial events.

In addition, for global enterprises, the communications can be configured based on supplier language preferences, including support for right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Manage & Analyze Supplier Performance

Most Supplier Portals lack Supplier Performance Management functionalities; however, for enterprises that understand the importance of using a single system for all supplier engagement & management, performance management is a must-have capability for a robust Supplier Portal. A Supplier Portal with Performance Management capabilities enables enterprises to effortlessly define performance indicators to measure, track & manage performance measures against Programs, Goals, or SLAs/KPIs against supplier contracts. They can also perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and create Corrective Actions to drive continuous improvement.

In addition, enterprises can track & manage critical supplier quantitative & qualitative operational metrics (Quality, Delivery, Cost/Commercial, Safety, Sustainability) and SLAs. A robust Supplier Portal also auto-calculates key contractual SLAs & operational metrics and automates the process for performance reporting (by suppliers, monthly or quarterly), validation, review & approval of reported performance, and generation & reporting of SLA scorecards. 

Track & Manage Supplier Risks & Contract Compliance

A comprehensive Supplier Portal enables enterprises to manage supplier assessments & response within the system or from external client systems with robust integration capabilities. Enterprises can leverage OOB assessments or create custom assessments and then effortlessly distribute them with customizable email templates. To further reduce friction, the supplier stakeholders can take the assessments without logging in as users and enterprises can easily monitor participation, responses on personalizable dashboards with drill-down capabilities.

Enterprises can effectively track and manage third-party risks to mitigate third-party risk exposure by effortlessly defining control points, reviewing assessment responses, creating risk issues, generating risk score & tier, mitigating risk with risk mediation plans across the third-party risk management lifecycle. They can easily create third-party risk audit plans, conduct internal & external audits and track risk audit findings to develop corrective action plans.

In addition, a comprehensive Supplier Portal also enables enterprises to integrate with external CLM & save time by leveraging AI, ML & Extraction rules to extract, manage & query crucial contract metadata like key terms, dates, deliverables & obligations, SLAs, pricing, and more. Enterprises can effortlessly create (or import from existing sources), manage & track contractual deliverables and obligations at any stage of the sourcing lifecycle. They can also automate the approval process of submitted D&Os with workflows and never miss any critical due dates with auto-reminders and penalties.

Augment Supplier Relationship Management

Augment supplier relationship management by effectively managing meetings (like QBRs, Scorecard Review) by quickly creating schedules, sending invitations (with agenda, stakeholders), capturing meeting minutes & action items, and creating & viewing forward meeting schedules (by meeting type, supplier & location).

Improve issue management with the ability to create, assign, re-assign, resolve, close issues, create parent-child issue hierarchies, capture the root cause of issues, auto-create issues (on SLA breaches, on Invoice validation errors, on missed Deliverables, etc.), mark an issue as a duplicate, track and report cycle time and volumetric reports, drill down from Issue Management Dashboards and slice/dice issues.

Effectively manage action items by automatically creating & assigning action items based on pre-defined business rules or events. Easily reassign or allocate action items to teams or specific team members (user groups) and gain real-time & actionable insights with reports that track cycle time and volume.

Enrich Existing Data with External Data

A comprehensive Supplier Portal enables enterprises to leverage third-party data feeds to enrich their existing supplier information with Company, Market, Financial, Sustainability, Compliance, Analyst Ratings & Geo-risk data and improve their analytical insights for making data-driven decisions.

Enterprises can choose to integrate with leading third-party data providers like Dun & Bradstreet, InsiderView, LexisNexis, Ecovadis, and more. These data sources can provide a wealth of enrichment data, including but not limited to:

• Vendor Data: Name, Logo, Description, CEO, # of Employees, CUSIP, CIK, UK SICS, ISIN, etc.
• Market Data: Stock Symbol, Stock Price, Market Cap, Enterprise Value, Revenue, etc.
• ESG Data: Sustainability Scorecard, ESG Score, ESG Grade, Global Score, Environment Score, Labor & Human Rights Score, Ethics Score, etc.
• Analyst Ratings: D&B Ratings, Moody’s Ratings, etc.
• Geo Risk Events: Geo Vulnerability data

Automatically Verify Sanctions & PEP Compliance

For highly regulated industries, the suppliers must comply with various regulations. When it comes to compliance with AML/CTF regulations, third-party data integration can facilitate automatic Sanctions Screening (for individuals, entities, or countries) & Politically Exposed Person (PEP) Screening with a list coverage including major watchlist (UN, EU, DFAT, & OFAC) and other government & law enforcement lists powered by external data feeds like Dun & Bradstreet, NameScan, and more.

Gain Actionable Insights with Comprehensive Reporting & Analytics

A comprehensive Supplier Portal enables enterprises to improve oversight & drive continuous improvement with in-depth, real-time, insightful & dynamic dashboards & reports for tracking supplier performance, risks, action items, issues, and more. 

Enterprises can effortlessly visualize real-time & actionable dashboards & reports for:

• SLA scorecards (monthly performance against SLAs by Supplier, Contract, Service Tower and Service Category)
• SLA Credits & Earnbacks (by Supplier, Contract, Service Tower & Service category)
• The Trend of SLA Performance (by comparing against previous month performance)
• Aggregate report of percent SLAs met or missed
• Risks (by type, status, supplier, contract, business unit, etc.)
• Risk Mitigation Cycle Time
• Risk Scorecards (across all dimensions of risk)
• Deliverables (with volume metrics, aging metrics, upcoming & overdue deliverables, etc.)
• Obligations/Compliance (for a Supplier across all contracts or specifically for a supplier contract)
• Action Items (by type, supplier, contract, business unit, etc., and cycle time to complete)
• Waivers & Disputes, and more.

How can Enlighta help?

Enlighta Supplier Portal enables enterprises to realize the full potential of their business relationship with third-party suppliers, mitigate risks & reduce value leakage across the supplier lifecycle.  

Enlighta Supplier Portal integrates with external client systems & third-party data providers to create an effective system of truth that enables enterprises with capabilities beyond a traditional supplier portal including supplier performance management, risk management, compliance management, relationship management, reporting & analytics, etc.

Here are examples of external client systems and third-party data providers supported by Enlighta Supplier Portal.

Is your enterprise using a robust next-generation portal to engage with Suppliers and Third-Parties?