Empower NetSuite with Stampli Advanced Vendor Management
Good supplier relationships are critical to any company’s success. At a minimum, businesses need vendors who provide the right goods and services at the right time and price. However, the benefits of healthy supplier relationships go well beyond simply supplying business needs. With the right investment in building and strengthening the relationships in the supply chain, suppliers can become valuable partners who work towards your mutual success.
Automated vendor management is a core component of procure-to-pay (P2P) optimization and supply chain management. Accounts payable solution providers, like Stampli, can help significantly improve vendor relationship management, from onboarding to communications to payments. SaaS solutions like Stampli Advanced Vendor Management integrate with NetSuite ERP to provide clarity, efficiency, and collaboration to vendor relationships across your entire organization.
Read on to learn more about how integrating advanced vendor management with Oracle NetSuite can help you optimize your vendor relations.
What is Vendor Management Automation?
Vendor management comprises any business process or function involving interaction between your business and your suppliers. These processes include vendor selection and onboarding, procure-to-pay, documentation, and vendor performance for most businesses.
Vendor management software streamlines and optimizes the various processes associated with supplier relationships. The automation solution can be standalone or, more usually, included as a component of a procure-to-pay automation solution. There are five key benefits to automating vendor management workflows:
Decreased Cost of Goods Sold
Supplier costs can make up a significant percentage of your cost of goods sold (COGS). Vendor management automation can reduce COGS in several ways. First, it ensures that procurement teams have up-to-date vendor information at their fingertips when selecting a vendor. They can easily compare pricing, business terms, and vendor performance to find the best vendor.
Second, automation helps ensure that suppliers are paid on time, avoiding late payment fees and taking advantage of early payment discounts. Finally, the vendor management system simplifies risk management, vendor communications, and contract management, which makes it easier to resolve vendor disputes and supply chain issues.
Centralized Vendor Document Management
Vendors may need to provide many documents and information during onboarding. Specific industries, such as construction, non-profits, and government entities, require valid copies of tax and legal documents. However, communicating with vendors and gathering documents can take time and effort.
Vendor management involves a lot of paperwork. Apart from the master contract, the vendor relationship can include many documents, including the following:
Tax Documents
The IRS requires all businesses to issue 1099 forms when they pay certain vendors. Other vendors may need to complete W-8, W-9, or other federal, state, and local forms.
Insurance Certificates
Businesses may require vendors to carry a certificate of general liability or other insurance before providing goods or services.
Licenses and Certifications
Certain professions and industries may require vendors to hold licenses or certifications and make them ready for inspection as needed. Many businesses also require suppliers to prove compliance with environmental or diversity and inclusion standards as a condition of doing business.
In companies that use manual vendor management processes, these documents can easily get lost or misdirected, which creates a significant risk of liability if a vendor is non-compliant. Vendor management platforms can include functionality to capture and centralize these documents, so they’re available to procurement teams, auditors, and other stakeholders when they need to ensure a vendor is compliant.
Centralized and Efficient Communications
Some companies rely on informal email, phone, and even paper-based communications with vendors. These manual processes are slow and inefficient, and important communications often get lost. For example, a procurement manager may negotiate a discount with a vendor but neglect to advise other stakeholders that the discount exists, resulting in the business paying a higher price.
Automation replaces haphazard communications with a centralized communications system. All communications and information are located in a central hub or self-service portal and easily accessed by stakeholders and vendors. Providing an online communications portal builds collaboration and ensures everyone works from a single source of trusted information.
Ensured Vendor Compliance with Standards
Some industries, such as Food & Beverage or Healthcare, require vendors to comply with mandated industry standards. For example, many manufacturers require vendors to hold ISO certifications. Vendor management platforms can capture and store certificates and other information showing a vendor complies with standards and regulations.
Improved P2P Process Efficiency
Automating and optimizing invoice processing and payments workflows with NetSuite ERP improves the turnaround time for invoices and payments and reduces the number of erroneous invoices. Not only do these mean vendors get paid faster, but increased transparency reduces the time vendors and AP teams spend resolving disputes. Vendors and stakeholders can simply communicate on the vendor portal to share information and resolve invoicing issues.
Optimizing Vendor Management Workflows
Vendor management automation can streamline and optimize vendor workflows like onboarding, procure-to-pay, and performance management. Let’s walk through each of these:
Vendor Onboarding
Onboarding a new vendor can be complicated, especially when done manually. Collecting vendor information such as names, contact information, bank account information, contracts, SOWs, and other documents is time-consuming and prone to errors. Team members can misfile documents, and information can fall out of date, creating headaches and delays for procurement teams and vendors alike.
A vendor management solution such as Stampli’s Advanced Vendor Management lets businesses onboard new vendors easily. You can use custom forms and documents to ensure that vendors provide correct and complete onboarding information. The platform synchronizes with NetSuite and other business systems so stakeholders can access up-to-date vendor information and documents.
Some platforms allow you to set document expiration dates to keep documents current. The system notifies procurement teams when a critical document, such as a contract, needs to be reviewed and renewed.
Procure-to-Pay
Vendor management is at the heart of the P2P process. Managing a purchase by email and paper documents can quickly become disorganized, especially if the transaction is complex and involves multiple purchase orders, vendor bills, and delivery dates. Extracting information from emails, tracking and verifying requisitions, POs, receipts, and invoices, and paying vendors can cause delays and increase the chance of errors.
Automation makes the whole P2P process simpler and more efficient. For example, vendors can submit transaction documents like receipts and invoices to a central email address or through the vendor portal. The AP system can then capture these documents, automatically enter them, and perform 3-way matching to confirm that the invoice is correct. The AP platform will also automatically sync the transaction data and documents with NetSuite in real-time, ensuring that all the stakeholders in the P2P chain have access to timely and accurate information.
Vendor Performance
Manual vendor performance management can be challenging. Tracking vendor delivery times, payment history, and communications can involve searching for emails and paper documents, then assembling everything into a report. The process is slow, and staff may miss important information.
Vendor management solutions can assist in vendor performance management by keeping all the vendor information in one location. Teams can easily access payment history, search through communications, and confirm the number of errors or late deliveries, making it much simpler to track vendor performance in real-time.
Automation platforms automatically sync vendor information and data with the relevant NetSuite procurement modules so all stakeholders can access supplier KPIs and metrics anytime.
A Better Supplier Experience: Stampli Advanced Vendor Management
Vendor management automation can provide a better experience for your vendors. Stampli goes beyond the vendor portal with Advanced Vendor Management – a simple and powerful way to streamline vendor processes, improve communications, and keep vendors happy.
Advanced Vendor Management builds on Stampli’s industry-leading AP automation solution to manage vendor onboarding, streamline the P2P process, and share vendor information and KPIs across the organization. You can process invoices faster, pay vendors on time, and seamlessly integrate accounts payable and vendor management with your NetSuite ERP.
Here are the key features of the cloud-based Advanced Vendor Management solution:
Streamlined Communications
Reduce inefficiencies by streamlining communications with everyone in the P2P chain via a central communications hub. Stakeholders can easily:
- Ask and answer questions from other team members and vendors
- Access data and documents in a single location
- Notify stakeholders when action is required
- Request updates to any invoice field
- Instantly see the status of an invoice
Data and Documents in One Place
Create a single source of truth for vendor information. Improve your ability to onboard and manage vendors by centralizing all vendor documents and data and syncing them with NetSuite.
Onboard Vendors with Ease
Reduce the time and effort spent onboarding vendors and ensure you have complete and current vendor information like licenses, certifications, and insurance policies.
Customize Your Vendor Portal with Your Brand
Create a seamless brand experience by customizing your portal with your logo and company colors – and reinforce your brand identity with your vendors.
Happy Vendors, Happy Life
Build stronger, more successful vendor relationships. Contact Stampli today to set up a free demo of Advanced Vendor Management.
