Supplier Management Software System/Vendor Management Software for Businesses

The need for Supplier Management software:

Every business (retail, wholesale or widely distributed) collaborates with a list of suppliers. A manufacturing industry works with suppliers to procure raw materials and production machinery; a medical lab requires suppliers to buy scanning machines, X-Ray devices, test tubes; even an informational technology company works with vendors to purchase laptops, servers, network devices. With the fast-growing opportunities for business across the world, each organization is competitive and tries to make the best out of the affordable supplies. It is mandatory to maintain a list of vendors who have or had a business relationship with you. This will help you to check whose products performed well towards achieving your targets and whose products failed to satisfy your needs. Based on the findings, one can continue business with the vendor or terminate the contract.

Manual maintenance of the supplier list and analyzing their performances is a tedious process. If the proper engagement of suppliers is missed, then you may end up losing high-quality supplies from valued vendors, hence resulting in erroneous products.  Wouldn’t be much easier if there was a software to digitally manage these? Supplier management software or vendor management software is a delight to all sort of businesses. With this software, you can manage the vendor inventory, make updates to the contacts, validate the risks and simplify the corrective action processes. It is an end-to-end solution to maintain supplier documentation that can be accessed anytime from anywhere.

Supplier management software features:

  • Automation of routine procedures – Manual frequent activities such as generation of bills, purchase orders and shipping notices and transactions are automated. The suppliers and the organization can use templates available in the software, reuse past receipts or merge two different orders for the same supplier into one. This will reduce the time taken to write a physical bill. All the documents are stored online to cross-check in the future.

  • Maintaining Up-to-date inventory – The vendor management system helps to add, remove or update supplier information. With the manual entry of vendor data, there is a chance to have outdated supplier contacts due to a lack of visibility. You can add details such as warranty information, purchase date, etc. for each of the parts purchased from a supplier.

  • Streamlining the processes – Due to proper access control, employees of the organization and the vendors associated can log in to the supplier management software anytime to communicate among them, address issues and streamline the existing processes if there are any deviations. They can create, track and close problem tickets.

  • Integration with quality management and supplier compliance – Most vendor management software systems are integrated with QMS to work on the audit or inspection findings and non-conformance standards.

  • Generate supplier performance reports – With a pile of physical supplier documents, there may be a lack of transparency and clarity to find out which suppliers performed better.  So, the manual ranking of vendors could be inaccurate. With supplier performance reports, suppliers can generate charts that exhibit their ratings and rankings. These charts help them to focus on their areas of improvement to have a continued relationship with the business.

The best Supplier Collaboration Portal:

Supplier collaboration portal developed by Harrington Group (Harrington Software Supplier Management Software), is the easy to use, reliable supplier management software available 24/7. It provides a common platform for suppliers and the employees of an organization for effective communication. Supplier access portal feature enables the suppliers to update their information, create or accept tickets to work on customer complaints. Unlike other supplier management software in the market, we go steps beyond to provide you with the following additional features. These features are available with our Enterprise plus version that is integrated with HQMS software.

  • Buyer profile to assign up to 4 employees of your organization to the suppliers to easy communication.
  • Debit memo to allow chargebacks from suppliers such as charges beyond warranty, etc.
  • Supplier Corrective Action Request (SCAR) and CAPA which is part of the quality control software, to assign corrective action work records to suppliers and track them until a root cause is found and a solution is obtained.
  • Inspection and receipts to create inspection records if a deviation is found and track the failures until resolved.
  • Issue management to accept, reject or replace non-conformance parts from suppliers.
  • First Part approval or PPAP ensures that a new part will be added to the approved parts list database only if they satisfy the industry standards. Processes are defined within the software that compares the expected outcome of the part with the actual results. At the end of these processes, only the parts that are compliant with defined standards are accepted and added to the approved parts list. Other parts will be returned or rejected.