Supplier onboarding, also known as vendor onboarding, is how you connect new suppliers to your business and get them ready to trade. Having a clear process for bringing new suppliers into your supply chain is critical for maintaining efficiency, boosting profit margins, and creating profitable business relationships. Yet navigating the process of onboarding new suppliers can be complicated and full of challenges.
Luckily, there are ways to make the process easier for both your team and your suppliers. In this blog, we will walk through our supplier onboarding best practices, including what to consider at each stage, common areas to pay attention to, and how to create a more efficient and consistent onboarding process.
We have also created a practical Supplier Onboarding Checklist that you can download.
What Is Supplier Onboarding?
Supplier onboarding, also known as vendor onboarding, is the process of connecting new suppliers to your business and getting them ready to become part of your supply chain. It involves establishing requirements and expectations, setting up the necessary technical connections, and ensuring suppliers are ready to exchange business documents electronically with you.
You can read more about what supplier onboarding is in our dedicated blog.
5 Supplier Onboarding Best Practices
A good supplier onboarding process starts before you send the first invitation. You need to know what you require from your suppliers, how they will connect with you, and how you will manage the process from invitation through testing and go-live.
Here are five best practices to consider when setting up your supplier onboarding process.
1. Define Your Requirements Before You Start
Before onboarding your suppliers, start by defining what you need from them. This includes which business documents you need to exchange, which formats you want to use, and how suppliers will connect with you.
Vendor Onboarding requirements aren’t always the same for all suppliers. For example, you may need to exchange orders and invoices with one group of suppliers, while another group needs to support additional document types.
Defining these requirements upfront gives suppliers a clear understanding of what they need to do and gives your team a clear framework for managing the onboarding process.
2. Give Suppliers Different Ways to Connect
Your suppliers will not all have the same technical capabilities. Some may already have an integrated EDI setup, while others may need a simpler way to exchange documents electronically with you.
A good onboarding process should therefore give suppliers different ways to connect based on their capabilities. With TrueCommerce, suppliers can connect via AS2 or SFTP, while suppliers without an integrated EDI setup can use our supplier portal instead.
It is also important to support relevant standard formats, giving integrated suppliers more flexibility in how they exchange documents with you.
By accommodating different supplier capabilities, you can bring more of your supplier base into the same digital process rather than limiting onboarding to suppliers with a particular technical setup.
3. Make Supplier Onboarding Self-Service With a Supplier Portal
Onboarding suppliers one at a time can quickly require a lot of resources, particularly when your team has to guide each supplier through every step.
A self-service onboarding portal allows suppliers to complete the main parts of the onboarding process themselves. Instead of your team managing each supplier individually, suppliers can work through the required onboarding steps and complete the tasks assigned to them.
This also makes it easier to onboard suppliers in parallel. Rather than having to prioritize which suppliers to onboard first because of the workload involved, you can invite larger groups and allow them to progress through the process at the same time.
Your team can then spend its time on the suppliers that actually require additional help. Want to learn more? Read more about self-service supplier onboarding.
4. Organize Suppliers Into Onboarding Campaigns
When you are onboarding a larger number of suppliers, it can be useful to group suppliers with similar requirements into onboarding campaigns. For example, you might create campaigns based on the documents suppliers need to exchange, their onboarding deadline, or other shared requirements.
This gives you a structured way to manage different groups rather than treating every supplier as an individual onboarding project. It also makes it easier to track whether suppliers within a campaign are progressing towards the same requirements and go-live date.
Some supplier onboarding platforms include campaign functionality to help you manage this process. Our supplier onboarding platform allows you to create and manage campaigns, giving your team an easier way to organize suppliers and keep track of each group’s progress.
5. Track the Supplier Onboarding Process From Invitation to Go-Live
Sending an onboarding invitation is only the beginning. You also need visibility into how each supplier is progressing through the process.
Your team should be able to follow suppliers from the initial invitation through connection setup and testing to go-live. This gives you a clear overview of which suppliers are progressing as expected and which still have outstanding steps.
Testing is an important part of this process. Before a supplier goes live, you need to confirm that they can exchange the required documents correctly. Tracking this as part of the onboarding process makes it easier to see who has completed testing and who still needs attention.
With a clear overview of progress, your team can focus its follow-up on suppliers that need help or are at risk of missing their deadline rather than manually checking in with everyone.
Your Supplier Onboarding Checklist
A structured supplier onboarding process can make it easier to manage different supplier capabilities, keep track of progress, and onboard more suppliers without adding the same amount of manual work for your team.
To help you prepare for your next onboarding project, we have put these recommendations into a practical Supplier Onboarding Checklist. Use it to check that you have the key requirements in place before onboarding starts, keep track of the important steps during onboarding, and make sure suppliers are ready before go-live.
Download the Supplier Onboarding Checklist.