Supplier onboarding is an important process for any business working with multiple suppliers, but it comes with challenges that grow as your supplier network does. While onboarding a small number of suppliers may be manageable manually, the workload quickly increases as your supplier network grows. Once you are onboarding more than a handful of suppliers, getting each one connected, meeting your requirements and ready to trade electronically can become a time-consuming process.
This is where a supplier onboarding portal can help. In this blog, we look at four of the biggest supplier onboarding challenges – from manual work and varying technical capabilities to EDI requirements and lack of visibility and how the right onboarding platform can help you overcome them.
What is Supplier Onboarding?
Supplier onboarding is the process of connecting your suppliers, ensuring they meet your business requirements and getting them ready to exchange business documents electronically with you.
You can read more about what supplier onboarding is in our dedicated blog.
Supplier Onboarding Challenges
1. Too Much Manual Work
Reducing manual work is one of the main reasons businesses turn to EDI in the first place. But while EDI can automate the exchange of business documents, getting suppliers onboarded can still require a significant amount of manual work. This becomes particularly challenging when you are onboarding more than a handful of suppliers, or when your business is growing and new suppliers are continuously being added to your network.
Some of the manual tasks involved in supplier onboarding can include:
- Emails back and forth: Sending invitations, instructions and information to individual suppliers throughout the onboarding process.
- Collecting information: Gathering the contact and technical information needed to get each supplier set up correctly.
- Sharing guides and requirements: Providing suppliers with the relevant documentation, EDI requirements and instructions they need to get connected.
- Testing and validation: Coordinating testing with suppliers and communicating any errors or changes that need to be addressed before go-live.
- Answering questions and following up: Responding to suppliers who need help and chasing those who haven’t completed the next step in the process.
- Tracking progress: Keeping track of where each supplier is in the onboarding process and what still needs to be completed.
How to reduce manual supplier onboarding tasks:
With a supplier onboarding portal for self-onboarding, you remove much of the manual work from your team. Our platform reduces the need for back-and-forth emails and removes the need for your team to collect technical information from each supplier.
The portal guides suppliers through each step of the onboarding process, so they can provide the required information, complete testing and validate their setup themselves. If something does not pass validation, they can see what needs to be corrected and resolve it directly in the portal.
2. Different Supplier Capabilities
Your supplier network is unlikely to consist of businesses with the same systems, resources and level of EDI experience. Some suppliers may already have an EDI solution in place and be ready to connect, while others may have little or no EDI experience.
This can make supplier onboarding more complex. Your team may need to spend time assessing each supplier’s technical capabilities and connectivity requirements before determining how they can get connected. The challenge then becomes finding a way to support all of these different suppliers without adding even more complexity and manual work to the onboarding process.
How to support all suppliers despite different capabilities
A supplier onboarding platform can provide one onboarding experience while supporting different ways for suppliers to connect. Suppliers can choose the connectivity option that matches their technical capabilities, such as SFTP, AS2 or a portal-based connection.
This means your team can manage supplier onboarding through one platform without requiring every supplier to have the same technical setup or level of EDI experience.
3. Meeting Your EDI Requirements
Getting a supplier connected is only part of the onboarding process. Before they can go live, you also need to make sure they can exchange the required EDI documents correctly and meet your specific business and data requirements.
This can involve communicating your requirements to suppliers, testing EDI documents and identifying any errors that need to be corrected before the supplier is ready to trade. When you are onboarding multiple suppliers, coordinating these compliance checks and helping each supplier resolve issues can quickly add more time and manual work to the process.
How to Make EDI Compliance Easier for Suppliers
Once suppliers are connected, they still need to make sure their EDI documents meet your requirements before they can go live. A supplier onboarding platform can guide suppliers through testing and validation directly within the onboarding process.
Support for EDI standards such as X12, EDIFACT and Tradacoms allows suppliers to work with the standards relevant to their business, while validation helps identify issues that need to be corrected before onboarding is complete.
4. Lack of Visibility and Control
When supplier onboarding happens across emails, spreadsheets and different systems, keeping track of every supplier can quickly become difficult.
Tracking progress: Your team needs to keep track of where each supplier is in the onboarding process, what they have completed and what still needs to be done.
Internal coordination: Without a central overview, different teams may need to share updates manually to understand which suppliers are progressing, which are experiencing issues and which are ready to go live.
How to Get a Clear View of Your Supplier Onboarding
A central supplier onboarding platform gives your team one place to track the progress of every supplier. Instead of piecing together updates from emails, spreadsheets and different systems, you can see where suppliers are in the onboarding process from one central view.
This makes it easier to identify which suppliers are progressing, which need attention and which have completed onboarding giving your team greater visibility and control across the entire process.
Ready to simplify supplier onboarding? Book a demo.
FAQ
What are the biggest supplier onboarding challenges?
Some of the biggest supplier onboarding challenges include too much manual work, different levels of supplier technical capability, meeting EDI requirements, and a lack of visibility and control across the onboarding process.
How can you make supplier onboarding faster?
Supplier onboarding can be made faster by reducing manual tasks and giving suppliers the tools to complete more of the onboarding process themselves. A self-service supplier onboarding portal can guide suppliers through connectivity, testing and validation while giving your team a central view of their progress.