Supply chain efficiency is such a hot topic in supply chain management that you probably feel famous in your company. (Or infamous when something goes wrong.)
Your CEO and executives are likely hyper-focused on building sustainability into decision-making, identifying critical bottlenecks, and adding flexibility to your supply chain so you can pivot supply chain operations on a dime. Often overlooked, yet incredibly important to achieve your goals, is strengthening and improving vendor relationships.
Vendor management should be tops on your list as a manager:
- Be more proactive with outreach to your vendors.
- Ensure they’re hitting agreed-upon KPIs.
- Check to see how they’re doing as humans in this crazy-busy world.
But there’s never enough time in a day, it seems. That’s why you need software to keep you on track. But, not just any old software. We will explain why the vendor management software features in our CloudLogix platform can help you solve common problems and make life easier for you.
First, though, let’s look at some common vendor relationship problems you can solve with the help of the right software for the job.
3 Things That Can Fracture Vendor Relationships
There’s never a good time for a vendor relationship to go south, is there? When a vendor relationship fractures, every element in your supply chain after the point of impact suffers. Smooth, collaborative vendor relationships are worth their weight in gold.
Read on for three things that may be hurting your vendor relationships and how to fix them using software.
1. Multiple Systems Hurt Supply Chain Visibility and Efficiency
Whether you’re managing five, 50, or 1,000+ vendors, visibility to information is key – for you and your vendors. At the bare minimum, you need real-time, reliable details about the order status. In a perfect world, you’d also have vendor KPIs and access to vendor standards at your fingertips, so you can continually monitor and gauge your vendor bench.
If a vendor isn’t hitting deadlines or expectations, being able to communicate with them early on is key. Being proactive can help you determine whether this issue is just a blip in an otherwise spotless relationship or if something’s off that will have a long-term impact on your own ability to deliver.
Compounding the problem for many managers is the inefficient use of your current software. Are you facing these roadblocks?
- Jumping from system to system to bridge information gaps.
- Using different systems for nearly every vendor.
- Scrambling to find KPIs and standards buried in Word documents and offline Excel docs.
If this sounds like your situation, your ability to look strategically at problems becomes cloudy. It’s also inefficient for you, not to mention challenging to pull together cohesive reporting to show management how you’re faring in the vendor management department.
2. Information Overload & Repetition Kill Productivity
No one has time to sift through information they don’t care about – not you, not your vendors, and not anyone on your management team. How often do you find yourself wading through too much information – repeated across systems – trying to find the one detail you need? How often do you want to tear your hair out because you can’t find the one thing you need?
It might help to give select vendors that you trust access to your system so they can update information in real-time for you, but that opens a can of worms because they’d have access to information that they (a) don’t need and (b) you don’t want them to have.
Minutes can quickly multiply into hours of lost time as you and your team update vendor information across systems, including that Excel sheet you’ve maintained on your desktop just to be safe. There are so many other things you’d rather be doing with your time. Things like strategic reporting and insights can help you move your own career forward.
3. Inefficient Communications Hurt Vendor Relationships
You want reliable vendors to stick around. And you’re a key client that vendors want to keep happy, too. The glue that holds you both together is communication. You want to be able to talk to vendors to streamline processes and help everyone be more efficient.
But things get bogged down when emails, approvals, and invoices tied up with a product order are in disparate systems. What happens when you have excessive communication waste?
- Misunderstandings add extra work to everyone’s day.
- Unchecked, small hurdles can lead to big mistakes.
- Eventually, vendors quit, taking all their knowledge and materials with them.
Don’t risk your supply chain being thrown into damage control mode. Ready to leave these problems in the past? Consider how CloudLogix can solve the challenges you’re facing.
Vendor Visibility: Your New Superpower
The CloudLogix supply chain software platform serves as a central hub connecting and streamlining your supply chain. Vendor management software features are a critical element of the platform, helping keep each of your vendors on track and moving in the right direction.
We work hard to remove surprises from your vendor relationships, bringing predictability and streamlining communications into one portal. From custom roles functionality to our robust vendor portal to extensive data and reporting, here’s how CloudLogix helps you prioritize vendor relationships to drive efficiency across your supply chain.
- Custom Vendor Roles: set up vendor-based access controls to empower your vendors with the data they need while restricting access to sensitive data.
- Vendor Portal: view all orders in this one compliant platform, eliminating the need for multiple pieces of software or spreadsheets.
- Real-Time Reporting: generate lively reports that can be utilized by stakeholders throughout the supply chain to support decision-making.
Don’t Wait Until Something Breaks: Use Our Vendor Management Software Features Today
A major supply chain disruption. A compliance issue or audit findings. A system failure with lost records. Don’t wait for one of these things to drive you to see the CloudLogix platform in action.
Your management team and the folks on the front lines of your supply chain will thank you for investigating the opportunity to improve vendor relations. When you make life easier for vendors, your team, and yourself, you can turn your supply chain into a competitive advantage for your company. Suddenly, that internal stress and burnout will also start to fade away.
Ready to maximize your vendor relationships? Request a demo of our software platform. Let us show you how to regain control of the supply chain using our popular vendor management software features.
