10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a SAP Vendor Portal.
When it comes to assessing the suitability of a direct spend for your business, there are many reasons why it should be your platform of choice for supplier enablement if you’re already using SAP ERP or S/4HANA. Here are 10 reasons your business needs a SAP Vendor Portal (often referred to as a SAP Supplier portal).
1 – You will reduce your supplier management costs
As you automate supplier management processes through the SAP Vendor Portal, you will increase efficiencies and your negotiating power, as well as eliminating the need for your team to spend time on data entry of supplier details. From automated onboarding onwards, direct spend portals are structured to save resource.
2 – Supplier communications will improve
You can keep all of your supplier communications together in one place, making life easier for both them and your internal teams. All communication takes place in real-time, and it becomes easier for your suppliers to respond to RFQs and other notifications.
3 – Silos between your internal teams will be broken down
A SAP Vendor Portal allows all the relevant teams to see the same information. There’s no risk of multiple data entry, no chance of being cut out of the loop on communication threads and each individual with access sees a ‘single truth.’
4 – It becomes easier to monitor supplier KPIs
How do you currently track KPIs? With a SAP Vendor Portal, you can expose maintained KPIs and have immediate visibility via the dashboard as to how your suppliers are performing.
5 – Suppliers can self-serve
Your suppliers can find all of the information they need, from blanket and individual notifications to contract and material details, in one place, in just a few clicks. Previously this could have entailed time-consuming emails, phone calls and meetings. Supplier enablement is key to developing stronger, more profitable relationships.
6 – User Experience
A SAP Vendor Portal such as it.mx direct spend is extremely straightforward to use, with a clear, visual user experience and intuitive functionality. Circumventing the complexities of SAP is a benefit to both your internal teams and your suppliers, and this simplicity is helpful in achieving quick adoption.
7 – Communicating change is straightforward
As businesses become increasingly agile and technology advances apace, the need to keep your suppliers up to date with new ways of working has never been greater. A SAP Vendor Portal gives you a vehicle to manage this change by making sure that your suppliers are alerted in good time when changes affect them.
8 – Natively delivered within SAP
What if your spend portal could utilise data and business processes which are already established in SAP? This would eliminate integration requirements and ensure that any changes made within the SAP Vendor Portal was updated to the correct location in SAP, in real time. it.mx direct spend is such a portal that is natively delivered within SAP and therefore eliminates the chance of duplication and the need for repetitive data entry. The direct spend portal sits within the SAP stack so no extra hardware or integrations are required.
9 – Action traceability
Whether it’s keeping track of order fulfilment or monitoring the upload of certification documents, you can see exactly who has completed which actions, and when. This creates a trail, should you need to revisit previous actions or communications, and simplifies reporting and supplier evaluation. Having a single, shared view allows you and your suppliers to troubleshoot in a timely fashion, thanks to the transparency provided by the portal.
10 – Supplier data is secure
By using it.mx direct spend portal, you can automatically address any issues with supplier data handling you may have had in the past, keeping GDPR front of mind. There’s no need for hard-copy paperwork and your suppliers know exactly what data you hold on them, as they have supplied account information themselves. You can control permission levels for added security.
Let’s Get Started
Find out how our SAP certified SAP Vendor Portal can help your business transform its supply chain. Take a look at the On Demand webinar and learn how you can introduce these supply chain efficiencies.
Read my previous blog – How to Get Management Buy-in For Your SAP Supplier Portal Project
Author: Jon Brooks, Business Development – CX Director, NTT DATA Business Solutions UK.