How to Optimize Your Supplier Onboarding Process

The speed of business is increasing every day. Too often, however, supplier onboarding becomes a bottleneck to getting business done. As you focus on three basic areas, you can easily optimize supplier onboarding and increase performance.

How is your current onboarding process doing?

Onboarding a new supplier can be time consuming for everyone. For the supplier it means filling out multiple questionnaires that regularly ask the same questions they’ve already answered. For you, it means numerous documents and data to manage, and they’re often living in different programs or even on individual’s desktops. This siloed approach seriously limits cross-team visibility into onboarding activities. How do you optimize this process to be better for you and your suppliers?

If you focus on improving these three areas, you can significantly streamline and accelerate your entire onboarding process:

1. Standardized Process

Make it easier for business partners to work with you by creating standard onboarding practices. If possible, have a dedicated team for supplier onboarding and relationship management. This will help you improve operational efficiency and better manage risk. 

To further standardize your process, you can use a central supplier management platform to track communications, record and validate data, and securely share information with other company systems. Create an onboarding timeline that allows for due diligence while ensuring all tasks are completed in a timely manner.

2. Risk Management

Supplier vetting is a top concern when it comes to mitigating risk. It’s important to make sure your supplier information is recorded properly and any changes to a supplier’s banking information are not only tracked, but also verified.

Risk management is all about preventative measures. Even after your supplier information is verified and recorded, make sure your teams regularly perform OFAC/sanctions checks to ensure suppliers are continuing to meet your standards. Prepare a risk remediation plan in advance so your team knows how to respond if your data or financial information is ever compromised.

These risk management procedures can be tedious if performed manually, but you can automate the process to save time and reduce human error. Make sure that your system automatically validates key commercial data like TIN, banking, OFAC, and W-9 forms to ensure that you’ll be working with the most current, high-quality and secure information. Changes in supplier banking information should require two-factor authentication and secondary approval.

3. Technology

Especially post-pandemic, businesses are shifting away from time-consuming manual methods and moving towards automation. With the help of a centralized digital platform, your procurement team can benefit from automating those time-consuming processes so your employees can focus on tasks that bring value to the business by reliably automating manual onboarding tasks.

Gain enhanced visibility, speed, and efficiency

As your procurement team focuses on improving these three aspects of supplier onboarding—a standardized onboarding process, built-in risk management, and smart technology—your supplier onboarding will be faster, easier, and safer than ever before.