Ultimate Guide to Vendor Management: Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Vendors are crucial to the procurement process of any firm. Unfortunately, many businesses ignore the significance of developing positive relationships with their vendors. This laxity is now a matter of concern as procurement of goods and services need to be conducted in an efficient manner to fulfil business objectives.

We are well aware of the fact that focusing internally rather than externally saves businesses a lot of time when controlling vendor risk. In the vast majority of instances—80.5%—internal controls testing directs the framework for such certainty as per the recent survey by Deloitte.

Effective partnership and cooperation with vendors is crucial now that procurement is evolving with time. Gone are the days when you could control your spending by negotiating better. Older vendor management approaches are no longer adequate for addressing current procurement issues.

What is vendor management?

Vendor management is an integrated process to manage vendors and enhance their influence on the buyer's business. It involves overseeing vendor deliveries, collaborating to executing processes, managing compliance, and paying invoices.

With effective management of vendors throughout their life cycles, firms can minimise risk, increase service quality, and control expenses. Vendor management also assists in getting long-term benefits from vendors.

Why is vendor management important?

Your vendors' success is dependent upon your success as well. And there is just one way to establish positive relationships with vendors. This is accomplished through efficient vendor management which aids in:

1. Catering to the ever-changing needs of the market
2. Leverage from the opportunities to expand your business
3. Building long-lasting productive vendor relationships
4. Ensure procuring better quality products at the best deals

Why is vendor management important in procurement?

Vendor management is important for a company because it could have a significant negative effect on business and result in financial loss. As a result, the procurement function will benefit from good supplier management practices. It is crucial for the procurement and purchasing function for the following reasons.

1. The supply chain flow can be disrupted or stopped entirely if the vendors are not handled appropriately, which would undermine the organization's bottom line.
2. Vendor performance and agreement compliance are critical for the seamless flow of operations, benefiting from supplier relationships, and eliminating potential hazards.
3. This aids in reducing erratic spending inside the company and securing contracts from the list of preferred suppliers at pre-negotiated prices, assuring predictable financial results for the company.
4. Additionally, it aids in forming long-lasting relationships with vendors, boosting logistical operations and profits.

How can businesses overcome various challenges with a vendor management system?

Most organizations have some kind of vendor management procedure in place yet there might be a little opportunity for improvement. Here are some vendor management best practices used by procurement experts worldwide to reduce vendor spend and increase vendor performance.

1. Risk Mitigation

The method for recognizing, evaluating, and minimizing risk in a firm's supply chain is known as vendor risk management.

The best methods for managing risks is by constantly monitoring vendors and having a contingency plan in place to address any type of risk. Automating your procurement process with a vendor management software is a wonderful method to cope with it.

2. Expense visibility

Transparency vendor spend management eliminates extra costs and implicit expenditures. Yet, manually monitoring the total spending on each vendor could be time-consuming.

Organizations can increase transparency in the procure-to-pay cycle by deploying an automated vendor management solution.

3. Vendor collaboration

Vendor collaborations that are fruitful can not only strengthen the buyer-vendor relationship but also bring significant benefits to both sides. Cloud-based digital vendor management systems assist enterprises in developing a vendor network by increasing visibility and collaboration.

4. Managing vendor performance

The process of evaluating and analyzing vendor performance assists organizations in saving money, mitigating risk, and extracting more value from agreements. The key to this technique is to establish a centralized data repository containing all vendor-related data. To record and manage vendor data, you need to implement Digital procurement solutions with a single reporting module that makes vendor performance management easy.

How to build and establish a robust vendor management process?

The vendor management process should be conducted in the following way:

Vendor evaluation

The first stage in vendor management is establishing whether a vendor has the competence and capability to meet the business requirement.

Vendor onboarding 

Vendors who have been approved are subsequently added to the organization's list. This stage entails gathering, documenting, and storing all necessary vendor information in a centralized database.

Ordering and shipment process

The order process is often started by a contract or a purchase order.

Following the fulfilment of the contract, the obtained goods/services are submitted to a quality inspection, and the vendor's performance is reviewed.

Vendor payment

The customer must match the invoice with the associated purchase order after receiving the goods/services.

If everything appears to be in order, the invoice is validated and payment is made. In the event of a discrepancy, the invoice is returned to the vendor.

How does the Vendor management system work?

Simply put, a vendor management system streamlines and automates the process of growing the business needs. The system makes sourcing quicker, simpler, and more affordable.

1. The system collects all the vendor data and prices of the products
2. It automates evaluation and vendor onboarding process.
3. It generates reports and analytics to give an overview of all processes.

How can a vendor management system help your business?

Manual methods further aggravate an already complicated commercial process. Organizations can build a systematic vendor relationship management strategy that controls expenses and eliminates risk while maintaining quality by using a procurement software.

A vendor management software assists users by providing a digital solution that extracts valuable data and gathers information across different procurement processes along the procure-to-pay cycle.

Here are the four reasons for investing in a vendor management software that automates vendor management processes seamlessly:

1. Vendor evaluation: Obtain and validate vendor data such as financial, credit risk, and reporting before onboarding them.
2. Vendor performance management: Vendors can be evaluated based on key performance indicators such as policy compliance, delivery reliability, efficiency, and product quality.
3. Vendor invoice management: It includes receiving, authorizing, and assessing invoices. Firms can save huge amounts of money and time by eradicating manual invoice management workflows and substituting them with automated workflows.
4. Supplier lifecycle management: maintain an open, organized, and integrated process and derives value by boosting business growth.

Vendor management has a much broader scope than merely building a rapport with vendors. If overlooked, it can severely affect the viability of any business. Businesses with an efficient vendor management process stay clear of purchasing risks, and derive more tangible benefits.

TYASuite cloud-based vendor management software is a comprehensive solution that boosts efficiency qualify and vendor onboarding, execute orders, and monitor vendor performance all at once.

Get in touch with our team to start your free demo today!