B2B Vendor Portal
B2B Vendor Portal software provides Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) functions to help you improve processes with your suppliers by adapting to your business.
Buyer Productivity – Purchase Orders
B2B Connex vendor portal functionality can be used to automate the publishing of documents such as purchase orders. Suppliers are notified by email of the new order. B2B Vendor Portal sends out email reminders to ensure a timely acknowledgement from the supplier. The buyer doesn’t have to waste time chasing suppliers to verify purchase order delivery. Suppliers view the order through web pages and can take actions to acknowledge, accept, request a change, or reject the order. Buyers are immediately notified of the supplier’s actions and can review any change requests from the supplier immediately through a web page.
B2B Connex is optimized for MRO Purchasing. Many vendor portals move the process of PO creation to their own systems which completely bypasses the data you have built up in your Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems. With B2B Connex, Purchase Orders are created in your current purchasing system using your requisitions and the data already existing in your equipment database. B2B Connex then manages your supplier communication, notifications and confirmations. Eliminate time spent obtaining quotes for rarely purchased items by allowing suppliers to update prices and delivery dates directly from a PO using change orders. Change order approval is done manually by your buyers or can be done automatically if within specific tolerances.
Invoices Match Purchase Orders
Online Payment Status
By having invoice payment status available to your suppliers online you’ll reduce the time spent by your accounts payable staff answering calls from your suppliers wondering when they will receive payment.
Online RFQ Bid Submission
Use your RFQ module to generate supplier bid sheets, but leave the re-keying to us. We’ll send bid sheets out to your suppliers and automatically upload their pricing to your ERP system for bid analysis. Suppliers can download their bid sheet as a spreadsheet to enter pricing information off line and then they can upload the completed spreadsheet when they are ready.
Managed Specification Distribution
Manage the distribution of new specifications – we’ll record when your supplier views the new specification to help resolve disputes in the future.
Send forecasts automatically after your MRP or MRO scheduling to help your suppliers with their planning processes.
Kanban replenishment signals can be sent from your factory floor to the B2B Vendor Portal either through a scanner, a mouse click on a PC, or another activation method. An email is sent out to the supplier with reminders to ensure a timely acknowledgement. Supplier requests for changes can be incorporated into the process if desired as well as the Kanban signal triggering a purchase order. The Kanban order is sent to the supplier faster, acknowledgements are tracked, and there is a visual indicator to the buyer if there is a problem with the order that requires attention.
Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI)
Whether you are sending inventory information or more sophisticated MRP information to your suppliers, you want to ensure they receive it and it is up-to-date. B2B Vendor Portal can deliver this information through email and web pages so your suppliers do not incur onsite costs to gather the information. Information sent to the suppliers is immediately acknowledged, and if suppliers have issues with the information, there is a visual indicator for buyers, planners, and production personnel.
Share Quality Documents with your Suppliers
Connect to your own Corrective Action or Non Conformance system or initiate quality documents from within the B2B Connex portal. CAR’s, NCR’s, SCAR’s can be sent out to your suppliers to request action when trouble arises.
Send scorecards monthly, quarterly, yearly to keep your suppliers informed of their performance.
Reduced Cycle Time
With pressure from your customers to improve cycle times, you are looking for greater responsiveness from your suppliers. And you are still looking for incremental inventory reductions to save costs. The traditional process of sending out faxes, particularly for rush orders doesn’t provide the productivity or optimal speed. It can easily take 24 hours for a rush fax order to be acknowledged. Consequently, buyers manually intervene to accelerate the process. B2B Vendor Portal provides the mechanism for immediate delivery, to multiple supplier personnel, with an acknowledgement back in minutes.
The elimination of both the manual processing of supplier change requests and the re-keying of supplier data will increase accuracy leading to better planning and scheduling as well as fewer invoice match issues.
Reduce Telephone Time Costs
Whether it’s your order desk or your payables department, too much money is spent to communicate with your partners. Distributors and sister plants call the order desk to confirm orders sent, find out an order status, and get an update on inventory. Suppliers and sister plants call to confirm you received the goods, and find out about payment status. In both cases the bulk of the information is in your ERP system.
B2B Vendor Portal provides email and web page updates, so that suppliers and sister plants can view received goods status and payment status, without having to call your accounts payable department. Similarly, order acknowledgement, order status and inventory status can be provided to distributors and sister plants. Inbound telephone calls from suppliers to your accounts payable and order entry departments are reduced.
The communication of this information can be further automated through the use of B2B Connex Direct software, which enables electronic files to be sent to, or from, your partners computer systems.
Easy to implement, Easy to use
The bottom line: with B2B Connex, the Vendor Portal is an easy to implement and easy to use solution that helps organizations make dramatic improvements in the efficiency of their communications with supply chain partners.