It is so important for the business to look towards a more agile approach to ensuring your vendor portfolio is fit for purpose across the business.

Previously, supply chains have gained a large reputation for being slow and inflexible, with complex and insufficient operations across procurement. And, with rising levels of automation and efficiencies across other departments within the business, it causes the procurement to become out of place and no longer fit for purpose. For this reason, there needs to be more efficient ways that allow the supply chain to collaborate and bring agility to the business, quickly responding to business opportunity and creating a rise in service levels for the supply chain. But why is this collaboration and real-time response so key to the business?

Data Usage is growing, so therefore the SRM needs to have the skills to handle data with ease.

Modern networks rely on inter-connective response between two parties and digitisation, eliminating labour intensive work which could result in human error. Therefore, new technologies built for the supplier relationship manager will help to improve the digital transformation of procurement, and automate the collaboration between both the business and the vendor. Logging data with ease across a secure database is a process which is so key in enabling the SRM to fulfil such an efficient role, making their awareness of data and software execution so important.

The supply chain has always been data heavy, and considering more and more of the business’s key aspects are being outsourced as we look to a digital age, there is an increased risk that all of this information is becoming even higher in volume. Therefore, if it is not managed properly, it can result in even more inaccuracy, and the value gained from the vendor will plummet and result in a decrease of service gained from the vendor portfolio. Moving to a one-repository platform can therefore prevent the business from drowning in a sea of facts a figures, jumbled and inaccurate from being piled into bundles of excel data sheets and email trails which far too often do not support the business in making rational based decisions on what is next for the vendor. Vendors can also therefore be forgotten, losing that opportunity of value if the business does not collaborate efficiently with those that could be of most importance to the business’s strategic aims.

This makes it vitally important for the supplier relationship manager to begin transforming their cost centres and heaps of data that is often mismanaged into a driver for change to maximise value and drive down costs that the vendor could impose, both from an efficiency context and a risk context. The best data allocated in the most suitable manner will give the business the opportunity to thrive with strong partnerships from identifying new market trends quickly, bringing lower risk to the continuity of business from outsourcing vendors with the support of an information technology function.

Increased outsourcing results in increased risk, so organisations need to begin using technology to combat this disruption.

As mentioned briefly above, the increased outsourcing we see across business today makes the procurement function even more important to ensuring that the risk is mitigated to an acceptable level when passing through key data and information to these third parties. With new types of risks emerging from the vendor, it is vital that the organisation have an effective strategy in place with the utilisation of upcoming technology to prepare for any risk that may occur from the supply chain.

The first step to a healthy supply chain is through vendor relationships and human interaction, therefore making it even more important that the business has the collaborative tools to keep strong control of the vendors in contract, and ensure compliance to the relevant policies and procedures through regular check ups and reviews. The business must build a solid framework which allows them to manage and track suppliers and their activities, provide real-time information and overall quickly flag up issues of non-compliance and risk the vendor may impose. This will inevitably prevent a domino effect from being initiated, as the vendors strengths will always have a positive effect on the business and their continuity, rather than introducing high risk which will affect both parties.

Having real-time visibility of your vendors is the key to sustaining an agile approach to risk management across the vendor portfolio. Without the interconnected network of your vendor portfolio, procurement will never be able to keep pace with the complex risks and challenges we see across the cyberspace, and across business continuity in general, in order to mitigate it in the most reactive time-frame.

Using agile technology will also give the business greater control, and sustainability of key relationships.

With an effective technology implemented across the SRM function, it will enable companies to explore new markets and generate new and improved supply chains which are of most benefit to the business and their needs. This will help the business to cope with the ever-increasing demands of the vendor, as well as improve regulatory demands as many organisations begin to look towards ethical sourcing and the way in which businesses want to improve the environment landscape.

With measures of compliance also varying between the many countries which supply goods and services to the business, it is so important to have the right frameworks in place which cater the business ensuring that the vendor, as well as the business, meets the required landscapes, as well as understands the consequences for non-compliance between each country, region, state or union. The use of a procurement tool will support this visibility across each of the markets of business today, and boosts the insights gained upon each vendor and their values, behaviours and reliability in terms of service. This allows businesses to operate with a bird’s eye view of the supply chain, and work out ways to overcome certain issues and maintain control across the various vendors they may have no matter where they are based and no matter what their values and behaviours are.

Having trust across your vendor landscape is one of the biggest obstacles procurement faces, and therefore opening up the market through automated tools which gather great insights into each vendor will only help to sustain better relations. The power of new technologies can help to provide key performance indicators and other key metrics based on both the responsible supplier relationship manager and the vendor portfolio they run. This will help to build upon rational-based decisions and create stronger relations through meetings which help provide coverage of the vendor, showing the importance they bring to the continual improvement of the business.