It’s shown that some companies can double their profits by simply reducing their supply chain costs 4-to-9 percent. Inefficient supplier relationships are a common cost sinker that can be easily avoided by putting the right processes in place. Poor supplier management makes it more likely for delays and errors to happen, ultimately increasing risk and cutting into your expected profits.
With a supplier portal, you can adopt a set-it-and-forget-it approach to onboarding and standardizing suppliers at scale. For small and growing businesses, investing in these optimizations saves them time otherwise spent manually tracking and following up on each supplier’s activities.
Now think about it — aren’t there better ways for your team to spend an hour instead of compiling and comparing supplier data across different systems?
If you’re looking to understand the value a supplier portal can bring for your business, then this blog is for you.
What is a supplier portal?
A supplier portal (or vendor portal) helps businesses streamline communication and task management with external suppliers and vendors. Supplier information is easily disjointed and dispersed across multiple communication channels and software systems. You’ll have important notes and data in email communication threads, voice and video calls, spreadsheets, payment software, and even paper-based documents. Keeping all this information secure and up-to-date is necessary for any business to formalize and standardize processes across multiple vendors.
A supplier portal elevates your record-keeping to prevent details from slipping through the cracks, but it also allows you and your suppliers to take back time lost to:
- Miscommunication: Ensure that internal and external stakeholders are on the same page throughout the process by providing a single source of truth for any documentation, deadlines, updates, and more.
- Error-prone projects: Eliminate errors from manual processes and inaccurate data by equipping your portal with automated workflows and the right software integrations.
- Poor risk management: Gain real-time visibility into any supplier task or project so you can better forecast and solve challenges before they impact your work.
Key features for supplier portals
Every business has its own unique needs and workflows when dealing with suppliers. Depending on the volume of suppliers you’re working with, your resource availability, and your benchmarks for success with suppliers and vendors, you can evaluate a portal based on the following strengths:
- Customization: Allows companies to tailor the portal and supporting workflows according to the businesses’ existing processes, requirements, and tech stack.
- User-friendliness: Gives suppliers an intuitive experience that’s easy to use and navigate, which allows for a shorter learning curve and less resistance from suppliers and vendors.
- Supplier onboarding: Helps companies automate supplier registration and approvals to accelerate ramp-up time and build familiarity with the right processes and resources.
- Inventory management: Simplifies tracking and managing supplier inventory levels for better visibility and risk assessment.
- Order request forms: Unlocks self-service options and speeds up the process of submitting and editing purchase requests.
- Vendor communication: Streamlines all supplier communication in one place.
- Document management: Allows businesses to securely store and centralize supplier-related documents in an organized location.
- Project management: Helps companies manage cross-functional tasks and organize collaboration between internal and external stakeholders.
- Billing and payments: Automates and tracks all invoicing and payment activities with suppliers for more accurate billing.
Top supplier management challenges
Businesses are pushing to invest in a supplier management portal to help them overcome bottlenecks that inhibit growth and efficiency in their supplier relationships. Supplier management is a complex business function with many moving parts—from training new suppliers to maintaining the quality of new and existing relationships and aligning all supplier-facing processes with internal policies and compliance requirements.
It can be incredibly time-consuming and unproductive for businesses to implement a supplier portal that doesn’t help them tackle their specific supplier management challenges. Here are a few common challenges that could influence your purchasing decision for a supplier portal:
Contract management
Poor contract management puts businesses at risk of regulatory non-compliance, financial disputes, and delayed projects. When sending and receiving contracts for each supplier, businesses must meticulously track and make amendments, ensure compliance, and maintain accuracy when negotiating terms.
A supplier portal provides a centralized location for businesses to securely store and manage contracts across all their suppliers, reducing the risk of errors from manual processes, delayed communication, and unorganized contract databases. Businesses can use a portal to automate contract renewals and deadlines notifications, track compliance requirements, and get a detailed view of all amendment history.
Onboarding
Without a smooth supplier onboarding process, businesses will find it difficult to align expectations and properly train vendors on the tools and processes they’ll use throughout the supplier lifecycle.
Onboarding involves a series of tasks and steps that suppliers must complete before they start working with a business, including filling out forms, uploading documents, and getting the right approvals from stakeholders.
A supplier portal helps businesses automate these tasks and create standardized onboarding templates, saving time that would otherwise be spent duplicating efforts for each supplier.
Quality control
As businesses work with more suppliers, they’ll find it harder to manually ensure that all quality standards are met. This puts businesses at risk of low-quality products, unsatisfied customers, and poor return on investment (ROI) on their supplier investments.
A supplier portal includes features such as performance monitoring, non-conformance management, and quality scorecards that help businesses standardize the review and inspection process for supplier performance.
Communication
Strong supplier communication is critical to help you ensure the quality and timeliness of any project, service, or procured goods. Ineffective communication and a lack of transparency prevent businesses from resolving issues promptly and identifying risks before they happen.
Supplier portals can come with built-in messaging channels and collaborative workspaces that help centralize and store all supplier-facing communication and notes, so you no longer have to search through fragmented email threads.
Compliance management
All who conduct business with an external supplier or vendor must comply with industry or location-specific regulations. For example, industry guidelines in industries like healthcare and finance require organizations to only work with vendors that have mechanisms to protect end-user data privacy in accordance with those laws.
Non-compliance leads to legal issues that damage a company’s reputation and incur high financial costs. If this is a challenge for your business, you’ll want to look for a tool with features like compliance tracking, audit trails, and automated reminders to ensure you and your vendors complete the necessary steps to ensure compliance.
Cost management
It can be incredibly resource-intensive to manage relationships with multiple suppliers. Poor management makes it harder for businesses to understand available budgets, predict business needs, and map out market opportunities effectively to manage budgets.
With features like automated invoice generators and seamless integrations with payment systems, you can accelerate your cost analysis, collections, and budget forecasting.
5 supplier portal software to consider in 2024
What does a supplier portal software look like? Let’s explore a few examples.
Softr
G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (346 reviews)
Capterra rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (60 reviews)
Price
- Get started with Softr’s forever free plan
- Softr’s most popular plan for small businesses starts at $139 per month
Softr empowers businesses with a customizable platform to build supplier portals and vendor management processes that fit your needs. Use Softr’s drag-and-drop builder, template library, and logic builders to build a user-friendly portal from scratch with features for self-service supplier onboarding, inventory management, document hubs, project management, billing, and reporting — no coding required.
With Softr’s vendor management template, build a self-serve supplier portal that streamlines critical processes like order requests, invoicing, contract management, document sharing, and more.
On top of key integrations with Stripe, Airtable, Google Sheets, and HubSpot, Softr also integrates with over 5,000+ apps via Zapier and Maker, giving you a wide variety of ways to build a supplier portal on top of your existing supplier databases in existing applications.
Gatekeeper
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (59 reviews)
Capterra rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (70 reviews)
Price: Get started for $1,125 per year
With Gatekeeper’s supplier portal, businesses can focus on automating contract management and vendor performance management. The platform has features that simplify vendor onboarding and compliance processes, such as auto-generated vendor records and configurable approvals. The portal is built on top of workflows.
To build the right experience for suppliers, you’ll use Gatekeeper to map out different automated processes within the portal — a few examples of workflows include those for updating documents, performance reviews, vendor invitations, and contract approvals.
Kissflow
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (536 reviews)
Capterra rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars (56 reviews)
Price: Starts at $1,500 per month.
Businesses use Kissflow’s supplier portal to unlock self-service capabilities and manage operational processes such as creating purchase orders, tracking invoices, tracking payments, and more. It’s a part of Kissflow’s Procurement App that also contains other procurement capabilities such as supplier management, contract management, and inventory management.
This platform is a good choice for companies who want a self-service portal, but it does call for developer and resource investment into additional procurement apps on Kissflow for other key supplier management functions. If you’re looking for an all-in-one procurement solution instead of a fully customizable vendor portal, then this is worth exploring.
Zoho Creator
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (172 reviews)
Capterra rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (154 reviews)
Price: Get started for $12 per user/per month.
Zoho Creator has strong integrations with external tools and custom workflows that teams can access via the Zoho platform. Data integrations with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems allow businesses to customize their portal and add features for managing purchase orders, allowing self-service tasks, and giving suppliers real-time visibility into order statuses and ongoing projects.
The portal also has a user-friendly interface that suppliers can access on the go to view payment dashboards, manage documents, and track invoices.
Precoro
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (150 reviews)
Capterra rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (217 reviews)
Price: Supplier Portals are available in Precoro’s Automation plan, starting at $999 per month.
Precoro’s supplier portal is tailored for those managing procurement suppliers and vendors. The portal is part of Precoro’s comprehensive procurement platform that helps businesses manage procurement spending with better supplier management.
This portal is a good fit for companies that want a comprehensive solution that combines supplier management and procurement operations. Due to the platform’s robustness, it requires a two- to four-week implementation and onboarding process, which may not be suitable for all businesses.
Best practices for implementing a supplier portal software
Is supplier portal software a sure-shot way to solve all your vendor management struggles? Well, not exactly. Like any software system, you’ll get the most ROI only if you do your research, get team buy-in, and build the right culture and processes within your organization to support a new tool added to the mix. Let’s explore a few tips to keep in mind before you implement a new supplier portal:
Get early alignment from key stakeholders
Collect feedback from everyone involved in the supplier lifecycle — including existing vendors and suppliers — about the strengths and weaknesses of your supplier management process.
This will help you prioritize the portal capabilities that deliver the most impact and ensure that your team and suppliers respond positively to change and are motivated to use a new portal in their day-to-day workflow.
Bringing decision-makers early into the conversation will also help you save resources evaluating or piloting portals that don’t meet their baseline requirements.
Focus on effective training and knowledge sharing
If your team or vendors don’t know how to correctly use a new portal, you won’t see any improvements take effect. Beyond choosing a user-friendly tool, you need to train stakeholders to use the portal before it’s fully integrated into everyday workflows.
This helps you identify points of friction, work with your team or vendor to improve any ineffective processes and create the right documentation or support channels to facilitate problem-solving and reduce unnecessary dependencies.
Build processes and workflows that work with existing systems
Teams spend a lot of time building custom integrations and maintaining broken ones. This doesn’t even take into account the additional time spent correcting inaccurate data and documents as a result of those broken integrations.
Even with a portal that integrates with your technology stack, you’ll want to create databases and workflows that help you eliminate steps in your supplier management process rather than creating new ones.
With platforms like Softr, for example, you have complete customization controls over how you build your front-end portal. This helps companies pull in the right data from existing databases at the right time without any custom coding or complex automation journeys.
Monitor adoption and usage
Once you’ve implemented a new supplier portal, it will be important to consistently track how your suppliers and vendors are actually using it. This includes monitoring how many of them are completing onboarding tasks and following through with the processes that should be conducted in the portal.
Product usage is the most telling way to see if suppliers and vendors are actually switching to the new workflows you’re implementing to boost efficiency. Take this one step further by collecting feedback regularly to pinpoint areas of poor adoption, understand the cause, and quickly iterate to make the necessary improvements.
Stop losing time and money to poor supplier relationships
Set your business up for success by prioritizing smooth and efficient supplier management right from the get-go. Implementing a strong, customizable portal will give you the visibility to make better decisions and strengthen the relationships that impact your bottom line most.
With this blog, we want to empower you with the knowledge and recommendations to identify and address potential supplier bottlenecks before they happen. Use Softr’s vendor management template to build a custom supplier portal that meets the needs of your business and makes your supplier’s jobs easier.
What is Softr
Softr is the easiest way to turn your data into powerful business apps—no code required. Connect to your spreadsheet or database, customize layout and logic, and share with your team or clients.
Join 700,000+ users worldwide, building client portals, internal tools, CRMs, dashboards, project management systems, inventory management apps, and more—all without code.
Join 700,000+ users worldwide, building client portals, internal tools, CRMs, dashboards, project management systems, inventory management apps, and more—all without code.
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Winona Rajamohan
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