Separating business and personal credit can be tricky for small businesses, particularly when you yourself are your business. It’s generally recommended to keep your business and personal finances separate, and building business credit that’s separate from your personal credit is part of that process. There are instances where your personal and business credit may overlap though. If you’re applying for financing for your business and don’t have a long enough business history to qualify, the lender may take your personal credit into consideration.
The Difference Between Personal and Business Credit
Your personal credit is attached to your Social Security number, whereas your business credit is linked to your Employer Identification Number (EIN) or Tax ID Number. Your Tax ID Number is how the government recognizes your business for tax purposes. You can apply for an EIN online and receive one pretty quickly. While you don’t technically need one for tax purposes if you’re a sole proprietor, you should probably set up an EIN. You do need an EIN to establish business banking accounts in most cases, and you also need an EIN to establish business credit.
Your personal credit history is managed by three major credit bureaus; Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. Experian and Equifax also have business credit reporting services. Your personal and business profiles will be separate.
Dun & Bradstreet is the largest and most well-known reporting service for business credit, though there are others. If you have more than one business, you can have a separate business credit report for each, so long as you have separate EINs for those businesses.
Business vs Personal Credit Score
Personal credit is frequently consolidated into a singular credit score that helps creditors and lenders see your creditworthiness quickly. FICO is the most common way of scoring personal credit. There is no equivalent for businesses; each commercial credit bureau reports and scores business credit in its own way.
Generally, business credit scores consider fewer factors than personal credit scores.
The most important factors in scoring business credit are how your business pays its bills, how much debt your business carries, and the industry your business operates in. Improving your business’ credit score is often much easier than improving your personal credit score as well.
There are fewer legal protections for business credit, and consumer credit laws do not apply to businesses. Consumer credit laws allow you to dispute entries on your credit report and have faulty information corrected or removed; no such protections apply to business credit, making it much harder to deal with any issues. You can challenge discrepancies and errors with the bureau reporting them, but that bureau is under no obligation to respond to your request.
Do I need Business Credit?
There are instances where your business won’t be able to complete transactions without business credit. Financial institutions will use your business credit to determine whether or not to lend your business money. You’ll also need business credit to get business insurance. Without access to business credit and lines of credit, you may not be able to purchase the goods and services your business needs to operate.
In some cases, you can use your personal credit to obtain some of the above, but it’s best practice to keep business and personal credit separate whenever possible. The IRS has very strict rules regarding mixing of business and personal finances. Using personal finances to pay for business purchases makes bookkeeping much more complicated. Some believe that paying for business expenses with business funds is just an overall more professional way to conduct business.
Business credit can also be a factor in how your prospective or current customers perceive the risk related to doing business with you. There are situations where your business credit or risk score may be used as a gauge of whether to include or exclude you as a prospect, and it’s important to always understand “how you look” to your customers.
Most importantly, if you use personal credit to run your business, you put yourself and potentially your family at risk if your business experiences financial difficulties or fails. When you use your personal credit to run your business, you yourself become personally liable for that debt rather than your business. Creditors will come after you for repayment, not your business.
Six Ways to Establish Business Credit
Select your business structure carefully. The best way to separate your business and personal accounting and assets is to do it legally. Instead of a sole proprietorship, consider removing yourself and forming a corporation or LLC.
Open a business checking account. Use this account to pay your business’ bills and handle payroll (including paying yourself). If you’re incorporated, you’re required to have a business checking account. You’ll need an EIN to open the account.
Apply for and use a business credit card. Pay business expenses with this card, not your personal credit card. This makes tracking your expenses much easier and helps you build credit for your business as you make payments on the card. If you don’t qualify for a business credit card, opt for a secured business credit card, which is backed by an amount of money you put down to guarantee you’ll pay.
Ask for credit terms from vendors. Even if the limit is small to start with, getting credit terms from a vendor can help you build your business credit. Pay the bills on time and after several on-time payments, ask for your limit/term to be increased. Success with even one or two vendors can help establish your business credit and put you in a much better position when applying for loans or asking for credit terms with other vendors.
Apply for a microloan. These very small loans can give you access to affordable capital, and are easier to qualify for than those from traditional lenders. Your payments on these loans will be reported to credit bureaus, which helps you build credit.
Apply with bureaus. Equifax and Experian allow you to open a business credit file on your own, but Dun & Bradstreet require that you apply for a DUNS number.
Addressing Procure to Pay Challenges with Best Practices
What is Procure to Pay (P2P)
Procure to Pay, also known as purchase to pay or “P2P”, is a process that organizations follow when procuring the goods and services it needs to do business. Procure to Pay is a process that includes requisitioning, purchasing, receiving, paying, and accounting for goods and services and includes all the steps between placing an order with a supplier through to payment. Procure to Pay solutions often include technology like ERPs, and other procurement software.
The P2P Process
The Procure to Pay process includes:
Identifying a need. The procurement team identifies the need for a new good or service.
Requisition is created. A formal purchase requisition is created.
Purchase requisition approval. Submitted purchase requisitions are reviewed by department heads or procurement officers. Requisitions can either be approved or rejected. Incomplete requisitions are always rejected for correction and resubmission.
Create a purchase order/spot buy. If the requested goods/services are considered low-value commodities, one-time unique purchases, or unmanaged category buys, a spot buy will be performed. Otherwise, purchase orders are created and approved.
Purchase order approval. Purchase orders are checked to ensure the specifications are accurate and real. Once approved, orders are sent to suppliers. After reviewing the order, a supplier can either approve, reject, or negotiate the order. When an officer approves a purchase order, a legally binding contract is activated.
Receipt of goods. Once the supplier delivers the goods/services, the buyer inspects the delivered goods/services to ensure they comply with contract specifications. The goods/services receipt is then either accepted or rejected based on the standards specified within the purchase order or contract.
Evaluate supplier performance. Supplier performance is evaluated based on how well the supplier followed the contract specifications. Qualifiers such as quality of the goods/services, timeliness of delivery, service, contract compliance, responsiveness, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) are taken into account. Non or poor performance is flagged in existing information systems for further consideration.
Invoice approval. Once the goods receipt is approved, a three-way match between the purchase order, goods received, and the vendor invoice is performed. This ensures that the vendor delivers and is charging for what the buyer specifically purchased. If no errors are found, the invoice is approved and sent to the finance team for payment disbursement.
Vendor Payment. Once the finance team has received an approved invoice, the finance team will process payment according to contract terms. Any contract changes will be accounted for. There are generally five types of payments made to a supplier; advance, partial, progress or installment, final and holdback/retention payments.
Procure to Pay Challenges
Ensuring your company’s P2P processes are smooth and orderly is vital to the success of your business. The efficiency of procurement is ultimately the responsibility of sourcing and procurement departments. These departments have to source suppliers, manage contracts, minimize spending, and find ways to use automation in the purchasing cycle.
Many industries face challenges with the Procure to Pay process, but there are a wide variety of solutions being created and deployed to address them, especially in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) realm. While the challenges may vary from industry to industry, the below challenges are generally encountered regardless of sector:
Disparate systems and processing.
Large departments within the same organization often have their own sets of tools and processes to manage different steps in the P2P process. This makes data consolidation difficult. Sourcing, procurement, and accounts payable are all handled by different departments and separate systems. These systems are specifically optimized to suit each individual departments’ needs. Companies often deploy more than one ERP system, which creates data silos. These data silos make it very difficult to integrate data from multiple departments and create reliance on manual data input. Managing manual data, like manual data entry and paper invoices creates inefficiencies that costs organizations both time and money. An effective Procure to Pay solution will help eliminate data silos and increase cross-departmental communication.
Lack of compliance.
Governance and compliance of procurement processes tend to be rather static and unchanging. Spend approvals are often seen as unnecessary bureaucracy, which often results in ad-hoc and non-contract buying. This lack of both governance and compliance increases maverick spending, which is spending done without following the company’s procurement policy. This maverick spending, caused by purchasing from out-of-contract or non-preferred suppliers, causes your company to lose out on the benefits and cost savings that were negotiated with preferred suppliers.
Lack of stakeholder buy-in.
Management often sees procurement processes as unimportant to overall business operations and success. This means that improving procurement systems with technology like automation is low-priority. Inefficiencies multiply throughout the procure-to-pay process simply due to lack of consideration or use of outdated technology.
Poor systems training and adoption.
Most Procure to Pay solutions and procurement software is cumbersome and difficult to use. Users are normally poorly trained in using the software as well. Users expect easy to understand processes due to experience with B2C platforms like Google and Amazon, but this is not often the case in B2B processes. Procure to Pay software is often designed by procurement professionals who are intimately familiar with the intricacies of procurement. These programs are often full of features and lack focus on usability. Inadequate user training coupled with unfamiliarity with procurement policy can lead to reluctance in adopting up-to-date P2P technology.
Change management.
Change management is difficult to handle in any area of an organization, let alone in procurement. Users are not often consulted about system changes or updates, and this leaves users frustrated. When making changes to procurement systems, it is vitally important that users and staff be consulted. If your staff isn’t consulted, your company may waste valuable time and money implementing a system that was a poor fit in terms of both user capability and solving departmental problems. Assessing both user needs and current problems will inform your choice regarding what new systems and technologies would be of benefit to your company.
Solving P2P Problems with P2P Best Practices
Automate your processes.
Automating your P2P processes reduces operational costs while increasing efficiency. Automation ranges from electronic purchase requisitions that automatically get turned into purchase orders once approved, automated approval routing to e-invoices. When you automate these processes, your organization and your suppliers reap the benefits of increased efficiency. Adopting automation allows your procurement team to focus its efforts on activities that add value to the organization while enabling the accounts payable department to be more productive and reduce cost.
Automating your P2P processes also improves supplier relationships throughout your supply chain by ensuring timely payments. You can significantly reduce late fees and even capitalize on early payment discounts if available, both of which add to overall cost savings.
Don’t underestimate user experience.
Investing in technology is absolutely essential for streamlining and reducing costs, but if your employees don’t use the technology the way it’s intended to be used, your ROI will be minimal at best. If the procurement team finds your new procure to pay solution difficult to use, they will resort to familiar methods or other workarounds, rendering your investment ineffective. Your procure to pay solution should provide an intuitive and responsive user experience. As you test various solutions, you should conduct a usability assessment with a framework like the system usability scale (SUS). Using a framework like this to assess software will give you an objective rating and evaluation so that you can accurately compare your options.
Use cloud technology.
Data security is of the uppermost importance. Cloud technology has come a long way, and implementing it can benefit your business in a number of ways. Cloud technology helps standardize business processes, improve efficiency, and reduce cost. It also helps support change management since support packages and other updates can be applied system-wide quickly.
Keep things mobile.
Procure to Pay solutions have traditionally been handled in-house with a P2P web portal or with digital forms. In today’s work environment, procurement professionals expect to have access to procurement systems anytime, anywhere. This means companies either need to develop or use procurement software that is not device-specific. A mobile-first approach keeps the user experience simple and allows for an easy, intuitive buying experience. Allowing access anytime, anywhere increases efficiency and reduces turnaround time on procurement requests.
Your business relies on goods and services purchased from vendors. Vendors can be any entity that your business purchases a good/service from. This means the folks who sell you notebooks and the corporation that produces specially designed equipment all count as vendors (the plumbers and caterers do, too).
Organizations can work with hundreds and even thousands of vendors, and every single one of them needs to be managed properly. Effectively managing vendors is important for your business. It can mean reducing overall spending, saving money, and making sure orders go smoothly from the time of purchase through to payment. Vendor compliance is one, if not the most important aspect, of vendor management.
What is Compliance for Vendors or Suppliers?
Put simply, vendor compliance management means making sure that all vendors your company does business with adhere to your company’s specific requirements for doing business.
Your company is responsible for setting up and maintaining requirements for vendors that it works with. These requirements mitigate risk, save time and money, and provide prompt resolution should issues arise.
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The need for effective vendor compliance policies cannot be overstated. Without an effective vendor compliance program, your business has no real way to resolve issues with vendors. If a vendor raises a price, delivers goods late, or delivers an unsatisfactory product, your business has no recourse aside from severing the business relationship.
With a vendor compliance policy or program in place, your business can avoid problems like wrong purchase order numbers, incorrectly filled purchase orders, late deliveries, damaged goods, and more. Any of these issues can ultimately lead to problems with customer service and your organization’s bottom line and reputation.
Can an Effective Vendor Compliance Program Reduce Costs?
Even though all organizations want to save money, compliance policies and programs are often excluded from cost-saving measures. A formal, well-defined vendor management policy that’s used consistently with every vendor can save time and lower all sorts of costs. Increased accuracy and time to market ultimately lead to better customer service and happier customers.
An effective vendor compliance process will also help your organization reduce issues like vendor chargebacks, claims, and disputes. Avoiding these issues leads to better-managed vendor relationships in the long run.
A Vendor Code of Conduct is part of your supplier registration in SupplierGATEWAY’s Onboarding Portal.
Vendor or supplier compliance policies and programs also allow for the implementation of advanced supply chain technologies, like just-in-time inventory, RFID systems, source marketing and ticketing, and ASNs. All of these technologies ultimately create more system efficiencies.
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What’s in a Supplier or Vendor Compliance Policy?
Your company’s supplier compliance policy should specify your company’s policies, procedures, expectations, requirements, and penalties regarding but not limited to the following:
Backorders
Product condition upon delivery
Product quality according to specifications
Delivery dates
Service standards
Product packaging and labeling/label-making
Paperwork requirements
Customer returns/credits
Your company’s policy should focus its attention on areas that are high priority. For example, if time-to-consumer reductions are important, you’ll want to include clauses regarding expectations for on-time deliveries so that backorders can be reduced. If transportation cost reduction is a challenge, your vendor compliance policy should include inbound routing guides that stress the importance of efficiency.
Promoting supplier compliance can be done in several ways, but chargeback schedules are the most common. Your chargeback schedule will be used to penalize vendors that don’t adhere to compliance policy. Chargeback schedules are often accounted for either through cost per infraction or manpower per hour cost. It should be stressed to your vendors that your company would much rather vendors be compliant than have to charge fees for non-compliance.
It cannot be stressed enough—this document needs to be as clear, precise, and concise as possible. Removing ambiguity helps reduce misunderstandings and confusion.
Build Your Vendor Compliance Program with SupplierGateway
The need for cost-effective, efficient supply chains is greater than ever.
Instituting a vendor compliance program that includes consistent goals and parameters can help standardize your company’s internal processes and achieve significant cost and time reductions. These reductions and savings can give your organization the edge over competitors and ultimately increase your bottom line.
Utilizing supplier risk management software as part of your vendor and supplier compliance program further increases your company’s time and cost savings. Making your vendors accountable for their products, services, and mistakes saves your business money and is critical to your ongoing success.
Simple, streamlined workflows for vendors to add critical data in SupplierGATEWAY’s Onboarding Portal.
SupplierGateway’s Vendor Onboarding Software helps you keep vendors accountable with Supplier Compliance Monitoring tools and a Compliance Document Center.
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Vendor contract management is an integral part of any solid vendor management program. Vendor contracts require specific handling, and are complex documents that do more than simply establish terms and conditions. Managing vendor contracts means not only managing the creation of contracts, but also their negotiation, execution, and review over time.
The contract management process ensures that both your company and the vendor involved in the contract meet the obligations and expectations put forth in the contract.
What is Vendor Contract Management?
Vendor contract management is a practice that allows organizations to control costs, mitigate vendor risks, and drive positive vendor performance throughout the vendor’s contract lifecycle. The management of vendor contracts is vitally important to your business, as contracts are legally binding documents and determine a business’s stakeholder relationships, scope of work, pricing, rights and obligations, timelines for projects, warranties and more.
If your company’s contract management is unstructured or simply doesn’t exist, your business could experience exposure to several different types of risk, including operational, financial, and reputational.
Contract management isn’t simply keeping track of documents. Contract management means understanding every aspect of a contract so that meaningful insights can be extracted and applied to future contracts. Contract management can be a useful tool to drive business performance and reach specific goals and objectives.
The goal of the vendor contract management process is to make sure that all parties to the contract meet the expectations and obligations set forth in the contract.
Here are the steps generally involved in the contract management process:
Nine Steps to Vendor Contract Management
Enable contract management. Identify the contract and verify the roles and responsibilities, and procedures laid out within the contract.
Contract negotiation. Once the contract draft is complete, both parties should assess whether or not the terms are acceptable. Ensure that the contract draft establishes roles and responsibilities of both parties.
Contract approval. To ensure contract approval moves along quickly, parties should create workflows tailored to approval, including serial and parallel approvals, to ensure that the decision-making process is efficient.
Contract execution. Executing the contract can be done either via fax support or e-signature to expedite the process.
Obligation management. This part of the process includes project management to make sure stakeholders are holding up their contractual obligations. This type of management also ensures that the contract’s value doesn’t diminish and that the verbiage of the contract retains meaning.
Revisions and amendments. The original contract should have clauses that lay out how the contract can be revised and amended should the contract need to be changed. Examples of changes in contract may be product specifications, delivery deadlines, and the like.
Auditing and reporting. Contract audits and reporting ensure that the organization is in compliance with the terms of the agreement throughout the life of the contract. Auditing the contract can help organizations stay on top of possible issues that may arise in the future as well.
Contract renewal. Contract renewals should be automated.
Contract exit strategy. Plan for a clean contract termination. Document exit provisions with your vendor. Many businesses use the ISO4401 Collaborative Business Relationship Standard. If you follow this ISO standard, you include a joint exit strategy. You should also ensure that your company has valid grounds to terminate a contract via documentation, contract review and updates, and other predetermined and contractual KPIs.
Vendor Contract Management Best Practices
A vendor contract is a legally binding document that lays out the expectations your business has for a particular vendor. The contract will specify the nature of the product or service, the quantity, and the terms under which the vendor will supply these products or services. Your company should be following these best practices when creating and managing vendor contracts:
Follow your company’s vendor management policy and use that policy when developing vendor contracts.
Create service level agreements (SLAs) or scope of work (SOW). These documents cover general parameters as well as vendor-specific terms and agreements to prevent confusion down the line. These documents should also include performance expectations, compliance requirements, data breach management outlines, and the penalties for not meeting these expectations.
Communication expectations and requirements. Your organization should be transparent in sharing information regarding vendor strategies, challenges, pain points, objectives, organizational details and relevant technology stacks as part of your agreement. You should also lay out communication and transparency expectations for your vendors as well.
Payment terms. The contract should explicitly state the cost of products or services, who is to be paid, payment schedules, and penalties for late payments.
Stipulations for additional parties. In the case that your vendor sub-contracts to third and fourth parties, the contract should require that your primary contract vendor monitors these sub-contractors and that they also comply with the contract.
Appeal To More Buyers, Win More Business
Buyers find that identifying the right supplier may be difficult, and a large number of procurement teams consider this the most challenging component of their job. Choosing the correct supplier ensures that the products and services are supplied on time, at a suitable price, and according to company standards. But how do procurement teams choose suppliers in the first place?
Procurement teams generally don’t randomly seek out suppliers; the supplier selection process starts once the procurement team has identified a specific need for new suppliers.
When looking for new suppliers, most companies follow a very specific process that’s known as a vendor selection and review process. Getting through this process is how your company gets selected as a supplier. While there are specific aspects of supplier selection and review that will vary from buyer to buyer, there are areas that buyers universally review to ensure that a supplier is going to be a great fit.
Here are seven tips to help you appeal to more buyers:
1. Price
Price is a critical factor that buyers consider when looking for new suppliers. However, buyers don’t merely pick a supplier based on their price alone, especially if the purchase is non-commodity items. When it comes to general costs, low-cost products and services may not be the best choice, as low cost may be indicative of low-quality. While your pricing should be competitive, your company needs to earn a sufficient profit at the specified price for your company to remain in business. Smart buyers are aware of this too, and aren’t likely to choose a supplier who could price themselves out of the market.
2.Understand Your Brand Perception
Being the best and easiest choice for a buyer means that your company doesn’t pose any undue risk to a buyer. Part of any vendor selection process involves due diligence on the part of the buyer. In a digital world, information about your company is more accessible than ever. Your company’s website is often the first place a prospective buyer will go for information about your company, so ensuring your website is up to date is critically important.
Information regarding your company’s service record, legal and financial history, credit history, and regulatory, financial, and legal compliance is of the utmost importance to a buyer when looking for new suppliers. You can bet that any potential buyer is going to assess this information as part of their supplier selection process.
Being aware of any potentially negative information or perceptions about your company allows you to fix issues before potential buyers become aware of them. Due diligence is important for your company too, and being on top of reputational, legal, financial, and compliance issues ensures that you’re always putting your best foot forward.
3. Show What You Do Best
Now that everything is online, we all have to find substitutes for walking through the store and picking up the products on display. Buyers are people too, and evidence like images, video clips, or detailed information of the facility, products, or services offered can go a long way to help you get into the “in” column. Competition is often fierce, so you should be taking every opportunity to show off where your company excels.
4. Be an Easy Choice
Your company needs to represent a safe, best value choice for your prospective customer. Whatever you can present that signals your solid reputation (like reviews), your track record (like references), and your stability (like certifications) will indicate that you’re an easy choice compared to a competitor.
For example, if you know your buyers are specifically looking for a certain type of supplier with a certain type of certification, get that certification! Lots of organizations have initiatives regarding supplier diversity and sustainability. If your company is diversely owned, local to a buyer, or a small business, have the certification necessary to back up that claim. You’ll be a much more attractive supplier for potential buyers in the long-run.
If you have a unique product or service but are new to the market, reduce your perceived risk by issuing warranties with your product or offering free trials. This can be a risk, so be sure your product or service is worth it. Most buyers will be looking for a way to avoid making a risky choice with no backup.
5. Nothing Beats a Good Reputation
One of the ways your prospective customer will make a final judgment is to seek recommendations and reassurance from your previous customers. If you are on one of the leading marketplaces, such as Amazon, buyers will check the reviews directly from your sales page. If you are listed in business sites like SupplierGATEWAY, your clients can leave reviews and ratings that are reflected on your profile. Follow up and communicate with your customers— make sure they are happy with your product or service. Your next sale may depend on it.
6. Be Prepared to Go Big
If you’re good at what you do—and we are sure you are— you should already be thinking about how to manage success and growth. If you discover that your customers are demanding massive shipments of your goods over time, orders may soon exceed your capacity. Most buyers are very unforgiving regarding late or missed deliveries. Talk to your key customers and work closely with them; they are vested in your overall success too.
7. Get to Know Your Potential Buyers
In the past, it was commonplace for customers to visit you and tour your company and its facilities. Today, a large global commerce footprint, inflation, and the overall impact of the pandemic has made in-person meetings and facility tours less frequent.
The good news is technology has made it possible to reduce some logistical costs and challenges while preserving the due diligence buyers require. Use virtual meetings, media and digital tools to your advantage to make more meaningful connections and lasting impressions at a lower cost and in less time.
Onboard New Suppliers Faster and with Less Risk with These Five Supplier Onboarding Tips
Without vendors and suppliers, most businesses wouldn’t be able to function from day to day. Whether suppliers are responsible for raw materials needed to produce finished goods or supplying essential services necessary for company operations, the importance of suppliers necessitates building strong and secure relationships.
Minimizing vendor and supplier risk and ensuring long, strong relationships is more than just finding the best suppliers. According to Deloitte, 60% of CPOs cite poor data quality, standardization of practices, and governance as the largest procurement problem they face. Having a standardized supplier onboarding process helps increase accurate supplier data capture and quality. Inefficient onboarding processes not only slow your company’s time to market and increase your company’s exposure to undue risk, but also reinforce lack of transparency as a norm for your suppliers.
Your company’s onboarding process sets the stage for all of your supplier relationships. Efficient and accurate onboarding processes ensure suppliers are aware of and agree to your transparency and communications expectations. Standardized onboarding practices allow suppliers to become partners in data security and transparency. Efficient and transparent onboarding enables positive supplier relationships and helps reduce your company’s exposure to risk.
While risk reduction is a top priority for over 90% of CPOs, poor supply chain transparency leaves a significant number of procurement officers with little to no knowledge of risk beyond their tier 1 suppliers. Lack of supply chain transparency also affects the end customer as well. Over 60% of consumers will not purchase from a company that they do not trust. If your supply chain has low levels of transparency, there are few tools available to use to gain consumer trust.
Adopting best practices for vendor and supplier onboarding will help you create a process that lays a strong foundation for your supplier relationships and ultimately increase profitability while reducing risk for your company.
What is Supplier Onboarding?
Supplier onboarding, or vendor onboarding, which is part of supplier relationship management, is a process that allows organizations to efficiently vet, qualify, approve, and contract vendors so that goods or services can be purchased, and make timely payments to current and new supply partners.
While many onboarding processes are similar, organizations may go about them in different ways. The process can either be paper-based or digital, managed via the buyer or self-directed by the supplier. Supplier onboarding isn’t that different from new employee onboarding.
A well-designed supplier onboarding process helps your company avoid potentially expensive mistakes, including avoiding risks that could put your organization in legal, reputational, or compliance trouble.
The Supplier Onboarding Process
In this article, supplier onboarding is broken down into five steps:
Identify the need for a new supplier according to procurement requirements. Any new supplier onboarding exercise is triggered by a need identified by procurement.
Identify potential suppliers and evaluate them. During this process, your organization should gather data pertaining to service record, reputation, credit history, and regulatory, financial, and legal compliance.
Qualify suppliers. Once a supplier has been evaluated, your company should use a predetermined qualification process to qualify (or disqualify) a potential supplier. The qualification process should reflect your company’s policies regarding lead times, pricing, ESG credentials, and terms and conditions. Suppliers that do not pass your company’s qualification process should be removed from consideration while those that pass the qualification process can be approved.
Collect supplier information. Your organization should collect supplier information either via a buyer-led process or through a self-service portal. Using self-service portals is considered best practice and saves buyers and suppliers a considerable amount of time. Your company will need to collect different types of information, including payment details. You’ll also want to ensure that suppliers have access to any necessary systems, and that internal stakeholders have access to supplier information.
Regularly review supplier performance. Supplier performance should be assessed on a regular basis after onboarding. This ensures the onboarding process has been completed and ensures that suppliers are always meeting company procurement standards and requirements in the future.
Supplier Onboarding Best Practices
In practice, supplier onboarding is often an inefficient, time-consuming process that can often take months to complete. Luckily, there are many steps your organization can take to optimize the onboarding process. By adopting best practices, you can streamline vendor selection, speed up the onboarding process itself, and ensure new relationships with vendors have the best chance at success.
Take due diligence seriously. Spending additional time on the supplier selection process can ultimately save you time by removing unfit suppliers sooner rather than later. Pay particular attention to reputational risk, financial information and risk, insurance information, and the supplier’s information/data security measures.
Prioritize data security. Keeping supplier data safe is crucial, so it’s important to invest in systems that keep your supplier information and data protected from threats. A paperless supplier information management system will help you protect this incredibly valuable information.
Get leadership buy-in ASAP. Having leadership buy-in early on is essential when creating a supplier onboarding process. Make sure all necessary stakeholders are involved in the process from the beginning. Getting buy-in from leadership ensures that your entire organization uses and understands the process, thus driving success in onboarding.
Be consistent in your approach. Make sure that your onboarding process is used company-wide. Consistent use means consistent results, but your care and attention shouldn’t stop after the onboarding process is finished. Ongoing supplier management brings about additional benefits for your business, like better time to market, supplier innovation, and more.
Developing a strong and well-managed supplier onboarding process helps your organization create an efficient and effective supplier relationship management program. A clear, efficient, and easy-to-understand supplier onboarding process creates a strong foundation for relationships that focus on mutual success.
Alongside relationship benefits with suppliers, your organization will also see these additional benefits when best practice supplier onboarding is instituted:
Effective and efficient supplier/buyer relationships and supplier management.
Streamlined processes and greater efficiency.
Enhanced risk mitigation (supported by data management and transparency).
A healthy and positive industry reputation as a buyer.
A sleek, well-tuned supply chain.
Reduced human error, invoice fraud, and maverick spend.
Enhanced industry, legal, and governmental compliance.
A healthier bottom line supported by optimal return on investment (ROI).
Reduced time for new supplier approval.
Supplier Risk Management Solutions from SupplierGATEWAY
At SupplierGATEWAY, we take your company’s risk mitigation seriously. As a SOC II Type 2 and ISO-certified company, we truly care about your supplier data security and accuracy.
We’ve launched over 2,500 self-service supplier onboarding portals and work with some of the world’s top brands and companies like Nike, The NBA, Vizient and LVMH.
Best Practices for Creating a Vendor Management Policy
Good vendor relationships are absolutely essential to running a successful business. However, managing these relationships can be complicated and overwhelming. Your business needs to keep track of a lot of information when it comes to vendors, from the very basics like who your vendors actually are, to far more intricate details like what kinds of access your vendors have, the SKUs they produce, and what internal policies apply to which vendor contracts.
Without a solid foundation for your vendor management program, keeping track of all of these working parts can quickly become a nightmare. An inadequate vendor management program can expose your business to undue risk, and lead to large problems that could ultimately damage your enterprise.
This series of five articles breaks down vendor management best practices, and should leave you with a much clearer understanding of what an effective vendor management program looks like.
In this article, you’ll learn how to establish a clear vendor management policy.
But before we get into the meat and potatoes of vendor management policy creation, let’s first establish what vendor management actually is.
What is Vendor Management?
The definition of vendor management has shifted significantly over the years. In the past, vendor management’s primary concern was keeping costs low. Today, vendor management is a far more complex process that involves creating strategic relationships with vendors that can truly drive your company’s success.
Vendor management is a process that includes how an organization identifies and selects vendors, evaluates and optimizes vendor performance, and encourages vendor collaboration and innovation.
Your organization needs a vendor management program for two main reasons. Firstly, you need to be able to evaluate vendor performance based on your company’s requirements. Secondly, you need to be able to identify where your vendors can improve while maintaining a good relationship throughout the vendor’s lifecycle.
To get the most out of any vendor, it is important to measure and track data that is relevant to your company’s goals while supplying consistent feedback to your vendors. This open communication fosters strategic partnerships between your vendors and your company.
Vendor Management Policy Best Practices
Clear and concise vendor management strategies enable strong vendor relationships. They allow your company to effectively choose and engage with vendors, lower vendor risk, and improve vendor performance and quality of service over the lifecycle of the contract.
A vendor management policy is a document that informs the company board and senior management about vendor management activities. Effective vendor management policies address areas that drive performance and quality improvement, risk reduction, innovation, collaboration, and vendor diversity.
Here are best practices for creating a vendor management policy:
Create a formal, written document. This document will be approved by management and address how senior management, board members, and other stakeholders will be informed regarding the vendor management program.
Make sure your purchasing strategy is aligned with your company’s overall strategy and mission statement. Management expects the purchasing department to reduce overall cost while fostering positive relationships with vendors. This enables new product/service innovations and overall growth.
Form a purchasing committee. The committee should be made up of the vendor manager and executives, unit managers, and other key stakeholders. The committee should regularly discuss policy, review performance, and adjust strategy based on changing conditions.
Designate responsible parties. Your policy should identify who’s responsible for what, a general outline of how the department runs, and board/senior management oversight standards.
Create a vendor selection and review process. Set guidelines that align with your organization’s overall strategy. Plan site visits and establish auditing requirements.
Establish guidelines for risk management. Review information security, legal, and financial risks for every vendor. To verify a vendor, look for independent documentation like tax or bank documents. Your company may require a separate risk assessment team.
Attain the ideal number of vendors. You should aim to have an optimal number of vendors based on the categories you’ve established for vendors. To get to that optimal number, consider the diversity of your requirements, risk factors, and market fluctuations.
Determine KPIs you want to measure when assessing vendor performance. These KPIs should be captured and measured objectively and allow for qualitative observations or additional context.
Once you’ve established your company’s vendor management policy, you’ll want to create a vendor contract management policy and also include that document as part of your overall vendor management policy.
You’ll learn best practices for creating a vendor contract management policy in the next article of this series on creating a vendor management program.
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Responding to the Qualitative Section of the HCAi AB962 Report
The AB962 reporting process includes a qualitative section to help HCAi and your stakeholders better understand the efforts that your health system or hospital facility is undertaking to promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in your procurement practices.
The guide below provides some tips on how to organize your response to provide a clear understanding of what your system is doing or is proposing to do. Remember that most organizations are on a journey, and this is likely true of your health system. You may have done some things to promote outreach and inclusion but have plans to do more. This is typical, and very common. This section of the AB962 report is an excellent place to describe your accomplishments and paint a picture of the plans that you have for future improvement.
The tips below are for each portion of the AB962 report qualitative section and understanding what is being asked.
How does your hospital encourage and seek out minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises to become potential suppliers?
The narrative provided here should give a clear understanding of policies, procedures and actions that your health system is taking that currently results in or is intended to result in minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses becoming potential suppliers. One way to break this down is to segment it as follows
Outreach – how do you make opportunities to do business with you be known to prospective diverse suppliers? (Example – Do you post notices and invitations to bid?)
Engagement – how do suppliers who are interested get your attention? (Example – Do you have a supplier registration system?)
Monitoring – How do you measure the effectiveness of your outreach and engagement? (Example – Do you evaluate the percentage of diverse suppliers that your procurement teams are interacting with when compared to the entire population.)
How does your hospital encourage its employees involved in procurement to seek out minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises to become potential suppliers?
The narrative provided here should give a clear understanding of specific efforts that you are undertaking to influence the behavior of the people who make sourcing and purchasing decisions, with the intent to engage more minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses. One way to break this down is to segment it as follows:
To illustrate some best practices, we are quoting from the Article “Change Employee Behavior in the Workplace with These 5 High-impact Corporate Training Strategies” by Asha Pandey, chief learning strategist at EI Design. www.eidesign.net/blog
Experiential Learning
In experiential learning, employees are immersed in simulations, role-plays and case studies, creating an atmosphere that is conducive to behavior change.
For your AB962 program, is there any version of your environment where your procurement teams can practice inclusive sourcing techniques and surface their questions, issues and challenges while still getting their work done. If you have these tools in place, their would be an excellent place to describe them.
Feedback
Feedback is vital to any effort to modify employee behavior. Without feedback, employees don’t know when their behavior is incorrect. Managers, supervisors, change managers, training teams and coaches all play a vital role in the feedback loop.
You are likely the coach in this scenario and you invest considerable time and effort in providing feedback in a qualitative way. Do you also have quantitative metrics to help support the progress you sense your teams are making?
Follow-up
After receiving feedback, employees should have the opportunity to follow up, ask questions and try again. Employees who can iterate are more likely to achieve desired behavior changes.
You may want to describe programs you have in place to encourage and process feedback on the progress your Supplier Diversity program is making.
Nudges
While active coaching and feedback is useful, small nudges throughout the flow of work can also be effective. Strategically placed microlearning opportunities can serve as reminders for employees, helping to modify their behavior. Short videos and infographics shared through email or a corporate social learning platform will also refresh the behaviors learned in formal training.
Does your Supplier Engagement platform provide you with tools to assist the nudging process. If it does, you should describe how you use it as an integral part of your program. This Knowledge Base article is an example of a nudge. Another example – the demographic breakdown panels that are strategically placed at various points of the SupplierGATEWAY system to remind teams of the demographic composition of their sourcing lists.
Modeling
Modeling by executive sponsors and champions serves as an effective method of changing employee behavior in the workplace. When combined with microlearning, follow-up messages from leaders will remind employees of expected behaviors and can help modify norms, reward appropriate actions and reduce undesired behaviors.
Does your senior leadership actively review and provide feedback on DE&I efforts? How often and when? The clear emphasis by senior leadership will send the message that this is important and reinforces the behavior. Your statements should reflect how that feedback is provided.
How does your hospital conduct outreach and communication to minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises?
The response to this question should provide a clear description of the various mechanisms and initiatives that help your health system to engage and communicate with minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses. You should pay attention to the narrative that best illustrates the sustained effort you are making to make outreach and communication an ongoing sustained process. One-off events are good and should be included here. Systematic persistent communication is even better and if you have programs or mechanism in place, you should take the time to describe them here.
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All these actions lead to new behavior that rewires the human brain, creating new neural pathways that lead to better habits. Once the behavior becomes a habit, it is engrained in employees’ day-to-day actions.
The AB962 report is simply a scorecard, but the process of preparing the scorecard should be additive to your overall program.
Conduct a Successful Vendor Risk Assessment in 9 Steps
Assessing the risk of a potential vendor requires time and due diligence. A risk assessment is not a place where your organization should be cutting corners and doing haphazard investigations.
Only about 37% of organizations have the ability to manage their vendors and vendor risk appropriately. In the same survey, 22% of respondents admitted that they didn’t even know if they’d had a third-party data breach in the last year.
A thorough risk assessment of your vendors is crucial to maintaining your organization’s financial security and reputation. A clearly defined vendor risk assessment process could even save you from doing business with irresponsible or even criminal vendors.
What are Vendor Risk Assessments?
A vendor risk assessment, also known as a third-party risk assessment, is a vetting process that helps organizations choose and monitor vendors. During this vetting process, your organization identifies and evaluates the potential risks of working with any given vendor.
Once these risks have been identified, you’ll then weigh the potential risks of the partnership versus the potential rewards of doing business with that vendor. These decisions will weigh differently from organization to organization, based on your company’s mission, policies, procedures, and other factors.
This process tends to be very long and tedious, but failure to carry out a thorough vendor risk assessment could land your organization in hot water. Reputation damage, lost business, legal fees, and fines can all result from doing business with an improperly vetted vendor. For example, if one of your vendors fails to comply with certain regulations, your company will be held liable as well.
The steps outlined below will help your organization conduct an objective and thorough risk assessment.
Step 1: Know the Types of Vendor Risk
Before beginning a vendor relationship, review the different types of vendor risk. The different types of risk, and corresponding vendor risk assessment questions, include:
Strategy Risk: Will the vendor steal trade secrets or intellectual property?
Financial Risk: Is the vendor financially stable? Do they have outstanding liens, or bankruptcies?
Compliance Risk: Does the vendor follow relevant laws and regulations?
Geographic Risk: Is the vendor located in an unstable area (i.e., an area prone to political unrest, or natural disasters)?
Technical Risk: How stable are the vendor’s IT and data management practices?
Subsequential Risk: Does the vendor use third parties for any of its processes and could these third parties affect your business?
Resource Risk: Does the vendor have the resources and ability to fulfill their contract with you? Can they actually do what you’d be paying them to do?
Replacement Risk: How easily replaceable is the vendor should they go out of business?
Operational Risk: Does the vendor have any operating policies and procedures that could expose your company to risk?
Reputational Risk: How could working with this vendor affect your company’s reputation both internally and externally? Would working with this vendor cause reputational damage to your company?
Not all of these categories will apply to every vendor relationship that your organization hopes to do business with, but it’s helpful to know where you might encounter issues.
Step 2: Determine Risk Criteria
Your risk criteria will depend on what kind of business your organization conducts, what type of business the vendor in question conducts, and how your two organizations will specifically interact. For example, a company that deals with a lot of sensitive information would prioritize data security and privacy when assessing vendor risks.
You want to make sure to avoid bias when choosing vendors. This is done by evaluating all vendors consistently, regardless of a vendor’s reputation. Your vendor risk assessment should be designed with a set format and scoring criteria and be used for each and every vendor assessment.
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A vendor assessment should actually happen in two parts. The first assessment should be of the entire company. The second assessment should be of whatever individual products or services you intend to purchase from the vendor.
While a company-level assessment vets things like a vendor’s reputation, regulatory compliance, and level of customer service, assessing individual products and services shows you risks inherent to those specific products and services in and of themselves.
For example, if you’re interested in purchasing vendor management software from a company, you’ll want to ask how secure the software is, how fast employees can learn the software, software cost, and the software’s compliance with any relevant laws.
Assessing both the company and the products/services you intend to purchase gives your organization a much more complete picture regarding risk.
Step 4: Consult Experts
Assessing vendor risk takes a very high level of expertise. Your organization should seek insights from staff in other departments of your company. You can also bring in outside experts that have relevant knowledge. Getting insights from people in IT, legal, finance, security, and compliance can help your organization assess potential vendor risk more thoroughly.
Many organizations have a specially designated third-party risk assessment team that consists of individuals from different departments. This team helps ensure consistent, thorough, and timely vendor evaluations.
Step 5: Assess Every Vendor, Regardless of What They Do
Vendor risk assessments are for all vendors, regardless of what product or service you purchase from them. Assessments should be performed before entering into a contract with any vendor, even if that vendor appears to be low-risk. A comprehensive vendor onboarding software with third-party risk assessment tools can help you streamline this process and ensure nothing goes unchecked.
Cleaners, catering companies, landscapers, plumbers, florists, and landlords should all be evaluated even if there’s not a formal vendor risk assessment conducted. If a company has access to physical space, files, or data, they should be evaluated as they could pose potential risks to your organization.
In March 2024, American Express revealed that a third-party data breach exposed over 50,000 customers’ sensitive details, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, and customer names. American Express has not revealed how the information was breached but claims that hackers got access to one of their vendors’ systems. Ensuring your vendors are using best practices and meet your organization’s standards could save your business money, ensure data security, and improve vendor relationships.
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Step 6: Organize Vendors by Risk Level
After a vendor has been assessed, you should determine that vendor’s overall risk level. Organizing vendors based on risk level can help you quickly and easily identify vendors to work with and expedite the risk management process.
Based on your criteria, a vendor should be identified as high-, medium-, or low-risk. Next, you should give the vendor an impact score. Impact scoring is determined by how important a vendor and their product/service is to the operation of your organization.
Visual risk rating data in SupplierGateway’s portal.
Next, you’ll want to assign levels of due diligence for vendors at each risk level. This helps increase efficiency and consistency while eliminating bias.
Step 7: Make a Risk Management Plan
Simply put, a risk management plan is an outline of how your organization will deal with each type of potential risk posed to it by a third party or vendor. Should something go wrong, your plan will allow you to act quickly to mitigate damage.
This plan should include risk scenarios and specific response tasks, as well as who is responsible for those tasks.
Additionally, your plan should include measures your organization will take to reduce risk. For example, your company may regularly monitor vendor compliance through an automated process or include specific contract considerations such as data storage requirements and subcontractor review policies.
When creating a risk management plan, you’ll want to get your designated third-party risk assessment team involved as well. They can provide insight into how to handle risks when they arise and prevent them from happening.
Step 8: Stay Up-To-Date on Laws and Regulations
Your company needs to be up-to-date regarding laws and regulations that affect it. Privacy, environmental, employment, labor, and tax laws change frequently, and it’s your business’ responsibility to comply with any changes.
As your company modifies its policies and procedures to stay compliant, you’ll need to be sure that your vendors are staying compliant as well. Make sure to communicate with your vendors so they understand the expectations your company has regarding compliance.
If a vendor is hesitant or has no intent on remaining compliant with applicable laws and regulations, cut ties with them. That vendor’s unwillingness or inability to remain compliant could negatively impact your organization. In some cases, your organization may even be held liable for breaches in compliance.
Step 9: Conduct Regular Assessments
Vendor risk assessments need to be done regularly, as vendors grow, shift, and change over time. The problem with initial vendor risk assessments is that they’re a snapshot of the vendor at that specific point in time.
The reality is that vendor risk assessments need to be done on an ongoing basis, as emergent issues can arise at any given time. Your organization may choose to do yearly third-party risk assessments for low-risk vendors, while high-risk vendors may require monthly assessments.
SupplierGateway is your comprehensive vendor risk management software, featuring capabilities and tools to help you easily manage vendor risks, including:
Supplier Onboarding Software: Centralizes data and reduces the risk of errors.
Seamless Integration Capabilities: Connects with your ERP/AP system to tackle data silos and build transparent workflows.
Supplier Diversity Platform: Expands your supplier pool, mitigating disruptions and boosting competitive position and innovation.
Sustainability Assessments and Reporting: Evaluate suppliers across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, as well as sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and human rights compliance.
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Establish Inclusive Procurement Practices in Four Steps
The sixth and final step to starting your supplier diversity program from scratch is establishing your organization’s inclusive procurement practices. This last step should be a snap if you’ve followed our guidelines for defining your supplier diversity program and creating your supplier diversity policy. These previously created documents are what you need in order to inform your inclusive procurement practices going forward.
Establishing your organization’s inclusive procurement practices can be outlined in four easy-to-understand steps:
Identify which groups of diverse suppliers you’ll work with;
Create policies that require procurement to include diverse suppliers in all bids and RFPs;
Track inclusiveness in your RFP process;
Measure non-diverse Tier 1 suppliers based on their Tier 2 spend with diverse suppliers.
Let’s break each of those steps down.
Identify which groups of diverse suppliers you’ll work with
Identifying which groups of diverse suppliers your organization will work with is one of the most important steps when defining your program. This portion directly informs how your organization will incorporate diversity into its procurement practices. If you’re here with us now, you probably already defined these groups back in step two or three.
Remember, the following groups are all classified as diverse:
Women
Persons with disabilities
Minorities (US, or where a minority group is recognized by a country’s government) including:
Native American
African American
Asian American
Hispanic American
Veterans and military-service-disabled veterans
People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender
Best practice indicates that businesses that are diverse should be at least 51% diverse owned, and that they should have a certification attesting to their diversity. For a refresher on diversity certifications and requirements, check out this article.
Incorporating local and small businesses into your normal procurement practices can also prove very impactful, both for the local economy and for your organization. Along with diverse businesses, small and local businesses are often more innovative, more responsive to the specific needs of your business, and can often help you get your products/services to market more quickly.
Create policies that Require Procurement to Include Diverse Suppliers in All Bids and RFPs
Inclusive procurement is a business strategy that supports the purchase of goods and services from diverse businesses (encompassing minority-owned and historically underutilized businesses) in order to advance social and economic development. Creating policies that require procurement and RFP processes to be inclusive ensures that your organization’s DEI initiatives are met.
These procurement policies should be based on your company’s documents that define your supplier diversity program and overall supplier diversity program policy.
Specifically, your procurement policy’s considerations and requirements section should include guidelines for engaging diverse suppliers. According to CAPLAW, this section should resemble the following:
“Minority Owned, Women Owned, and Small Business Vendors. X Organization is committed to taking all necessary affirmative steps to assure that minority business, women’s business enterprises and labor surplus area firms (‘MWSB Vendors’) are used whenever possible.
Such steps include:
Placing qualified MWSB Vendors on solicitation lists;
Soliciting MWSB Vendors whenever they are potential sources;
iii. Dividing total requirements, when economically feasible, into smaller tasks or quantities to permit maximum participation by MWSB Vendors;
Establishing delivery schedules, where requirement permits, which encourage participation by MWSB Vendors;
Using services and assistance, as appropriate, of such organizations as Small Business Administration and the Minority Business Development Agency of the Department of Commerce; and
Requiring the prime contractor, if subcontracts used, to take affirmative steps listed in paragraphs (i) through (v) of this section.”
Of course, your company’s procurement policy will look different depending on your locality and other considerations. The above is meant to act as a starting point for including an area in your procurement policy that specifically addresses engaging diverse suppliers.
Track Inclusiveness in Your RFP Processes
Inclusiveness should always be tracked, regardless if the company you decide to ultimately award a contract to is diverse, small, or local. When tracking inclusiveness in your RFP processes, you should be tracking the following KPIs:
How many diverse/local/small businesses were contacted;
How many of those businesses submitted an RFP;
How many of those businesses won their RFP;
What the contracts won were worth.
Measure Non-Diverse Tier 1 Suppliers Based on Their Tier 2 Spend with Diverse Suppliers
While some of your Tier 1 suppliers may not classify as diverse, chances are they contract with diverse companies. Measuring how your Tier 1 suppliers engage with diverse suppliers themselves offers another opportunity for your organization to effectively diversify your supply chain.
As more and more companies consolidate their supply chains, it becomes more difficult for smaller diverse suppliers to gain contracts as Tier 1 suppliers. According to the CGLCC, ensuring your organization has a robust Tier 2 program that encourages and contracts Tier 1 suppliers to institute their own diversity programs creates significant opportunities for smaller minority-owned businesses.
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