SupplierGATEWAY Partners With Hello Alice to Promote Small Business Success
SANTA ANA, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — SupplierGATEWAY and Hello Alice are pleased to announce a partnership to continue promoting the growth of small businesses by leveraging SupplierGATEWAY’s Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC) to facilitate the certification of small and diverse-owned businesses, which include women, people of color, U.S. veterans, entrepreneurs with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ owners.
Hello Alice’s community of nearly 500,000 business owners will have an opportunity to acquire a valid certification of diverse ownership, which provides new business opportunities that may otherwise not be available to them.
“We look forward to bringing this offering to our New Majority owners,” said Carolyn Rodz, co-founder and CEO of Hello Alice. “Too often, these owners are excluded from access to opportunities and resources that can positively impact their business. This certification can open doors to many opportunities that these owners have traditionally been denied access to.”
The mission of SupplierGATEWAY and Hello Alice align as they look to support the success of small and diverse businesses.
“We have a singular goal of enabling millions of diverse businesses to get certified quickly and inexpensively,” said Ade Solaru, CEO of SupplierGATEWAY. “We believe EDC can help jump-start aspirational small businesses in the Hello Alice’s community to create the economic impact we all want.”
SupplierGATEWAY is a leading cloud-based, instant-on, low-priced digital supplier management platform, which automates and simplifies supplier and vendor management. SupplierGATEWAY’s tools and solutions can be deployed individually or in any combination, and easily integrated with existing AP/ERP infrastructure.
The tools and solutions capabilities encompass Supplier Registration and Enablement, P2P Sourcing & Procurement, Supplier Management, Financial Risk Monitoring, Supplier Compliance Management, Corporate Responsibility/Diversity and Vendor Credentialing.
Hello Alice is a free, multichannel platform that helps businesses launch and grow. With a community of nearly 500,000 business owners in all 50 states and across the globe, Hello Alice is building the largest network of owners in the country while tracking data and trends to increase the success rate for entrepreneurs. Our partners include enterprise business services, government agencies, and institutions looking to serve small- and medium-business owners to ensure increased revenues and promote scale. A Latina-owned company, founded by Carolyn Rodz and Elizabeth Gore, we believe in business for all by providing access to all owners, including women, people of color, veterans, and everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit.
SupplierGATEWAY Partners With Certify My Company To Expand Business Opportunities Through Diversity Certification
SANTA ANA, Calif., June 24, 2021 – SupplierGATEWAY and Certify My Company are pleased to announce that they have entered into a partnership to offer organizations a more accessible way to connect with small, diverse businesses by leveraging SupplierGATEWAY’s Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC), an all-digital certification platform.
This partnership enables Certify My Company to work with SupplierGATEWAY to expand its capacity to help corporate clients connect with small diverse businesses, including sole proprietors, that are currently not certified.
“Many of our clients have been asking for this for some time,” said Heather Cox, Co-founder and President of Certify My Company. “EDC represents the solution we have been looking for. It is a fantastic product, especially for small businesses.”
The rapidly changing digital landscape has revolutionized every aspect of business. EDC represents an innovative digital certification process for the e-commerce age.
“EDC provides an opportunity for 4 million minority and 11 million diverse businesses that are currently not certified to get certified online quickly and inexpensively,” said Ade Solaru, CEO of SupplierGATEWAY. “We are excited to work with Certify My Company to create an expanded opportunity for small businesses to grow and prosper.”
For more information about EDC, please visit our website.
About SupplierGATEWAY:
SupplierGATEWAY is a leading cloud-based, instant-on, low-priced digital supplier management platform, which automates and simplifies supplier and vendor management. SupplierGATEWAY’s tools and solutions can be deployed individually or in any combination, and easily integrated with existing AP/ERP infrastructure.
The tools and solutions capabilities encompass Supplier Registration and Enablement, P2P Sourcing & Procurement, Supplier Management, Financial Risk Monitoring, Supplier Compliance Management, Corporate Responsibility / Diversity and Vendor Credentialing.
Certify My Company is the premier supplier diversity consultancy specializing in diversity certifications. We support entrepreneurs through their certification journeys as well as the corporations they serve. By strategically leveraging supply chains, corporations can meet and exceed their diversity goals; Certify My Company is the trusted partner for Fortune 1000 supplier diversity initiatives.
Media Contact: Leanne Strickler 949-525-9205 Contact Us.
Enhanced Digital Certification: a Fast, Easy, Affordable Small Business and Diversity Certification
Getting your diverse business or small business certified expands the pool of opportunities to do business in the public and private sectors. However, less than 5% of of small and diverse businesses don’t have certification. At SupplierGATEWAY, we wanted to figure out why this problem was so common despite the benefits that come with being certified.
Current Challenges
According to the Small Business Administration, there are more than 4 million minority-owned businesses in the U.S., yet only a fraction have pursued acquiring a certification due to the cost, time and documentation required.
On average, it takes around 90 days for a business to be certified as a diverse- owned or small business. The cost can be from several hundred to more than a thousand dollars based on the location and its size. The long and involved process process along with cost dissuade many business owners from getting certified at all.
At SupplierGATEWAY, we understand these challenges, and our goal is to constantly figure out the best solutions to business challenges. We understood that having a certification for diverse and small business owners that was easy to apply for and cost-effective would help increase the number of small and diverse businesses that are certified. This would not only ease the burden on suppliers trying to make an economic impact in their communities, but also help buyers looking for certified suppliers to work with.
Today, we’re thrilled to say that our new Enhanced Digital Certification (EDC) program is a timely, cost-effective and practical solution to a pressing challenge. EDC gives you the power to create new opportunities for your business to attract and engage buyers looking for diverse-owned suppliers.
What Is EDC?
Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC) is a fast and inexpensive way for small and diverse businesses to get certified as a small or diverse-owned organization while at the same time exposing them to new opportunities afforded by being in the SupplierGATEWAY network.
EDC is gaining widespread acceptance by some of the most prominent advocates of inclusive purchasing, including Amazon, Home Depot, Target, and Nike- all of whom also seek to create new economic impact at scale. By digitizing and streamlining the diversity certification process, we have made it easier, faster and much less costly to achieve your diversity or small business certification.
If your business belongs to a small and/or minority-owned category, EDC is the go-to program for becoming certified as a diverse-owned business.
Takes As Little As 15 Minutes From Beginning To Approval Stage
With EDC, the whole certification process is optimized with a simple, clear, easy-to-follow digital form. Even your identity verification is done online, making it convenient for you to securely attest to your declarations and representations. If you have the required corporate documents ready, you can complete your application in 15 minutes.
EDC Process
After filling out the application, verifying your identity, business information and completing risk and compliance checks, you will receive an email if your application was successfully completed. While your certification is subject to audit, the normal process takes under 72 hours!
Access To Your Certification 24/7 Regardless of Location
“Congratulations! Your application has been approved!”
With your Enhanced Digital Certificate in hand, you also get something significant to your future customers – peace of mind. The EDC was developed for the digital world – complete with QR Code-based validation of your certificate, which enables your clients to conveniently verify your business category and diversity certification status, 24/7 and at no cost. Use the code on your email signature line, website or marketing collateral to quickly and confidently let customers know your organization is diverse-owned and operated.
Enhanced Digital Certification (Sample)
Everything your customers need to know about your business’ diverse ownership is in this digital certification. They can look up your business information by
Scanning your QR code OR
Entering your certification ID in their SupplierGATEWAY portal OR
Accessing the SupplierGATEWAY EDC Validation API connected to their ERP and purchasing systems.
We have made it easier for companies looking to do business with diverse suppliers to validate their diversity ownership status – the rest is up to you!
Detailed business information after scanning QR Code (sample)
The total cost is only $25, or even FREE
The entire EDC program was conceived with a singular objective – create new opportunities for diverse-owned and small businesses. That philosophy carries over into the price. The EDC is available as an annually paid certification or is simply included as an added benefit for SupplierGATEWAY premium Supplier Platform subscribers.
If you are a supplier and currently in…
Cost
Premium Plan
FREE
Free Plan
$25
Participate in the sponsored program paid by EDC corporate sponsors
FREE
Our premium subscribers will enjoy all the supplier features from SupplierGATEWAY as well as the opportunity to certify your business for free.
Automated Renewal Notification
Your EDC is valid for one year. But don’t worry! Our system will send the notification to remind you, and your only task is to update your information to get EDC renewal in no time.
We Made Small and Diverse Certification Fast and Easy. Time For You To Get The Most Out Of It!
“We have a singular goal of enabling millions of diverse businesses to get certified quickly and inexpensively. We believe EDC can help jump-start aspirational small businesses to create the economic impact we all want,”- Ade Solaru, CEO of SupplierGATEWAY.
Enhanced Digital Certification— A New Digital Era for Engaging Diverse Businesses
In today’s complex sourcing landscape, a diverse and inclusive supplier base is now widely accepted as a procurement best practice; from creating bottom-line savings and creating future demand, to projecting a better more socially oriented image. Hence, supplier diversity initiatives are highly recommended if you’re looking for a sustainable way to promote innovation and economic impact while creating competitive advantages that can differentiate your organization.
A study released by the Hackett Group found companies with diverse supplier lists drive an additional $3.6 million to a company’s bottom line for every $1 million spent on operations costs in procurement. This is literally “doing well by doing good.”
It would seem that establishing and implementing a supplier diversity program shouldn’t be difficult, but it is. One common refrain by buyers is that it can be difficult to find diverse suppliers, especially in niche industry spaces.
Current Challenges
To find one of the reasons behind this challenge, let’s look at the supplier’s side. To be a qualified diverse supplier, they must:
Be well-qualified, including creating a business, surviving, being innovative, and being as good or better than their competition for cost, quality, and service.
Spend time and money to go through a lengthy process to be certified as diverse-owned. It’s no surprise that many small business owners view this as an added “tax” on their business.
Hence, many suppliers decide to be self-identified as diverse instead of getting certified, which unfortunately does not meet many buyer’s inclusion program requirements, especially in big corporations.
As a result, it negatively affects procurement professionals’ opportunity to expand their diversity program, and diverse suppliers get left out. This is the paradox we sought to break.
With a mission of Making it Easier to Do Business™, SupplierGATEWAY is thrilled to launch Enhanced Digital Certification (EDC), a new innovative and robust digital certification program – a powerful tool to address all the challenges we mentioned.
What is Enhanced Digital Certification?
Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC) is a new, innovative and powerful digital certification program designed to enable all types of diverse businesses to reduce the hassle of acquiring a valid certification of diverse ownership.
EDC is gaining widespread acceptance by some of the most prominent advocates of inclusive purchasing – all of whom also seek to create new economic impact at scale. By digitizing and streamlining the diversity certification process, we have made it easier, faster and much less costly for suppliers to achieve diversity certification.
Verify Your Suppliers Electronically 24/7 At No Cost
Everything you need to know about a business’s diverse ownership is in this digital certification. You can look up the business information by scanning the ECC QR code, entering the certification ID in your SupplierGATEWAY portal or accessing the SupplierGATEWAY EDC Validation API connected to your ERP and purchasing systems.
Unique QR Code can be used to validate certification status 24/7! EDC QR Codes can also be placed on websites, literature and emails.
Only One Click to Get All Information You Need
You can easily find potential and current suppliers’ diverse information by using their certification ID in your portal’s search tools or even simply scanning the QR Code in the certificate to receive all information you need.
Detailed business information after scanning QR Code
Using the “Verify Enhancement Digital Certification” box to verify suppliers’ certifications
While You Read This Blog, EDC is Already Configured In Your Portal And Ready-To-Use
If you’re a buyer and currently using SupplierGATEWAY’s software, everything is FREE – there are no hidden costs. We hand you this power to freely and quickly source qualified diverse suppliers. Once a new supplier registers in your portal, they have an option to start the application.
EDC Process
Sponsorship Opportunities – Maximize Sourcing Power and Make A Significant Economic Impact on The Community
To make a mark on accelerating inclusion and diversity, we offer unique opportunities to sponsor diverse suppliers’ costs to get certified in a targeted area or market, or for specific diverse business groups that you are trying to engage. By doing so, your business speeds up a certification path for eligible suppliers. You get the satisfaction of directly contributing to the economic impact of every business you sponsor.
Our program has already gained traction, and we’re thrilled that Amazon Business and LA Clippers already took the initiative to grow their supplier bases speedily.
This is an excellent opportunity to show your commitment to the community and align with the corporation supplier diversity goals while aggressively sourcing the mass number of small and diverse suppliers your corporation is seeking.
Some additional benefits include:
Create business opportunities for small and diverse businesses to grow and scale
A Path To Business Success – Grow Together, Win Together
By encouraging your current and potential suppliers to get the EDC, your business increases the volume of opportunities to multiple suppliers – from minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned, LGBT-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned, historically underutilized businesses.
In the past few years, the massive shifts underway in the business and social landscape towards inclusive procurement have proved that integrating supplier diversity into business operations is not just the right thing to do but also benefits everyone. EDC is here to help build your supplier diversity program successfully.
SupplierGATEWAY Introduces Enhanced Digital Diversity Certification
SANTA ANA, Calif., June 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — SupplierGATEWAY announces the launch of its diversity certification program Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC). EDC is an innovative, fast and inexpensive way for small and diverse businesses to get certified while at the same time exposing them to new opportunities afforded by being on the rapidly growing SupplierGATEWAY network.
As more companies in the private and public sector seek to engage certified diverse suppliers, EDC represents an optimal certification solution for diverse businesses that may have previously opted out of certification due to the cost, complexity or length of existing traditional certification processes.
SupplierGATEWAY’s EDC leverages digital technology to provide a fast, reliable and cost-effective process that establishes and certifies majority ownership of a minority or diverse business.
EDC certifies all diverse classifications that apply to suppliers and vendors, including minority-owned, women-owned, LGBT-owned, veteran-owned and disability-owned businesses. The EDC certification can be easily verified by scanning the QR Code on the certificate via a login to the SupplierGATEWAY platform or electronically through an API connection.
The launch of EDC has attracted interest from organizations, including global brands keen to implement initiatives to grow their diverse and inclusive supplier base.
SupplierGATEWAY is a leading cloud-based, instant-on, low-priced digital supplier management platform, which automates and simplifies supplier and vendor management. SupplierGATEWAY’s tools and solutions can be deployed individually or in any combination, and easily integrated with existing AP/ERP infrastructure.
The tools and solutions capabilities encompass Supplier Registration and Enablement, P2P Sourcing & Procurement, Supplier Management, Financial Risk Monitoring, Supplier Compliance Management, Corporate Responsibility / Diversity and Vendor Credentialing.
If your serve B2B clients, it’s common for you to respond to requests for proposal (RFP) from prospective buyers. But, many RFPs are complicated and feel overwhelming, which discourages businesses from exploring what makes a winning RFP response.
Learning how to respond to RFPs is critical to business success. The more compelling and responsive your proposal is, the more chances you win new business.
What Is RFP?
According to Wikipedia, A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that solicits a proposal, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service, or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals.
RFPs are typically issued as questionnaires for a specific need. If your company has a solution to the problem, you will respond with a proposal including all responses to the questions, pricing and required content.
In this blog, we’ll give you some practical tips to write a successful RFP response.
Demonstrate Your Knowledge of Client’s Request
It’s crucial to understand if the client’s objectives and requests are related to a product or service you can provide. It may seem like you’re repeating what the client wants, but in fact, clients always want to hear how much you understand their requests.
It’s similar to our shopping behavior today. We always look for salespeople who understand our needs better than we do. For example, we’re planning to buy a chair in the furniture store, but the salesperson keeps trying to sell the table—both a turn-off and a waste of our time.
Tip: Briefly summarize the client’s problems in a way that demonstrates you understand what they are asking for before suggesting your solutions.
Speak To Your Client’s Needs
Generally speaking, clients are pretty focused on what they want or need and don’t actually care that much about what you think (Harsh but true!). Assume the only thing they care about is how you can make their lives easier and improve their profitability, and you will be on the right foot.
An RFP response should be valuable, informative and transparent. Don’t forget to mention any social proofs illustrating your professionalism along with the past projects, case studies, or examples that align with the project’s goals.
Tip: Writing in a way that speaks to the client’s goals and objectives trying to achieve.
Pay Attention To The Evaluation Criteria
The client typically uses some form of evaluation criteria to rank the proposals they receive. It’s essential to understand the criteria and be aware that all of your hard work will be judged by that scale. It’s hard to win an RFP that is focused on rapid delivery and low-price when your main talking points are “unbounded creativity” and an “aversion to schedules” (it’s a joke, but you get the idea).
Tip: Think carefully before responding. Focus on the factors that account for the most significant scores.
Keep It Short And Simple
Remember your potential clients don’t expect your sales pitch in response to their RFP. The main goal here is to help them accomplish the project or objective. Keeping your proposal short and straight to the point is the best optimal way to increase the chance to be chosen.
If a buyer can get your answer in one page, having to read 25 pages of fluff is at best annoying, and at worst, likely to eliminate you from consideration.
Tip: Focus on your solutions, how to accomplish your plan, and why you’re a better fit than your competitors.
Be Clear And Descriptive While Answering Questions
Non-compliant responses commonly fail to answer the RFP’s questions, which means you gain a massive advantage if you answer all the questions. Also, your answers should be concise, clear and easy for the client to evaluate. There’s a simple trick for this, but it requires a bit of effort upfront – break down all the questions into all the parts and make sure your response covers everything that was asked.
Tip:
Make it clear and evident that you have met the requirements.
Set realistic expectations that you can deliver.
Don’t exaggerate about what your business can offer because your reputation is always on the line.
About us:
At SupplierGATEWAY, we offer a robust platform for suppliers where you can gain access to new business opportunities and connect with customers of all sizes – from Fortune 500 companies and globally recognized companies to your local health system, manufacturer or business. Our easy-to-use app will help you stay connected to the opportunities that could make all the difference to your bottom line. Get started today for FREE!
5 Tips To Write An RFP That Get You Results
Creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) is a crucial business practice that allows a company to identify and engage the right supplier to satisfy a requirement. A well-written RFP substantially increases your company’s chances of getting the services or products you need at a price that works for you. The ultimate goal is to ensure you’re working with qualified suppliers at what you consider the best value.
In this blog, we will give you a clear picture of what RFP is and list five tips for writing an effective RFP that can help you get high response rates.
What Is RFP?
According to Wikipedia, A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that solicits a proposal, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service, or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals.
In simple words, an RFP is a document created by a buyer requesting information about a product or service requirement, generally sent to suppliers to propose solutions. The purpose of an RFP is to enable buyers to compare the features and prices across potential suppliers.
A great RFP contains clear criteria that are important to a buyer. By properly structuring and articulating the requirements in an RFP, you can identify how well each supplier understands your project and set benchmarks to measure a project’s success later.
RFP Format
This is one of the biggest challenges in crafting RFP, mainly because there is no standard format. The typical RFP includes sets of questions that are split by section and subsection, which is more important for large or complex requirements.
RFP responses can be as simple as yes/no interrogations or require narrative responses. Additionally, suppliers may be requested to submit other information and send additional documents such as the company introduction, why they believe they’re a better fit than the other competitors, etc., to explain the rationale behind the answers.
What Key Elements Should Be Included In RFP?
Though each RFP varies based on the goals and needs of a project, there are a few core elements that should be included in most categories (according to HubSpot):
Background/Introduction
Project Goals and Scope of Services
Anticipated Selection Schedule
Time and Place of Submission of Proposals
Timeline
Elements of Proposal
Evaluation Criteria
Possible Roadblocks
Budget
Tips To Write A Compelling RFP
When you are putting together an RFP for any category, it is critical to provide a clear overview of the project to attract the best responses. With these five tips in mind, you can be confident that the RFP process will be productive for you and the suppliers who elect to participate.
Planning
Planning what to put into an RFP will save you a ton of time in the process of reviewing and selecting the right suppliers. Regardless of the scope and complexity of your RFP, these three main components should always be at the top of your mind. (i) Making sure you have clearly defined your need, (ii) establish your communication strategy and (iii) define your evaluation criteria.
Stakeholders Involvement
An RFP is all about solving problems for your business. To draw great responses from the suppliers, you must ask the right questions. How can you achieve that? Collaborate with stakeholders. Coordinating with people who will be impacted the most by your purchase will help you identify the challenge, the tools you need, and define success. Bringing these people into the early stage of writing RFP will help prevent scope ambiguity and unclear requirements to suppliers.
Be careful to separate our needs from wishes. Unless money is no object, you may have to clarify what you must have versus what you would like to have, if possible. The process of determining this also has an impact on how you set your evaluation criteria.
Set Important Dates
People usually underestimate the importance of time when writing an RFP – both theirs and the suppliers’ time.
Write all critical deadlines that suppliers should know, such as the response date, pre-bid document submissions, implementation date, etc.
Evaluate all timelines and ensure they are adequate to get the job done – from how long it takes to get responses to how long it will take you to evaluate them.
Try to balance your needs with the reality of how long it takes to respond appropriately to an RFP. For example, if you care mainly about price, don’t ask hundreds of nice questions to know but don’t add value to your evaluation process, and the answer to which is likely to be formulaic and non-value-adding (ex: tell me your 5-year strategic plan). Buyers sometimes forget that every question asked requires the response to be evaluated, scored and ranked.
Be detailed without being prescriptive
Focusing on detailing your project goals instead of telling suppliers how to do the job will encourage respondents to freely use their expertise and insights in presenting their solutions. Suppliers are more likely to respond to RFPs that gives them room to be creative and suggest solutions.
Remember to ensure that you can still evaluate the responses relative to your needs. This is, after all, about what you want.
Be Transparent:
A great RFP should include as many details as possible to describe the requirement so that respondents don’t have to guess what you need or have to make lots of assumptions. By removing the guesswork, you allow suppliers to focus entirely on the solution – such as optimizing a budget range, satisfying both low and high-level requirements and so on.
RFP Is A Time-Consuming Process…
The better an RFP is, the better the proposal your suppliers can send to you. The best thing to remember is – if you can’t describe what you want, then there is a high likelihood your supplier cannot describe the solution in a way that will be acceptable to you. Up-front work that results in clear and concise requirements, timelines, expectations and evaluation criteria yields the most effective responses (assuming you engaged the right suppliers!)
One way to reduce the challenge is to use automation to eliminate the non-value-added effort and make sure the right suppliers are in your respondent pool.
Remember, the software can be your friend (finding potential bidders, distributing information and coordinating responses, receiving bids according to policy standards, etc.) and can also be your enemy (asking 100 boilerplate template questions when only ten would do the job). A judicious combination of planning and automation helps you achieve your goal – working with qualified suppliers at what you consider the best value.
In the SupplierGATEWAY Sourcing app, you can quickly post new opportunities to promptly find prospective suppliers that are likely to meet your needs. The easy-to-use Bid app accelerates and streamlines the process of engaging suppliers to request bids and quotes and manage responses, even for small projects. Also, The software enables you to schedule web meetings, conference calls, or even in-person meetings with selected suppliers – all in one place. If you’re interested, watch our demo and get started today for free.
AB 962 – Impacting Total Healthcare With Supplier Diversity
Watch our AB 962 Webinar, updated for new 2022 reporting requirements:
With AB 962, hospitals are expected to increase engagement and partnerships with diverse businesses to leverage the rapid growth of the health sector to benefit marginalized communities in California.
What Is AB 962?
The California State Assembly passed Assembly Bill 962 (AB 962) in 2019. Authored by Assemblymember Autumn Burke (D-Inglewood), AB 962 supports and promotes diversity by requiring a licensed hospital with operating expenses of $50,000,000 or more, and a licensed hospital with operating expenses of $25,000,000 or more that is part of a hospital system, to annually submit a report on its certified minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran enterprises procurement efforts.
How AB 962 Immediately Impacts Hospitals
The original report was due on July 1, 2021 and then updated annually. Failure to file a report within 30 days after the deadline shall subject the licensed hospital to a civil penalty of $100 per day. The report requires collecting qualitative and quantitative data as evidence of inclusive procurement practices, and all the information must be readily accessible. Starting in 2022, AB 962 requirements changed and now include Tier 2 engagement reporting. This fundamentally changes how your hospital or health care system engages with tier 1 suppliers.
How SupplierGATEWAY Can Help You with AB 962 Supplier Diversity and Data Reporting Requirements
As a leading cloud-based supplier management platform, we are thrilled to give you a complete, easy-to-use, turnkey solution to support your organization’s supplier diversity and AB 962 data reporting requirements.
With the new Tier 2 requirements, your organization now has to put rubber to pavement, and our Supplier Diversity Platform helps your organization quickly and accurately organize, track and report all of your supplier diversity engagement metrics.
Our low-cost, instant-on solutions help accelerate your program efforts while making supplier management easier. We can also handle your supplier onboarding and offboarding, which makes your supplier management more robust/
Outreach Compliance Report Console
As part of your Supplier Diversity Platform, you’ll also have access to the AB962 Data Reporting and Outreach Compliance Report Console. This tool centralizes the key evaluation criteria of your program in one place. You can easily manage reports for an individual hospital or the entire system, all from one convenient location.
Save Time and Money
Organizing the data for your program can be an incredibly time-consuming task for an IT department that has more work than it does hands. Hiring an additional team member to handle your supplier diversity is an additional expense that might not be in the budget. Our Supplier Diversity Platform costs $12,500 per year, comes with built-in training, and support from a client success manager. Should you decide you want us to manage supplier enablement, credentialing, procurement, risk management and more, our Enterprise platform costs $37,500 for the year.
Remember: each day after 30 days that your report is late, your organization is fined $100 per day. This can easily accumulate to over $36,000 for the year.
Building solid relationships with local and diverse businesses and efficiently managing suppliers are the cornerstone of your company’s success in many ways. Having a responsive, flexible and reliable supplier management system is a critical component of any strategy aiming to positively impact both your company’s bottom-line and the community.
About SupplierGATEWAY:
SupplierGATEWAY is a leading cloud-based supplier management platform, which automates and simplifies vendor management. SupplierGATEWAY apps can be deployed individually or in any combination and easily integrated with existing AP/ERP infrastructure. The app capabilities encompass Supplier Registration and Enablement, P2P Sourcing and Procurement, Supplier Management, Financial Risk Monitoring, Supplier Compliance Management, Corporate Responsibility / Diversity, Vendor Credentialing.
SupplierGATEWAY has powered global supply management environments across multiple industries since 1997. We support billions of dollars in purchase transactions and hundreds of thousands of active suppliers in various industries, including Healthcare, Aerospace and Defense, Retail, Staffing, Manufacturing, Food and Beverage, Sports and Entertainment, and Health Sciences.
B2B Customer Retention – Definition And How To Keep Customers Happy
Acquiring a new customer is always exciting. Yet, it doesn’t mean they will stay with you permanently. It is a common mistake for businesses to overlook their existing valuable customers and instead, focus so heavily on acquiring new customers they fail to retain their existing ones.
The Fascinating Numbers Tell The Truth
Excellent customer experience is a significant competitive advantage that drives sales and great branding practice that potentially leads to referrals. A study conducted by The New York Times found that 65 percent of companies’ new business comes from referrals. Here are some customer retention stats you should be aware of:
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. (Invesp)
73% of U.S. consumers say that customer experience is a critical factor in their purchasing decision. If they love a company or product, 59% will still walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% will walk away after just one bad experience. (PwC)
Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5x as likely to forgive, 4x as likely to refer, and 7x as likely to try a new offering. (Temkin Group)
51% of B2B companies avoid vendors after a poor customer service experience. (Zendesk)
Among B2B decision makers, lack of speed in interactions with their suppliers is the number one pain point, mentioned twice as often as price (Temkin Group)
Calculate Your Customer Retention Rate
The above numbers have shown that customer retention is one of the best ways to increase your business revenue. Before diving into the solutions, it’s crucial to understand the key metric to guide and improve your customer retention strategy.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is a metric showing the number of customers that continue to do business with you over a given period. CRR is calculated as a percentage of the existing customers that maintain their loyalty to your business. With CRR, you can understand the lifetime customer value and quantify the efficacy of your current strategy.
Formula: CRR (%) = ((E-N)/S) x 100
The information you will need:
The number of customers at the end of a period (E)
The number of new customers acquired during that period (N)
Number of customers at the start of that period (S)
The result is a percentage that represents the customer churn rate. For example, if a company had 200 customers at the start of the period (S), then added 10 customers over the period (N), and 150 customers at the end of the period (E), the CRR would be 70%, or ((150-10) / 200) X 100 = 70%.
The goal here is to keep this rate as high as possible. What’s a reasonable retention rate by industry? The answer is infinite cause no one-size-fits-all. According to Mixpanel’s 2017 Product Benchmarks report, the average 8-week retention is below 20% for most industries.
How To Combat Losing Your B2B Customers And Keep Them Satisfied:
While it’s impossible to achieve 100% customer retention, you should still do your best within the realm of possibility to keep as many customers as you can. To do so, you need a solid customer retention strategy. Here are some highlighting ways you can apply to your business:
Setting The Right Expectations
“I don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.” – Larry Hogan.
Even though you want to boost your B2B customer retention figures, being overpromised will cost you more than you imagined. Customers are easily upset and even considering switching to your competitors if their expectations or perceived parameters are not met. Hence, it’s essential to be clear in what you can do, when you will deliver, and how you can make sure you keep your words and not disappoint them. The golden rule here is being transparent and straightforward in terms of communication.
Stay In Touch With Your Current Customers Base
Alert them with all upcoming promotions, discounts or reward programs, product updates that you think it’s relevant and exciting to your customers. Even if your efforts don’t drive sales immediately, your brand will pop up first in their mind at the right time.
Inviting Customer Feedback And Work On Solutions
Inviting feedback is one of the most personal experiences to build a long-term relationship with your customers. By doing so, customers feel their experiences and needs are being noticed and cared about, making them feel more comfortable and open to express any concerns or complaints instead of walking away. However, it’s also essential to work on solutions after collecting feedback.
You can collect customer feedback by checking in with them via phone, email or any other communication that is most convenient for you and your customers.
Leverage Customer Surveys
Unlike the personal customer feedback mentioned above, a survey is a great practice to get the statistics within your customer base regarding your products and services, new specific changes to have valuable insights for your organization. It helps understand your customer needs and wants.
Send Old-Fashioned Mail
It’s time to step away from the tablet and computer. The average customer today is intimidating by emails, phone calls and other digital channels. Sending a “Thank You” or “We Value Your Business” handwritten note along with some promotional items on special occasions will be a game-changer of boosting customer loyalty. This unique gesture stands out in the long run as it sticks to customer’s good memories. It’s never wrong to show your appreciation and let them know how much you value them.
About us:
At SupplierGATEWAY, we offer a robust platform for suppliers where you can gain access to new business opportunities and connect with customers of all sizes – from Fortune 500 companies and globally recognized companies to your local health system, manufacturer or business. Our easy-to-use app will help you stay connected to the opportunities that could make all the difference to your bottom line.
The outsourcing model has been popular over the years as companies scale up and require specific supply needs to accommodate their growth. Yet, many companies have been questioning and doubting the effectiveness of having one provider meet their procurement objectives. Instead, they adopt a new approach by having multiple vendors involved, known as “multi-outsourcing.”
Increasingly, many businesses consider outsourcing as a part of their procurement strategy to maximize performance and gain a competitive advantage. This article will give you most of all necessary information that can enhance your understanding and whether multi-sourcing should be a part of your business strategy.
Definition
Before diving deeper into the topic, we should be clear about what outsourcing is. In simple words, outsourcing is the practice of obtaining goods and services from third-party suppliers. This is commonly used to reduce costs and add specific skill sets needed for a product or service without requiring substantial in-house investment to get something done quickly.
Multi-sourcing, also known as multiple sourcing, is an outsourcing approach in which products or services are contracted to various suppliers needed to conduct the business instead of using traditional single sourcing.
Is Multi-Sourcing A Good Strategy?
Leveraging multi-sourcing can create flexibility and mitigate the risks of causing supply chain disruptions from unexpected events such as natural disasters or the most recent coronavirus outbreak. On the other hand, working with multiple suppliers adds complexity to the supply chain, making it challenging to manage suppliers. To get a better understanding, here are some main pros and cons of multi-sourcing:
Pros:
Risk Deduction: Less reliance on any individual supplier increases the flexibility in the supply chain if something goes wrong.
Supply Chain Stability: reduce the significant risk across the products or services through supply chain diversification
High Product Quality: Get the highest product and service quality at the best possible price, thanks to a larger resource pool
Innovation: build innovation through competition
Negotiation: Be able to monitor which suppliers perform best, which helps you make a better deal in the future.
Cons:
Supplier Management: Difficult to build and maintain a good relationship with multiple suppliers simultaneously.
Administration costs: Potentially increase the management overhead costs associated with managing and communicating with numerous suppliers.
Quality Control: A challenge of keeping track of quality control and efficiency
Integrations Difficulties: When multiple suppliers take over different parts of a product, there will be an issue integrating them, resulting in additional costs and time.
Besides these main points, some external factors also influence whether you should adopt multi-sourcing. Smaller businesses tend to have less flexibility in choosing suppliers due to limited budgets and labor. Hence, the answer will depend on what particular project you are working on and your capabilities. Each factor will lead you in a different direction that is best in your current situation.
Supplier Lifecycle Management
As mentioned, there are still drawbacks of multi-sourcing besides many benefits. One of the biggest challenges is how to effectively manage the complexity of having multiple vendors. Manual workflows to manage suppliers no longer works in the multi-sourcing model. Instead, many businesses embracing multi-sourcing utilize the end-to-end process of supplier lifecycle management to ensure their operations run smoothly and more efficiently.
Here are the eight critical areas in most supplier management solutions.
Qualification: This is the first step of supplier management when making sure your suppliers meet your specific requirements or not. There are a hundred or thousands of suppliers participating in your program. Therefore, it’s essential to filter only the ones that satisfied your requirements.
Evaluation: After suppliers submit their application for the evaluation process, you will start evaluating those who passed the first step based on different criteria such as quality, supply risk, customer reviews, performance, diversity, etc. – whatever matters to you and your organization most will be considered in this stage.
Selection: After assessing all of the candidates, the number of qualified suppliers should be significantly narrowed down for you to make a decision. This selection process is crucial cause it directly impacts your business operations; hence, it takes time. The ultimate goal is to maximize the potential value and able to build a long-term relationship.
Onboarding: This step is all about collecting all the necessary information and documents that you need to get a supplier approved in your system. Once a supplier is approved, you can now see updates on supplier information and their performance.
Supplier Performance: Supplier performance management helps your company find out the problems early and solve them quickly. It’s essential to constantly monitor and value their performance to determine whether they follow the agreement’s terms.
Identifying Risk: the goal is to reduce risk as much as possible. Identifying risk will prevent unexpected events such as a breach of contract, late deliveries, low quality, etc. Risk management is critical and yet the most overlooked.
Supplier Development: Businesses with strong collaborative relationships with their suppliers are more likely to grow faster than those who aren’t. Regularly sending feedback to supplies will help improve the process and manufacturing capabilities.
Supplier Management: Cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with your suppliers will give you a significant ROI and gain more competitive advantage and innovation, which results in reducing cost, lower risk and higher quality.
Solutions for Effective Multi-Sourcing: Automation Is A Future
Though it seems overwhelming, supplier lifecycle management is not impossible to reach. It has already been a critical part when it comes to business success. Having a clear and centralized view of your procurement and supply chain brings significant benefits to the performance. With automation, you can unlock the full potential of your current and future suppliers by utilizing robust software that allows you to do these 8 steps simultaneously with much less effort.
SupplierGATEWAY’s scalable, instant-on and robust software provides everything you need – the ultimate supplier management, procurement and supplier diversity solutions that help businesses of all sizes to manage their suppliers easily, quickly, effectively and at a low cost. We’re excited to tell you more. Contact us today!
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SANTA ANA, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — SupplierGATEWAY and Hello Alice are pleased to announce a partnership to continue promoting the growth of small businesses by leveraging SupplierGATEWAY’s Enhanced Digital Certification™ (EDC) to facilitate the certification of small and diverse-owned businesses, which include women, people of color, U.S. veterans, entrepreneurs with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ owners.
If your serve B2B clients, it’s common for you to respond to requests for proposal (RFP) from prospective buyers. But, many RFPs are complicated and feel overwhelming, which discourages businesses from exploring what makes a winning RFP response. 
Creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) is a crucial business practice that allows a company to identify and engage the right supplier to satisfy a requirement. A well-written RFP substantially increases your company’s chances of getting the services or products you need at a price that works for you. The ultimate goal is to ensure you’re working with qualified suppliers at what you consider the best value.
Acquiring a new customer is always exciting. Yet, it doesn’t mean they will stay with you permanently. It is a common mistake for businesses to overlook their existing valuable customers and instead, focus so heavily on acquiring new customers they fail to retain their existing ones. 