3 Reasons You Should Care About Supplier Information Management

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Editor Coda
Nov 11, 2015

Supplier information management and up to date vendor information is a hot topic amongst shared services professionals.

In a recent sharedserviceslink survey, 48% of our respondents described the quality of their supplier information as ‘poor’ or ‘fair’, acknowledging that information was causing problems to some extent.

So why should you care about supplier information management and what you can do to improve it? Here are three key reasons:

1. Real-time supply chain information is crucial to meet tax and government regulations.

Increasingly we are seeing tax authorities wanting to see information on supply chain transactions in near real-time. The need for good quality data is not only essential for good processes, it’s increasingly essential for compliance.

2. Networked information is the future, and many shared services are behind.

Developments in areas such as e-invoicing and e-procurement have networked businesses and made trading easier and faster than ever. However managing the supplier information has lagged behind. Maintaining vendor and supplier information has largely been a manual process, leading to often out of date and inaccurate data. Leading shared services are starting to use tools that connect them to all of their suppliers, and collect the information required to do business (tax IDs, bank account information, forms like W8s or W9s ) on one platform and can also validate the information across third party databases. Crucially, new tools put the burden of maintaining the profile on the supplier, while also approving changes through workflow and validation before they are updated in the ERP.

3. Measuring and monitoring compliance is often done manually and doesn’t capture the full picture.  

In our recent survey, we found 38% of shared services organisations didn’t use any tools to measure or monitor supplier performance and compliance, meaning it’s done manually or not at all. Considering the risk often comes from the tail end of the supplier base, this is potentially putting a lot of organizations at risk.

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