Welcome to the future of supplier onboarding – Guided Onboarding

Supplier onboarding can sometimes feel like a necessary evil, seen as another box ticking exercise by procurement. This can be compounded further when antiquated systems or Excel is the tool of choice to manage this process, creating confusion as to where in the process the supplier is, causing unnecessary delays, and offering limited availability for reporting.

Our Supplier Information Management (SIM Dojo) tool was developed 4 years ago, and has always tried to tackle supplier onboarding and management slightly differently. By allowing organisations to have as many questionnaires as necessary it streamlines the onboarding process. This typically takes the form of either a category or risk (or both) based approach, meaning lower risk categories can have less questions than high risk categories. This results in a much quicker turnaround time for these suppliers.

Over the last 12 months we have further developed SIM Dojo to offer some world leading functionality, some of which we haven’t seen in other platforms. The result is that we can now provide a solution which offers ‘Guided onboarding’ amongst other key features.

Guided Onboarding

Replacing your one size fits all Excel or alternative system with a category or tiered question set means greater thought is needed when it comes to onboarding a supplier to make sure they receive the correct question sets. Well not anymore.

SIM Dojo now has customisable logic built into the questionnaire selection process. Through the use of custom tags, the user will only need to select the correct tags for the supplier (e.g. region, category, and/or risk profile), and the system will do the rest.

The video below shows that Supplier Registration, PQQ – Financial and PQQ – QMS questionnaires are selected when the tags of ‘Fasteners’ and ‘England’ are chosen:

If I then update the tags to also include the tag ‘Software’ we can see that the system has automatically added on the ‘IT Security Questionnaire’.

In the near future you will also be able to automate the approval workflows based on the supplier tags.

Supplier Profiling

We’ve added the functionality to add custom fields to your suppliers which can be applied against a supplier account at any time. This creates powerful filtering and reporting options for you. If you need to quickly identify all the suppliers within a certain category, and/or region, this information is immediately available.

It also means that you can use the information to segment your suppliers for supplier management. You may want to record your suppliers as critical, strategic, etc and manage them accordingly. In the future, you’ll be able to use our Supplier Relationship Management module to do this, but the first step is to get your supplier information in a good place and the relevant tags assigned.

Advanced Reporting

Supplier onboarding will create a lot of data for your organisation. Using Excel or legacy tools can make reporting on that information difficult. As has been documented in other places before, we have an API integration into Microsoft Power BI. We have made huge improvements to the number of endpoints available in this API to improve the reporting capabilities of SIM.

This means that the data comes alive, and because of the way the data is structured, the dashboards are highly interactive. Some examples are shown before, but the possibilities are endless.