From communicating with prospective vendors to ensuring contractual compliance after awarding a vendor your business, you carry tremendous responsibility within your department and your organization to reduce costs and increase profitability. Without a centralized and streamlined electronic vendor management software system, you can encounter unnecessary vendor management bottlenecks that can decrease your bottom line. Discover how leading vendor management software can enable you to
Finding cost-effective and competitive vendors that meet your necessary criteria can prove challenging without a centralized system in place. Manual vendor request processes, such as emails and phone calls, can delay vendor sourcing and inadvertently exclude competitive vendors. You cannot afford to waste time and resources with such delays, especially when gathering pertinent information to ensure vendor collaboration security and optimizing your vendor’s supply chain turnaround.
Fortunately, vendor managers can leverage a user-friendly vendor registration gateway portal to streamline vendor requests and registration. Leading vendor management software enables interaction with third-party vendors through a vendor collaboration portal that centralizes RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, bid advertisements, bid awards, configurable vendor response ratings and scorecards, bid communications with the ability to attach virtually unlimited documents, and more – yielding unparalleled bid oversight for optimally profitable vendor selection. Vendor managers can award and correspond with vendors by integrated email via a low-friction MS Outlook Plugin – centralizing communications.
Vendor management software can streamline your vendor registration processes by allowing you to simply share a link with your vendor so they can fill out all necessary information within their centralized vendor record – including vendor commodity codes – allowing you more time to focus on your vendor management profitability. Should a contract need to be drafted, negotiated, signed, and tracked, this may be seamlessly integrated within a vendor record.
When coordinating contractual elements separately from your vendor record, such as mailing paper-based documents with wet signatures and sending scanned documents via email, you can be frustrated by stakeholder miscommunications and purchasing delays. Relying on antiquated processes to track vendors with methods such as spreadsheets and non-trackable communications can increase the risk of human error – yielding more repair costs. When managing various vendors with ranging contracts, COIs, DBE certifications, and other pertinent documents, you cannot afford to place your organization at risk due to inadvertent compliance violations.
Fortunately, leading-edge vendor management software can help solve these issues by allowing contract creation directly from a vendor record, which can streamline and centralize the contract lifecycle management (CLM) process. The entirety of contract lifecycle processes from requests to renewals can be seamlessly integrated within a vendor record – including rapid approvals and speedy eSignatures. Watch the video below to learn how CobbleStone’s proprietary electronic signature software engine – IntelliSign® – can streamline your vendor management signing processes.
With CLM integration, you can virtually ensure that vendors and assets comply with agreed-upon expectations, including budget parameters, until your vendor contract requires renewal - in which case robust vendor management software can notify necessary stakeholders.
Vendor management software allows you to track impending expirations for COIs, DBE certifications, contracts, and other documents. To track vendors and important key dates, vendor managers can receive automated notifications to effectively communicate with stakeholders in a timely fashion. When needing to maintain or increase supplier diversity, robust vendor management software can trigger notifications to all necessary stakeholders to ensure diversity certifications, including DBEs, are renewed prior to expiration. Such anticipatory reminders can help maintain the remuneration your organization incurs for continuing its relationship with certain incentive-driving organizations, including disadvantaged business enterprises (DBEs).
Moreover, vendor management software can make COI tracking (Certificate of Insurance tracking) essentially effortless. Rather than wasting time manually sifting through vendor records for Certificate of Insurance expiration dates, CobbleStone Vendor Management Software proffers COI tracking and automated alerts to all necessary stakeholders – reducing organizational risk and virtually ensuring vendor compliance accountability.
Leading vendor management software allows for data within vendor records to be reported on, displayed in executive graphical dashboards, and exported into spreadsheet formats – for increased vendor tracking and transparency. With such low friction and seamlessly integrated functionalities, you can achieve optimal vendor oversight – empowering you with robust and visually engaging information to enhance your vendor management revenue strategy.
Pulling vendor data from various platforms, including spreadsheets and paper-based files, can significantly delay your vendor risk management processes. Without centralizing vendor information, you can increase unwarranted risk and overlook vendor compliance standards.
Luckily, a centralized vendor management dashboard can provide a holistic view of vendor data - including key dates and risk assessments concerning compliance standards. CobbleStone Vendor Management Software can provide risk visualization by rating vendors against the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) national sanctions list and compliance standards with integrated OFAC search. Other forms of risk and risk exposure can be comprehensively and easily managed with the help of artificial intelligence with machine learning – such as VISDOM®, CobbleStone’s industry-leading AI engine. Additionally, when needing to renew your vendor contracts, artificial intelligence can support contract renewal improvement areas with detailed reporting for increased overall ROI.
Fortunately, vendors and prospective vendors may be assessed and updated with a risk score in real-time. Vendor management software makes OFAC search easy by allowing you to make more informed decisions when working with prospective vendors and holding current vendors accountable to contract compliance standards.
Leading vendor management software can also help you visualize and measure vendor contract risk variables. With the help of a risk assessment matrix, you can use statistical data analysis to identify negative, neutral, or positive facts about vendor contracts within your vendor management software to help increase cost-cutting vendor management best practices.
You can also enable message alerts, as mentioned prior, to notify you if a vendor’s contract incurs a value of X% greater than the average contract within your vendor management software database. Such robust artificial intelligence empowers you to make highly strategic decisions to help increase your organization’s overall vendor revenue.
Ward off underperforming vendors and attract revenue-driving vendors by implementing vendor management best practices with the help of leading-edge vendor management software. Streamline your vendor processes with an end-to-end vendor management software platform. Holistic vendor management oversight with integrated contract lifecycle management begins with CobbleStone Vendor Management Software.
CobbleStone’s trusted, award-winning, fully integrated vendor management software streamlines the purchasing process with optimal governance, reduced friction, and high flexibility from general vendor management to integrated source-to-contract lifecycle management. CobbleStone is a visionary developer in vendor management software and leading contract lifecycle management software – helping vendor management professionals for over twenty years. CobbleStone’s user-friendly, robust, and scalable solution seamlessly integrates with mission-critical applications for unified and seamless vendor management, supply chain contract management, and more. CobbleStone is also SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliant to support highly secure vendor management processes.
Discover why thousands of vendor managers and contract managers trust CobbleStone Software with their vendor management needs. To learn more about CobbleStone’s unparalleled vendor management software, book your free demo with a CobbleStone Software expert today!
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