Today I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about our Supplier Management product, primarily because it’s such a clean example of how a few key features can combine in a simple way to reduce inefficiencies and risk.
Everyone has suppliers. Whatever the thing is that we create to drive revenue, we all depend on raw material – whether in the form of manual labor, intellectual property, or something physical. The bigger your organization and/or the more complex your product, the more suppliers you’re likely to have – it’s not uncommon for some of our bigger customers to have tens of thousands of suppliers at varying levels of activity.
In the same way as you want to use the best ingredients in the meals you cook, you can only create your best product when your suppliers meet your requirements for quality and when they are fulfilling the terms of your agreement, especially when those terms are designed to limit your own liability. But when you’re managing lots of suppliers, doing this manually becomes a daunting task.
At its core, DevonWay software is an operational process automation and reporting tool. We help you collect the data that is important to you, route it through a workflow, and derive insights from it, often in the form of automated alerts. All of these features come into play in our Supplier Management solution:
- New suppliers are directed through a self-service onboarding process that is 100% web-based, easy to use, and automated, so critical data doesn’t run the risk of being missed or falling into the black hole of someone’s email junk filter.
- Business and workflow rules ensure that all necessary information is collected, and that the proper reviews and approvals by Legal, Finance, and other relevant departments take place.
- Ad hoc reports and automated alerts help you keep on top of your own compliance requirements, such as making sure suppliers have the right insurance coverages in place for the work they’re doing, which can be critical to limiting the risk of unanticipated liability; or, if you’re regulated, making sure you’re issuing enough contracts to minority-owned, disadvantaged, or similar businesses.
- Weighted scorecards let you apply an objective grade to each supplier based on criteria you set, so that you can replace underperformers and reward outstanding achievers.
- Lastly, from a business standpoint, the fact that DevonWay’s pricing is for unlimited seats means that you can involve as many internal and third-party users in your process as you need to, without worrying about fluctuating costs.
None of these features, individually, are rocket science. But when combined, they provide the transparency over your data that you need to make sure that one of your most critical dependencies – the health and quality of your supplier network – is operating as reliably as possible.
