Webinar recap: vendor onboarding and collaboration portals

The webinar

On September 13, 2022, Aavenir hosted a webinar on vendor onboarding and collaboration portals, looking at where procurement and vendor management meet. This recap covers the main points for anyone who could not attend live.

Where procurement and supply chains are heading

Globalized markets and increasingly complex supply chains are testing how resilient, stable and agile procurement organizations can be. The panel's view was that a return to a predictable, normal supply chain was unlikely, and that organizations would need vendor management that meets supply chain needs while improving efficiency and protecting savings.

What vendor management really means

Vendor management is much more than buying from suppliers and paying their invoices on time. It is the management of the whole supplier experience across every source to pay process: onboarding, information exchange, contracting, performance, compliance and payment.

The top issues in vendor management

Procurement organizations at every level of maturity face similar challenges:

• Onboarding vendors quickly and without friction
• Exchanging documents and supplier information consistently and accurately
• Managing vendor contract performance and compliance
• Keeping up with routine questions and status updates from suppliers

Of these, the two raised most often were slow, tedious supplier onboarding and difficulty managing supplier information across the relationship. The speakers stressed that onboarding is never really complete without a defined process or system for managing supplier information afterwards.

The gaps organizations face

Research from Financial Executives International found that 43% of compliance and procurement teams found it challenging to identify environmental, social and governance factors in due diligence, and 68% of global organizations saw fraud by external parties such as vendors, suppliers and partners as a high or significant risk management priority.

Well run vendor management makes collaboration easier and gives suppliers confidence that you are easy to work with. That requires closing the automation and efficiency gaps across source to pay. Where those processes do not run on one platform, the systems should still work together to give suppliers and internal teams a connected experience.

Audience question

Does Aavenir's onboarding app do the same thing as ServiceNow Vendor Risk Management? No, it complements it. At the time of the webinar the app was called Vendorflow. It is now Onboardingflow, which handles supplier onboarding, information collection and the supplier portal, while ServiceNow Vendor Risk Management handles risk assessments. Running both on ServiceNow lets assessment results and supplier information share one record. See vendor risk management.

About Aavenir

Aavenir is an enterprise contract intelligence platform for procurement, legal, IT, finance, and sales teams. Aavenir AI reads every agreement an enterprise has signed, Aavenir Atlas answers questions across the whole portfolio, and its apps act on contract terms from sourcing to payment, natively on ServiceNow or standalone. About Aavenir.