Supplier relationship management (SRM) considers establishing and maintaining relationships between suppliers in all business areas. A Supplier Relationship Management system aims to link suppliers to the company and support purchasing during the procurement process. All sources of supply and purchasing data are considered and managed.
This article will give an overview on software and solutions for Supplier Relationship Management. The SRM software usually supports you with the initial registration of suppliers or the inclusion of potential suppliers. It includes recording the qualifications of existing suppliers via a supplier portal.
The Supplier Management Software usually maps risk control and enables classification and ordered supplier development with possible task management. Document and contract management, entry forms, and supplier controlling are often integrated into the supplier relationship management software. This software enables supplier evaluation and thus comprehensive supplier management.
Companies need to find good quality, cheap and reliable suppliers and organize these relationships efficiently. SRM is about the systematic selection and management of suppliers as part of procurement. The SRM system includes supplier identification, supplier limitation, analysis, and evaluation.
Benefits of the Supplier Relationship Management System
The advantages of Supplier Management systems lie in the broad, holistic approach and represent a further development of electronic procurement. Supplier data management, DMS, or contract management are just as part of supplier evaluations and a supplier portal. There is a high level of automated handling of processes, which can help reduce purchasing costs. At the same time, purchasing and quality management can use the SRM system across departments.
Typical features of supplier relationship management software:
- Plan services and material requirements
- costing
- project budgeting
- Search for suppliers, requests for quotations
- Vendor Management
- Management of company addresses, customer and supplier data
- Supplier Registration
- supplier portal
- Vendor Dashboards
- Supplier Qualification
- deadline monitoring
- Create bills of quantities according to government standard
- Carry out inquiries and tenders
- Automated billing processes
- Analysis and strategic purchasing optimization
- Compliant performance acceptance
- Price comparison with variants and simulations
- Multi-stage negotiation rounds and auctions
- Order negotiation (sourcing)
- order management
- Electronic Delivery Notes
- workflow management
- Supplier evaluation according to, for example, quality, adherence to schedules, adherence to quantities, and audit results with freely definable weighting
- quality management
- certificate management
- Goods and goods group management
- Functions for tender
- Functions for commissioning
- transport management
- Inventory management or order proposals
- Product Data Tracking
- Key performance indicators (evaluations)
- event management
- catalog system
- target scheduling
- Interfaces to ERP systems
- contract management
- document management
- Create rating trees per product group
- Allocation of product groups and supplier classifications
- action management
- comprehensive reporting functions
- Detailed statistics
- User and rights management
- Multi-user capable, network-capable
- Import and export functions
- automatic data backup month/year
- Extensive search functions
Other specific criteria and suggested questions for the assessment of:
- Before making a software decision, conduct thorough market research of potentially suitable solutions.
- Ask whether it is possible to conduct purchase negotiations with several business partners simultaneously using the SRM system.
- Clarify whether forward and backward scheduling of target dates for individual process steps in the workflow is possible.
- Clarify whether the SRM system includes complaints processing.
- Ask whether a shipping notification function, delivery plan, and delivery schedule functions are included in the SRM system.
- Ask if the solution includes a Document Approval Exchange. This document facilitates the exchange of documents with the supplier. It allows you to make your internal approval processes more efficient.
- Does the SRM System include a savings track? Is it possible to deposit measures and planned savings? Can the savings achieved be split (e.g., financial years, different locations, etc.)?
- Is there a dashboard or traffic light system that quickly shows risks? It is crucial to take appropriate measures immediately and avoid delivery bottlenecks.
- If you operate the software as a SaaS solution, ask for the server location, have the security precautions explained to you, and consider the measures resulting from the data protection regulations.
Conclusion
Kodiak Hub flexibly supports all business processes related to supplier relationship management. With this business software, you have all the necessary supplier analysis and forecast features. You can access important information in real-time with almost any mobile device.
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