Supplier management is the process that ensures maximum value is received for the money that an organization pays to its suppliers while supplier lifecycle management is the supplier management process covering the entire supplier lifecycle.

8Manage Supplier Mgt. provides the automated workflows for the entire supplier lifecycle.  It includes supplier self-registration, qualification, categorization, onboarding, ongoing management and strategic relationship management.

8Manage also distinguishes different contact types such as the following:

The minimum information to create a new vendor or supplier is just its name.  However, 8Manage allows the enterprise to incrementally capture wealthy information of the supplier. 8Manage also allows the vendor or supplier to add or change its own product and service information including prices and discounts.  This would great save the enterprise’s effort of keeping each vendor or supplier’s product and service information up-to-date.

8Manage was designed to deal with global vendor or supplier name problem and would be able to identify the same vendor or supplier with different names and also allow the linking of the information and transaction records of the same vendor but with different names together.

8Manage automatically tracks the following measurement information during the “delivery & acceptance” process and aggregate and summarize measurements results in real-time:

• Tender Invitation Rate (Number of Times Invited / Total Number of Tenders)
• Tender Response Rate (Number of Times Responded / Total Number of Times Invited)
• Tender Hit Rate (Number of Wins / Total Number of Times Responded)
• Tender Rejection Rate (Number of Losses / Total Number of Times Responded)

The automatically collected objective performance data is very use for quick sanity checks.  They are also very useful when being combined with subjective performance appraisal data from the users who directly receiving products and services from the suppliers. 

8Manage allows the user to set up the questionnaire for performance appraisal  for the target vendor or supplier and 8Manage can automatically send the questionnaire to the appraisers specified by the user and calculate the result based on the pre-assigned score for each answer for each question in the questionnaire.

Top performing enterprises have 2 to 3 times fewer strategic suppliers than their lower-performing peers or competitors. The deliveries for many high end businesses require strategic sourcing, not tactical sourcing. The important thing in strategic sourcing is the quality of your partnerships, not the quantity of your suppliers. 8Manage can help you to develop strategic relationships with your leverage suppliers.

Use strategic partnership management to do better optimization

The most obvious benefit enterprises will experience from strategic supplier management would be higher levels of cost savings. By identifying and selecting suppliers that will provide the highest value at the right pricing will enable an enterprise to continuously achieve higher cost savings.

Aligning your sourcing activities to your business goals is at the crux of strategic supplier management. Better alignment allows your business to achieve higher business performance with higher efficiency and minimal supply chain risks.

Use strategic partnership to grow your business

Enterprises need to realize that supplier strategies go both ways. Most companies focus on what suppliers can do for them rather than on what they can do with the supplier to lower costs. Enterprises can start gaining the strategic sourcing advantages by treating their suppliers as true partners for long term wins. Strategic partnership can help you grow your business in the following ways:

Access to new customers

A strategic partnership means access to new customers, and embedded in this is an opportunity for free advertisement.

Opportunity to reach new markets

Along with an extended reach into a wider variety of customers, your brand is now able to expand its horizons in areas previously unexplored.

Added value for previous customers

By establishing roots with other corporations (strategic partners), you increase the chance that you’re getting the words of month benefits.

Brand awareness

By pairing your service with successful partners that have large customer base.

Brand trust

Brand trust spawns naturally from a good business partnership. When people see you work well with your partners, they will be more willing to support your business. It is all part of creating a healthy, stable and productive network.

Use business alliance to increase your competitive advantages

When the trust level between you and your strategic partners has continuously increased, you have the opportunities to turn your partnerships into business alliances to accelerate your speed-to-market. In addition to creating strategic optionality and accelerating the time to value capture, strategic business alliances can provide the added advantage of reducing capital requirements and thereby reduce risks.

A successful enterprise usually has win-win long-term relationships with its suppliers. But, for non-consumer product s and services, buyer’s dependency on vendors increases when the products and services that it depends upon are non-standard and specialized. For example, the trading and settlement systems of an exchange are specialized and their uptime can be heavily affected by whether the exchange has the know-how of managing its vendors that it heavily depends upon.

Therefore, managing vendor relationships become crucial and 8MSaaS provides tools for the enterprise to better manage supplier relationships.

Tracking all key interactions and promises

In order to maintain good long-term relationship with its vendors, the enterprise must maintain corporate memory (not individual memory) of its key interactions and promises with its vendors. 8MSaaS provides facility to record the enterprise’s interactions and promises with each vendor and view them in chronological order.

The easy and clear tracking of what have been discussed and promised helps reinforce that people of the same corporate to have corporate memory and speak with the same tongue.

Vendor as a team member

Communication is very key in nurturing relationships. 8Manage provides social sharing, real-time chat and discussion forum communication tools for outsourcing activities.

8Manage also allows the staff of the enterprise and outsourcers to directly involve and work together in outsourcing projects and programs as team members.

Tracking all issues

8Manage allows centralized tracking of issues and actions and provides automated alerts and escalations.

Outsourcing Risk Management

8Manage automatically detects systemic risks of outsourcing projects and programs, and provides an integrated risk register for recording user-identified risks and tracking them to closure

Outsourcing Issue Management

8Manage provides the following functions to track issues and actions to closure:

• Multi-level issue aggregation and tracking
• Critical issue management
• Emergency management

Managing reward and punishment

8Manage’s real-time contractual service level agreement management functions can detect any discrepancies between what have been promised and what have been delivered at the earliest possible time to avoid the building-up of over-promising and under-delivering.

8Manage’s real-time contractual service level agreement management functions also supports rewards and penalties based on KPI results. The real-time performance-base rewards and penalties help reinforce the enterprise and its vendors to keep their promises or they will face the consequences.