Supplier Collaboration

3 Ways to Improve Your Supplier Relationship

The buyer-supplier relationship can feel strained at times because so much depends on performance and orders moving smoothly. As a buyer, the development of your product and its assembly are completely dependent on your suppliers. The stronger your communication is with your suppliers, the stronger your relationship will be.

One of the biggest challenges to the buyer-supplier relationship is communication. 

If you’re like most buyers, your procurement team probably uses multiple platforms to communicate with suppliers. These platforms can include email, phone calls, texts, and fax. While your business can function with this system, the margin of error in your purchase order operations is high. Errors can include anything from missed PO acknowledgments to operating with inaccurate PO details. Every hiccup in your PO, AP, or RFQ process puts the buyer-supplier relationship at risk and can lead to late deliveries.

With this in mind, we’ve created a list of 3 ways to improve your supplier relationship and your ability to communicate with them.

1. Invest in a Supplier Collaboration Software

Building a relationship with your supplier may not involve face time, but it should always involve collaboration. Managing purchase orders, accounts payable, and RFQs across multiple platforms makes your supply chain vulnerable. Missing details on POs can have a severe impact on your ability to get deliveries to your customers on time. Collaboration solutions, like SourceDay, seamlessly connect buyers and suppliers in a single platform where all interactions are archived in real-time and available for both parties to see.

Through our solution, both buyers and suppliers can track every part of the PO process and communicate in a single dashboard. Alerts, notifications and even color-coded flags ensure nothing gets missed. Using SourceDay, buyers have experienced a 35% increase in on-time deliveries.

2. Make Your Software Accessible to Suppliers

For effective collaboration between buyers and suppliers, your suppliers have to adopt the same software that you are using. With SourceDay, buyers pay for the license, and their suppliers access the software for free. Suppliers are then able to streamline labor-intensive tasks, quickly acknowledge POs, and ultimately, get paid faster.

Plus, SourceDay provides all the necessary training for buyers and their vendors, making the transition simple.

3. Give Your Suppliers Feedback

Suppliers care about their service and want to know how they’re doing. Effective service leads to loyalty. SourceDay’s Supplier Scorecard solution streamlines grading vendors so you can quickly relay the good and the bad as far as their performance.

With SourceDay’s quality control dashboard, you can easily track the incoming inspection of supplier materials to determine if specifications are met. If the materials fail inspection, suppliers are quickly notified through the platform and the failing materials are then dispositioned. After the issue is resolved, buyers can score the interaction, giving suppliers an incentive to take care of any problems quickly.

Improving your supplier relationship starts with using the right tools. Updating your purchase order process by using software like SourceDay allows you to improve your communication with suppliers and meet more commitments. Learn more about SourceDay’s solution and chat with a member of our team!

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