If you think back to when you first launched with your NetSuite ERP, you probably remember how it brought big improvements to your purchasing process. NetSuite does a great job with key purchasing tasks like PO creation, order release, and receipt transactions. It’s a powerful tool for sure, and no doubt it did away with a lot of your manual work, and made your team’s jobs a heck of a lot easier in executing the creation of POs, right?
But what about everything in between releasing the PO and receiving the goods?
Let’s face it: whether you’re using the standard NetSuite purchasing module, NetSuite Native Demand Planning/MRP, or a SuiteApp MRP partner, you’ve got gaps remaining between your NetSuite ERP and your supplier network when it comes to true PO lifecycle management.
We Can Help You Fill in the Gaps
It’s no knock on NetSuite that, by adding to its functionality, you can take your capabilities to the next level of business process automation. SourceDay can help you do just that by leveraging the power of NetSuite and giving you the additional functionality that fills in the critical gaps, delivering true end-to-end PO lifecycle management.
This really starts prior to the purchasing process itself, since the first gap comes before a PO is created. Our RFQ Collaboration tool gives you key functionality that eliminates the manual quoting gap between you and your suppliers. It allows you to simultaneously send RFQs to all potential suppliers, new and existing. Once they’ve responded with their bids, it lets you review their submissions in easy-to-read bid comparisons. Finally, it facilitates you awarding the bid–including splitting the bid if you wish to award different line items to different suppliers.
When it comes to the PO itself, our PO Collaboration tool makes managing those a breeze. We give you functionality to let you manage all orders in one dashboard. After you place a PO in NetSuite, SourceDay takes over to ensure you ALWAYS receive an initial acknowledgement from your supplier so that everyone’s on the same page from the start and NetSuite knows your PO lines have been confirmed.
If that PO remains unchanged, then you cruise right on through in your lifecycle management to shipping and receiving what you ordered.
But that’s not the case in over half of POs that are created, and it’s in managing the changes on a purchase order that even more gaps exist. SourceDay’s PO solution lets you manage change orders, including communication of the changes themselves and acknowledgements back from your suppliers, all within the system—down to the individual line level of the PO. There are no paper copies of POs floating around, no post-it notes on computer screens or desktops to track the changes, no arm-length email strings trying (and often failing) to keep everyone on the same page, and no undocumented phone calls from people desperate to know where things stand (and just possibly losing track once they hang up the phone). Sound familiar?
When it’s all said and done, shipping information is conveyed within the system, too, and can flow back into NetSuite automatically (no spreadsheets or emails here either!).
What’s more, our central dashboard offers additional tools. Our supplier scorecard tracks critical KPIs like acknowledgement rate, responsiveness, and on-time delivery for each of your suppliers in real time. You know at a glance what kind of job your suppliers are doing for you, who your best suppliers are, and, perhaps more important, your worst performing suppliers. And by using that tool to track your suppliers’ performance over time, it allows you to set improvement goals with each of them to drive tangible performance improvement results.
Other Benefits
An additional huge benefit of using the SourceDay solution is that SourceDay is 100% free to your suppliers. That means you can have an unlimited number of suppliers on SourceDay and provide them with the power of automation as well to serve you as a better performing and more collaborative supplier. With SourceDay in place, you will be able to create the kind of collaborative partnership that purchasing teams have always dreamed of.
And having full end-to-end PO lifecycle management delivers other advantages too. It allows you to better manage your cash flow, which as we all know is critical to all folks looking at the balance sheet each quarter. Similarly, it gives you tools to manage the risks of stock-outs and/or lost revenue. It eliminates the use of paper, getting you a lot closer to the paperless office. And by automating even more of your business processes, it helps eliminate human errors as well to help ensure data integrity inside of NetSuite on all things PO related.
NetSuite is a tremendously powerful asset. A huge part of that is the power it brings to your purchasing function. Still, it falls short of providing the full PO lifecycle management capability your business needs. SourceDay closes the loop and gives you all the functionality you need to fully manage your POs from creation to receipt by extending NetSuite’s purchasing capabilities to your supplier network.