Supplier On-boarding Best Practice Guide · approval workflow and be updated in your ERP through the process described in this document. Open request set up The Continuous Supplier

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Contents

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Supplier On-boarding

Best Practice Guide

Date: May 2018

April 2018 Copyright by SourceDogg 2

Supplier On-boarding Best Practice Using SourceDogg

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Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 3

Considerations before start .................................................................................................................... 3

Supplier Onboarding set up .................................................................................................................... 7

I want suppliers to register for the marketplace ................................................................................ 7

I want to ensure the supplier meet my standards .............................................................................. 7

I want to update my supplier’s data ................................................................................................... 8

Open request set up ........................................................................................................................... 8

Data Structure ......................................................................................................................................... 9

Custom Fields ...................................................................................................................................... 9

Tags ................................................................................................................................................... 10

Data Validation patterns ................................................................................................................... 11

Getting Responses ................................................................................................................................ 13

Website landing page ....................................................................................................................... 13

Mailing campaign .............................................................................................................................. 14

Tracking the progress ........................................................................................................................ 14

Reporting .............................................................................................................................................. 15



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Introduction

Availability of accurate and content-rich supplier information is a necessity for every organisation.

Improved insight into supplier capabilities is critical for any activity related to the supplier, that

includes sourcing, category management, contracts, payments, etc.

Active management of supplier data has several very significant benefits for the organisation:

• helps firms to manage their active vendors, which results in less time that accounts payable

spend managing data and collecting information on suppliers organisation no longer deals

with.

• increases overall productivity and usage of procurement team’s time to focus on more

strategic tasks related to supplier selection, supplier evaluation and performance

management and category management.

• prevents poor data quality and inconsistent data standards for vendors, this results in more

time spent on obtaining, harmonizing, and enriching vendor information, rather than trying

to identify the accuracy of supplier information.

SourceDogg offers a simple and user-friendly solution that will allow vendors to self-serve and

provide required information on regular basis and automate the process of data updates in the ERP

systems.

Considerations before start

Several elements of data collection must be considered before the start of the project. We

recommend starting with looking at the desired final objective and then configuring the platform to

achieve this, keeping in mind the requirements of your organisation, available resources, and level of

integration and automation needed.

Please consider the following:

1. What data needs to flow to ERP and other systems and in what format?

Each ERP has different requirements when importing data from other systems. It is therefore important to consider the data that needs to flow from SourceDogg to another system, and what format this data needs to be in. This will influence the format of the questions in your Supplier Onboarding form and the Supplier Profile Custom Fields these questions populate. 2. What reports need to go to which users and of what subset of the data should they see? Not all your users need to see all your supplier data. Groups of users can be assigned to different views of supplier data or can be added to separate report distribution lists. Views of data are created through sub-pools based on the data the supplier have on their profile, e.g their category, are they



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approved or not and the country they are based in. You can also include what data in include and exclude Accurate and readily available data is a necessity for decision making, therefore the data collected from your suppliers should be exported to decision makers within your organisation. Customised regular updates could be set up to each category manager with data relevant for their category and their supply chain partners. 3. What searches are your users going to complete to find suppliers and have you captured

enough data to enable that search? You could potentially be collecting large amounts of data from your supply chain partners and you need to be able to search through hundreds of suppliers, finding ones that fulfill your current requirements. SourceDogg enables this provided you have collected this information through the system in the correct format. We recommend asking your suppliers to answer questions that will categorise them and allow you to filter on their capabilities, locations, company type, legal entity, etc. Finding the supplier to match your needs will then take a matter of seconds. 4. What is the matrix of certification and qualifications you demand from suppliers? Are you

capturing these to ensure suppliers are qualified to supply different categories of products and services?

Managing and reducing the supply risk it one of the main targets of supply chain professionals in the current business environment. A failure to verify supplier’s certifications before awarding the contracts might cause problems at a later date. SourceDogg features will allow you to collect certifications of your supply chain and these will be available for any member of your team by visiting their Supplier Profile in SourceDogg. Every supplier will be automatically notified when their certification is due to expire and asked to provide an update through their account, and this will also be immediately available to you. If the supplier fails to update their certification, a report can be scheduled to notify the responsible user so further action can be taken. Examples of certifications collected by our clients are ISO 9001 Quality Certificate, ISO 14001 Environmental management, OHSAS 18001:2007 Occupational Health and Safety Management Certification, or ISO 22000 Food safety management. The same approach can be used for collecting the insurance certificate, such as Product Liability, Employer’s Liability, or Public Liability. This functionality can also be used in a similar way to collect internal policy documents of your supplier, e.g. Health and Safety Policy, Anti-Bribery policy, Human Rights policy, Business Continuity policy or Equal Opportunities and Diversity policy. Below are the examples of outputs from SourceDogg after a Supplier On-boarding process.



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Figure 1 Example of Contact Information on Supplier Profile

Figure 2 Example of Profile Custom Fields, includes both data collected by Supplier On-boarding and manually entered data



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Figure 3 Supplier profile tags

Figure 4 Example of Certifications on Supplier Profile



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Supplier Onboarding set up

Depending on the nature of the supplier that requires being on-boarded, we recommend setting up

several on-boarding questionnaires. These would include a “speculative” supplier on-boarding form

for any business expressing an interest in becoming your supplier, where the range of information

collected would probably be limited to simple contact information, category information, and

perhaps supplier certifications.

Existing suppliers or vendors identified as critical to the business would be required to provide

detailed information about the company, this could include the data such as registration number

details, VAT information, or banking details.

As described above, the most important characteristics of Supplier Master Data should be the

accuracy of the information and this can only be achieved by regular data updates. Due to nature of

the business and frequent changes to contact information, new capabilities of the supplier, or

changed banking information we recommend that organisations regularly refresh their onboarding

information with the use of separate “refresh” supplier onboarding questionnaire.

I want suppliers to register for the marketplace

Any vendor who contacts your organisation with an interest in becoming a supplier should be

subject to simple supplier on-boarding questionnaire that will allow you to make a later

determination on whether you have any interest in doing business with them. The content of this

form should be aimed at getting basic information from a supplier such as:

1. Contact information – name, address, email, website, phone details, etc.

2. Category information – a description of what products and services the vendor provides.

This information will later help with the selection of suppliers for any RFx and will grow the

supplier base, provide more competition and result in an opportunity for better prices and a

higher quality of products or services provided to your company

3. Product / Service delivery information – it is important to understand where vendors

deliver the products or provide the services. The importance of such information grows with

global suppliers and in case your organisation operates in multiple countries or regions.

4. Any other information your company considers essential – e.g. company registration

number or VAT number

I want to ensure the supplier meet my standards

For any existing vendor or supplier identified as critical to business, we would recommend using the

“full” supplier on-boarding questionnaire that will be extensive in content and collect all the major

information from your supplier. The types of information we recommend collecting could be split

into several sections:



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1. Contact information – as above

2. Category and delivery information

3. Financial information – would include the bank details, financial performance information

(revenue and gross profit margin information for previous years), tax information, invoicing

details, currency, etc.

4. Certifications – such as ISO 9001 Quality Certification, ISO 14001 Environmental

Management Certification, etc

5. Insurance – public liability insurance details, product liability, employer’s liability, etc.

6. Business Policies – Health & Safety policy, Business Continuity, Equal Opportunities and

Diversity, Anti-Bribery policy, etc.

This is only a very small selection of information you might need in your organisation and

SourceDogg can share the list of best practice questions used for the full supplier on-boarding so

nothing important is forgotten.

I want to update my supplier’s data

Your suppliers will be changing their banking details, addresses, contact people over the time you

deal with them and therefore it is a necessity to update the data you hold in their profile. The easier

solution to this to publish a separate questionnaire on SourceDogg and link it to your website so

supplier could alter the information as needed.

We recommend that data refresh questionnaire is a copy of the full supplier on-boarding so it will

allow the supplier to change any details they have provided previously. The data refresh

questionnaire should not have any mandatory questions so the supplier can only amend the details

that have changed since they were on-boarded. The updated information can go through the

approval workflow and be updated in your ERP through the process described in this document.

Open request set up

The Continuous Supplier on-boarding request in SourceDogg generates an URL link that can be

added to your website or sent to potential suppliers by email if required.



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Data Structure

In SourceDogg, functionalities of profile custom fields and tags are used record the information

provided by a supplier on their profile and consequently to schedule reports. The approach we

suggest taking is to consider how the data collected are going to be used and which of the data must

be available for reporting, integration, or just available to be searched for in SourceDogg.

The below document provides guidance and will help you to identify the data that your organisation

need to report on, or data needed to create new supplier records in your ERP system.

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/3.-Supplier-Onboarding-RFI-Pool-

Settings.xlsx

Custom Fields

The user can link the individual questions in the questionnaire to profile custom fields. The values

supplier responds these questions with will be transferred to their profile to the respective custom

field after the supplier review and approval process.

The data entered can then be found in the supplier profile in the “Company VAT” profile custom

field.

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/3.-Supplier-Onboarding-RFI-Pool-Settings.xlsx

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/3.-Supplier-Onboarding-RFI-Pool-Settings.xlsx



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Tags

Certain types of questions (checkbox, radio button, dropdown list) can have supplier answers

transferred to tags on supplier profile. Such functionality facilitates multiple values to be added to

profile as searchable keywords and supports the feature of supplier filtering by category, company

type, etc.

The tags collected will be visible in the supplier profile below the description.



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Tags support also the creation of “Saved Searches” which are predefined filters that can be assigned

to team members to either allow a quick search for approver suppliers per specific category or limit

the ability of team members to select supplier outside of the approved group.

Data Validation patterns

By using the validation patterns for questions, the buyer can enforce the format of the responses

from suppliers and improve the accuracy of the data collected. For example, it is possible to define

that a response to VAT number question will start with two capital letters followed by an

alphanumerical sequence of a minimum of 6 and maximum of 15 characters. If suppliers try to enter

any other text, this will be rejected and the supplier will not be able to submit their response.



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Validation patterns are set up for each Profile Custom Field individually. SourceDogg customer

service holds validation patterns for main data types so please contact us on

[email protected] if you need any assistance.

Further information about the validation patterns can be found in the document available under the

link:

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/User-Guide-16.-Validation-

patterns.pdf

mailto:[email protected]

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/User-Guide-16.-Validation-patterns.pdf

https://www.sourcedogg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/User-Guide-16.-Validation-patterns.pdf



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Getting Responses

To simplify the process of supplier on-boarding and reduce the administrative burden, we

recommend setting up a procurement landing page on your organisation’s website where the

supplier can find the details on how to register their interest to become your approved supplier.

Website landing page

On the landing page, we recommend providing the details about SourceDogg platform and describe

step by step process your potential suppliers need to follow to register with you.

• Explain your organisation is using SourceDogg to collect supplier data and to publish the RFx

events and describe the value proposition to your suppliers.

• Provide a link to SourceDogg supplier registration page:

https://secure.sourcedogg.com/supplier-registration

• Explain to suppliers that the registration on SourceDogg is not the final step of the process

and they must answer your questionnaire to register with you

• Consider using multiple of forms, e.g. one for each product/service category and select

appropriate team members for each of them.

• Do not forget to add a link to your Change of Information form.

• Each supplier can only answer each of the forms once

https://secure.sourcedogg.com/supplier-registration



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Mailing campaign

When on-boarding the existing supply chain we recommend inviting the suppliers by email and

include the URL link to onboarding questionnaire or to your landing page. It is also worth considering

including some further information about the process, the benefits suppliers get using SourceDogg

and workflow for registration and answering your on-boarding questionnaire.

We suggest using email tracking services so the emails sent out can be monitored and information

such as opening rate, click rate or undelivered email is available and appropriate action can be

taken.

SourceDogg recommends using the email tracking platform SendGrid, which will allow you to get full

insight on the status of all emails sent to your suppliers and choose an appropriate action when

emails are not delivered or opened.

The details of this service can be found here: https://sendgrid.com/

Tracking the progress

Built-in reporting features of SourceDogg allow you to schedule reports to selected team members.

Request summary report will show the details of multiple requests and provide information whether

suppliers have accepted the invitation, responded, declined, etc.

https://sendgrid.com/



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Reporting

Daily interface report will provide the export of supplier’s data in the simple CSV file and can be

scheduled to be uploaded to Secure FTP server or emailed to the selected internal stakeholder. The

information collected can then be used to create or edit the supplier records in the ERP system.

SourceDogg reporting tool allows to fully customise the reports, including data fields (custom fields

in the supplier profile), filter the reporting data by tags or values in the custom fields (e.g. report per

each supplier category) and even select the event that triggers the report. This allows the report to

be sent every time the supplier is approved, or a value in the custom field is changed.

Documents

Supplier On-boarding Best Practice Guide · approval workflow and be updated in your ERP through the process described in this document. Open request set up The Continuous Supplier