5 Easy Ways to Strengthen Vendor and Supply Chain Relationships Around the World

Your supply chain relationships can make or break your business. Without happy vendors, you run into bottlenecks within your supply chain and production can slow to a crawl. This leads to project delays that you either have to rush to get back on track or justify to unsatisfied customers. Keeping your vendors well informed throughout your production processes and setting up an open line of communication can help strengthen your supply chain relationships.

1. Create a Self Service Portal
   Many of our clients have chosen to open up those lines of communication with their supply chain through a vendor self-service portal. By providing your vendors self-service access to relevant information and the ability to create and monitor their order statuses, you save your employees time and ultimately streamline your production processes.

2. Eliminate Business Hour Restrictions
   Allow vendors across different time zones to see updates in your production process. They receive alerts when you need a job completed and can access all the information they need within a web-based portal. Additionally, your vendors can update statuses online so that your employees have the most up-to-date information when they get into the office in the morning.

3. Streamline Production Planning
   With accurate, real-time information at your fingertips from your vendors, you can see what jobs you’ve assigned to which vendors. You can understand the capacity of your vendors, pull reports of past performance, and get a better idea of what timelines to expect from them. You can prevent future delays and keep all your own products on-time and on-schedule simply by empowering your supply chain with secure access to only the company information you want them to see.

4. Automate Quality Controls
   Hold your vendors to strict company standards by creating quality controls that they must abide by. Ensure quality without messy email chains and mitigate risks by standardizing your quality management expectations across multiple vendors.

5. Increase Output
   By providing your vendors with access to accurate, real-time information anytime, anywhere, you can ultimately improve communication, collaboration and coordination across the supply chain. This, in turn, creates a stronger working relationship that allows you to streamline your operations, produce and process more orders and become more efficient as a company.

One of our clients, KIC, LLC, uses a self-service portal to open up the lines of communication with their vendors. They use a vendor portal that integrates with their business management solution, SAP Business One, to manage longer supply chain logistics and lead times.

KIC uses a web-based solution built by Vision33’s strategic partner, zedSuite. With the help of zed Vendor Portal, KIC’s overseas vendors can access up-to-date information about KIC’s projects and update additional status information directly into KIC’s SAP Business One application.

Watch the KIC Success Story Video to see how providing vendors with self-service has helped KIC triple their business in the last 10 years.